Where the Logic Is Most Complete: Animal Use and Meritocratic Reasoning

The argument developed across this site is that meritocratic reasoning — the logic through which any form of class exploitation is rationalized — operates by sorting people into categories of more and less deserving, then using the resulting hierarchy to justify unequal treatment. The logic is circular: those in subordinate positions are said to owe their subordination to their own deficiency, and the structural conditions that produce the deficiency are treated as evidence that the deficiency is real. What changes across contexts is the content — which groups are found wanting, which deficiencies are cited — but the formal structure is identical.

This essay argues that our treatment of non-human animals is the limit case of this logic: the point at which the denial of need-universality, which elsewhere operates as tacit practice, becomes explicit doctrine.

The clearest expression

Nearly everyone who has interacted with another animal knows that they experience and value their own lives — that they enjoy freedom, security and play; that they nurture their children; that they will do just about anything to stay alive. The biological and anthropological evidence confirms what common observation suggests: social animals have demonstrable social and emotional needs, rooted in the same evolutionary heritage we share. The needs framework I develop elsewhere — drawing on Max-Neef's work — insists that needs are universal and non-hierarchical. This is not a sentimental claim. It is an analytical one, grounded in what we know about social species: their dependence on an integrated range of social-reproductive requirements is characteristic of their biology.

And yet over 70 billion land animals are bred into existence annually as property, to be used and killed because people are willing to pay others to do so. How is it that even the most fair-minded among us are so dismissive — often aggressively so — toward any suggestion that the harm we inflict on them matters?

The answer is meritocratic reasoning, applied to its fullest extent.

The circularity

When challenged on their animal use, people reach for a set of justifications that are remarkable in their circularity. They point to the putative fact that the victims are "just" animals. They argue that since we "can't know" whether animals "truly" suffer, it is acceptable to harm them. They assert that animals "don't mind" being used and killed so long as they don't suffer "too much" — in the estimation of the perpetrator. They invoke differences in intelligence, language, or self-awareness as grounds for treating other species as raw material.

What unites these claims is that they all presuppose the irrelevance of animal experience in order to conclude that animal experience is irrelevant. The differences cited — cognitive, linguistic, bodily — are real enough. Other animals experience their lives differently from how most humans experience theirs, and they have different bodies and abilities. But these differences are irrelevant to the question at hand. The question is not "how clever is my victim?" or "how exciting do I consider their life?" but whether they experience and value their life. And the answer, as anyone who has watched an animal play, nurture, grieve, or flee for its life already knows, is yes.

This is the same circular structure that operates in every other form of class exploitation. These categories — property, livestock, resources — were created by the exploiting class to facilitate extraction. Using them to argue that the exploitation doesn't count as exploitation is the same move slaveholders used to argue that slavery wasn't "really" class exploitation because slaves were legally classified as property rather than as free sellers of labor power. The juridical category created to enable the relation is then cited as evidence that it doesn't qualify as extraction.

Why this is a class issue

The connection between animal exploitation and class rule is not merely analogical. At the material level, what class exploitation involves is the organized extraction of endosomatic energy — energy from living bodies — for the benefit of those who control them. This is true of the worker whose labor power is purchased, of the woman whose household and reproductive labor is appropriated, and of the animal whose entire bodily existence is restructured by production relations it has no capacity to resist or escape.

This was not always the relationship. The archaeological and genetic evidence indicates that many domestication events began not with human capture and control but with animal agency — wolves scavenging near human camps, cats following rodent populations into grain stores, wild sheep and goats gravitating toward managed landscapes.^[1] These were relationships in which both parties adjusted their behavior, and in which the animals were active participants rather than passive objects of human will. What transformed these relationships into the property relations we have now was the progressive intensification of human control: selective breeding for traits that serve human purposes, confinement, the killing of individuals who resist management, and the systematic destruction of the animals' capacity for independent social life. The current regime of animal exploitation is not the natural endpoint of cross-species contact. It is the product of the same logic that transforms every other social relationship into a class relation — the reorganization of a relationship that once involved mutual adjustment into one organized around extraction.

With domesticated animals, the denial of need-universality that elsewhere operates tacitly becomes systematic: their social existence is not merely neglected but actively destroyed. These are beings whose needs for sociality, freedom, play, and security are not unknown but deliberately overridden — because the production system requires it, and because meritocratic reasoning has taught us that their needs don't count.

A framework that identifies this logic as the foundation of what it opposes in human class relations but exempts its most extreme expression across species has not overcome the reasoning form — it has merely drawn the line at a different point. If the problem is the circular attribution of subordinate position to the subordinate's own deficiency, then consistency requires rejecting that attribution wherever it operates, including where it operates most completely.

Why it matters for everyone

The practical implication is straightforward: if you reject meritocratic reasoning in principle — if you hold that it is wrong to sort beings into categories of more and less deserving and to treat their needs as mattering accordingly — then you should stop using and harming other animals. This means going vegan: not consuming products made by or from animals, and not participating in practices that treat them as property.

This matters not only for the animals' sake but for the coherence of any anti-class politics. Animals are the population least able to organize against their own exploitation. The checks that constrain what rulers can do to human subordinates, including the ability to withdraw labor, to organize, to make political claims, to revolt, do not exist here. The depth of the conditioning follows from that absence; it is not its cause.^[2]

This makes speciesism an exceptionally effective training ground for the reasoning form itself. The ease with which otherwise thoughtful people generate justifications for animal use — justifications whose circularity they would immediately recognize if applied to humans — demonstrates how deeply the logic is embedded. But the depth is produced, not natural. Children respond empathically to animals on the basis of interaction — proximity, familiarity, the experience of a being whose needs are visible — and the conditioning that overrides this must be actively produced in each generation.^[3] What it produces is the replacement of interaction-based responsiveness with a categorical distinction (human/animal) that permits the empathic response to be withheld. The mechanism is identical to what the companion essays document for race, class, and gender: rigid categorical sorting substituted for the flexible, interaction-based empathic pattern the species starts with.

The converse is also true. Unlearning speciesism is practice in recovering the unconditioned perceptual mode — re-learning to respond to needs on the basis of interaction rather than categorical assignment, to see the animal in front of you rather than the category that permits you not to see. You learn to notice when differences are being cited to justify unequal treatment, to ask whether those differences are relevant to the question at hand, and to distinguish between what is and what is said to be by those who benefit from the arrangement. These are precisely the skills that anti-class organizing requires.

Note, too, the connection that runs in the other direction: humans who are willing to engage in or shrug off genocide routinely make this easier for themselves by thinking of and referring to the victims as "rats," "cockroaches," "pests." The dehumanization works because the conditioning has already trained the perceptual apparatus to withhold empathic response from beings assigned to certain categories — the species boundary is not just an ideological permission but a trained perceptual impairment. What genocide requires is the reclassification of the target group into a category where that impairment is already operative.

Speciesism is where meritocratic reasoning operates most completely, which is precisely why it is where the work of unlearning it should start. If you can learn to recognize the circularity here — where social conditioning is deepest and the social consensus most uniform — you will find it far easier to recognize the same logic operating in every other domain. And if you cannot bring yourself to reject it here, you should ask what, exactly, you think you are rejecting elsewhere.

Further reading

The deeper case, connecting animal use to the material structures of class rule, draws on work that deserves serious engagement.

Gary Francione and Anna Charlton's Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach develops the philosophical case for the equal consideration of equal needs, and their six principles have been formative for my own thinking. For those who prefer a spoken introduction, Francione's lecture on the Abolitionist Approach at Vegetarian Summerfest 2015 covers much of the same ground. Francione's Animals as Persons extends this into a sustained argument against the property status of animals. Gary Steiner's Animals and the Moral Community situates animal ethics within the broader history of Western moral thought, showing how the exclusion of animals has been built into the tradition from the outset. David Nibert's Animal Oppression and Human Violence traces the institutional and historical connections between the domination of animals and the domination of humans — making visible how these are not separate problems but interlocking systems. And Bob Torres's Making a Killing examines animal exploitation specifically through the lens of capitalist production relations.

Taken together, they provide the material for understanding why consistent opposition to class rule cannot stop at the species boundary.

For practical guidance on going vegan, see howdoigovegan.com. I'd also encourage you to look up your local vegan society and consider joining — making this change is considerably easier when you don't have to figure everything out alone, and the community is worth having.