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

The argument developed across this project 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, wherever moral worth has been universalized, operates as tacit practice, becomes explicit doctrine. It is the limit case in three senses that coincide only here — the denial is open rather than tacit, and what is open here is not merely the ranking of capacities, which other traditions have also stated as doctrine, but the entitlement the ranking is taken to confer; the frustration of need is total rather than partial, by the arrangement's design and across every need domain; and no counter-pressure from the sorted exists to force the sorting to switch its form — and that coincidence is why the essay ends by arguing that this is where the work of unlearning the logic should begin.

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: animals have experienced needs — for autonomy, protection, connection, play, among others — rooted in neurobiological architecture shared across species, and identifiable through the pathology that follows when those needs are frustrated. The needs framework I develop elsewhere identifies thirteen such dimensions, insists that they are non-hierarchical, and finds each in any animal that has the biological architecture it requires. 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.^[1]

And yet over 80 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.^[2] 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 and their question-begging. 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. The justification battery recurs regularly enough to have been taxonomized in the psychological literature as the "4Ns": natural, necessary, normal, nice (Piazza et al. 2015); and the developmental and motivated-reasoning evidence set out below indicates that what is operating is not independent moral reasoning but a socially reproduced rationalization structure.

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 citing them ranks beings on a scale on which humans stand first, a measure that does not track whether a being's needs are frustrated, and anyone who refuses that measure among humans has already conceded the point; ranking by species membership instead only moves the same measure up a level, since it still asks which kind stands first rather than whether a being's needs are frustrated. The question is not "how clever is my victim?" or "how exciting do I consider their life?" but whether the being has experienced needs that the arrangement systematically frustrates — and the answer, as anyone who has watched an animal play, nurture, grieve, or flee for its life already knows, is yes. The claim that animals "don't mind" is not merely circular in principle; it is empirically falsified by the resistance their confinement generates — escape attempts, fence-testing, maternal distress when calves are removed, the stereotypies that develop wherever motivational systems are thwarted. These are not pathological outbursts but purposive responses to specific conditions, as any farmer who has watched a sow destroy a farrowing crate or a hen pace a battery cage already knows.

The circle in the strict sense lies one step further back, and it is the one 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 a line of ostensibly Marxist readings made about chattel slavery: because the enslaved were legally property rather than sellers of labor power, their labor was classed with machinery as constant capital, producing no new value, and slavery was set outside capitalist accumulation ("Bred Into Existence" takes these readings up). 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: animals are not a class, but they stand in a class relation ("Living and Non-Living", forthcoming). At the material level, what class exploitation involves is the organized extraction of labor from living bodies — compelling other beings to act, under conditions you set, for purposes that serve you — for the benefit of those who control them. What makes this exploitation rather than mere resource use is that the bodies in question have experienced needs that the arrangement must systematically frustrate to extract at the rate accumulation demands. This is true of the worker whose labor power is purchased, of the woman whose reproductive labor is appropriated, and of the animal whose entire bodily existence is restructured by production relations in which its resistance is received as a defect of the animal — aggression, vice, failure to adapt — rather than as a refusal anyone is obliged to hear. The companion essays develop the structural mechanisms: the distinction between consuming a body's stored energy and compelling its ongoing activity as labor; the appropriation of reproductive capacity — gestation, lactation, ovulation — as variable capital producing surplus value; the formal-to-real subsumption of animal biology by industrial production.^[3] This essay's contribution is the ideological form: the circularity through which the exploitation is justified to those who benefit from it and participate in it daily.

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, junglefowl drawn to the food around human settlements.^[4] 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 circularity operates here too: the docility, confinement-tolerance, and reduced flight response that millennia of selective breeding produced are then cited as evidence that these animals are "meant for" human use — that their subordination reflects their nature rather than its violent reshaping. But selective breeding can redesign the body; it has not eliminated motivational architecture that is phylogenetically far older than domestication, and where it has dulled it, it raised the threshold of provocation rather than removing the need. The stereotypy evidence — bar-biting in sows, tongue-rolling in calves, pacing in confined predators — demonstrates that the needs persist through whatever class power does to the organisms it exploits. 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. The companion essay "Matter Out of Place" traces the same transition in the human case: prior taboo-structures held relations with the spirits of the mine and the mountain to be reciprocal (the Bolivian miners' tío, the Andean Pachamama, to whom llamas were sacrificed), and their destruction by the property form was a cosmological transformation — from a cosmology of obligation to one of extraction — that tracks the Taussig transition that essay documents for labor.

Nor has cooperation disappeared: animals still trust the humans who feed and handle them, still settle into shared routines, still form bonds that are not pretended on either side. But the trust now operates on terms only one party can set — honored while the animal's productivity warrants the cost of her upkeep, and revoked when it does not. The farmer's attentive care for a known animal is real, but it operates through the innocence perception: the animal is classified as not-responsible for its condition, and the care that classification permits is conditional on the animal's continued utility within the production relation. When the cow is "spent," the care is withdrawn — not because the innocence frame breaks, but because the institutional arrangement overrides it. This is not a failure of individual caring but a structural feature of the property relation, which a care ethics grounded in the caring relation cannot distinguish from genuine need-meeting: it has no account of what the organism in its care requires that the caring relation must answer to, and the animal's refusal reaches it only as information about whether the care succeeded, not as a no anyone is bound by ("Merit All the Way Down", §I). The strand that can tell them apart is the one that counts what the animal communicates: Josephine Donovan's dialogical ethic of care extends caring to "caring about what they are telling us," and concludes that "no animal would opt for the slaughterhouse" (Donovan 2022, 52).

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 connection, autonomy, play, and protection 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, not the other way round: a sorting that meets no pressure it must answer is never contested as a sorting, so the apparatus that maintains it goes unchallenged and comes to read as nature.^[5] In the imperial forms framework's terms this is mediating factor 3 at its limiting value, and what is missing there is not the capacity to refuse — the balking and the escapes are refusals — but a party obliged to register that one was made: they arrive and are re-filed as aggression or failure to adapt, the position the companion essay "Standing to Refuse" calls the first standing-regime.^[6] "Bred Into Existence" sets out the collection's several accounts of the animal case as layers over that limit.

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.^[7] The mechanism is the evaluative shift "Conditions of Care" traces through the family: the progressive replacement of interaction-based responsiveness with categorical sorting, where belonging is made conditional on the child's response to assessment. The same developmental process that teaches the child to suppress their own needs when expressing them becomes too costly teaches them to suppress their recognition of others' needs when caring becomes socially costly — and at the species boundary, where caring is coded as sentimental and childish, the cost is enforced most uniformly. When a child acts on the response and stops eating meat, the cost arrives as the parent's no: about half of young British adults recall having thought about stopping before they left school, whether they could depended above all on their parents, and the parents backed the return to meat more than the attempt to stop — which is why so many who go vegan do so only once they have left home.^[8] What the conditioning 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 the same one the companion essays document for race, class, and gender: rigid categorical sorting substituted for the flexible, interaction-based empathic pattern the species starts with. What is identical is the form of the operation, not its dynamics — in the human cases the sorted population can organize the counter-pressure that forces the sorting to switch form, and at the species boundary it cannot — not by nature, but because the independent social life a joint refusal would need is the first thing the arrangement destroys — which is why (as the closing section argues) the same operation runs deeper here than anywhere else.

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.

But this claim requires a distinction. Many people who care about animals — including some who go vegan — are operating not through the recovered pre-evaluative register but through what the "Innocence and the License to Kill" calls the innocence perception: a category within the evaluative framework that animals satisfy by default because they cannot be coded as responsible for their condition.^[9] The care is real, but it operates within the moral-accounting system rather than outside it. The tell is selectivity. The person who is tender toward dogs but indifferent to rats, who cares about charismatic mammals but not about the spider in the bathtub, who recoils when an animal bites or becomes inconvenient, is extending the innocence classification to a wider set of beings without dismantling the evaluative framework that makes the classification necessary. The innocence perception doesn't generalize to beings that are threatening, ugly, or coded as responsible for the trouble they cause — which is exactly the limit that the pre-evaluative register does not have. "Matter Out of Place" identifies the affective mechanism: the contempt-to-disgust shift that fires when the low become "out of place" — proximate, visible, claiming equality — operates at the species boundary too. The feral cat, the aggressive dog, the cow that kicks undergo the same innocence-revocation as human gradient-bottom populations that resist: their innocence was conditional on their position, and contesting that position triggers disgust rather than sympathy. Responding to needs on the basis of interaction rather than categorical assignment means responding to the rat's needs too, and the spider's, and the animal that just bit you — and it means taking seriously the consistency test "What Sentience is For" develops: if the grounding is biological, it cannot be specific to Homo sapiens, and the framework applies wherever the relevant neurobiological architecture exists, including in birds, cephalopods, and social insects. The distinction matters for the essay's central argument: if unlearning speciesism is to function as practice for unlearning meritocratic reasoning generally, the unlearning must operate at the level of the register, not the category. Extending the innocence classification to animals leaves the sorting apparatus intact. Recovering interaction-based responsiveness to needs as such is what actually dismantles the reasoning form — and it is harder, which is why starting here, where the consensus is deepest, is the right place to begin. And the recovery is more often the outcome of the practice than its precondition. People reach it by different routes — a bond with a particular animal, or giving up meat first because vegetarianism is the culturally legible way to act on concern for animals — and which doorway someone enters through matters far less than where it leads. Going vegan changes the daily practice, and the changed practice is what opens the room in which the earlier dissonance can be revisited and the register recovered — the same order of operations the companion essays insist on elsewhere: the disposition shifts through altered practice, not through being argued into it. What matters is the endpoint — responsiveness to needs as such, and the refusal of animal use it grounds — not the path by which someone reaches it.

Suppression, not absence

The connection also 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." John Sanbonmatsu calls the figure of "the animal" "a universal currency of denigration," whose metaphors have served "even as cultural preparation for genocide" (Sanbonmatsu 2025). 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 impairment of the empathic response. What genocide characteristically draws on, beside the revocation of innocence traced below, is the reclassification of the target group into a category where that impairment is already operative. The innocence perception explains why reclassification is sufficient: because what most people are operating through is not the pre-evaluative register, which would respond to visible need regardless of category, but the innocence perception, which is category-dependent. Block the category — reclassify the human as vermin — and the response that the innocence framework provided is withdrawn, because the framework was conditional on the classification, not on the need.

"Innocence and the License to Kill" traces how legitimation of violence becomes progressively more elaborate as the moral community expands — from power-based hierarchy (the gods are simply stronger; no justification needed) through moral accounting (the victim's suffering is merited) to universalized moral worth (whose paradoxical consequence is that violence now requires revoking the victim's innocence before it is permissible). But this trajectory applies only to beings within the expanding moral community. At the species boundary, the trajectory appears never to reach: animals seem to remain in the earliest legitimation register — one where no narrative management of the victim's suffering is required. Animal sacrifice could be sacred without the redemptive-violence structure (chaos defeated through sovereign violence) because the animal's non-personhood made the sacralization operate through the sacrificer's purposes rather than through legitimation of the act against the victim. Contemporary animal agriculture appears to complete this: its legitimation apparatus does not even sacralize the violence. But the appearance is produced rather than natural. The suffering is not unperceived — it is perceived and suppressed. Children weigh animal lives far closer to human ones than adults do (Wilks et al. 2021), and the reasoning that makes the practice liveable develops with age rather than preceding it (McGuire et al. 2025). Consumers deny minds to animals they are told will be eaten — motivated dissonance-reduction, which takes psychological work, rather than passive non-perception (Bastian et al. 2012, replicated by Jacobs et al. 2024). "Matter Out of Place" develops the affective mechanism in full: the avoidance body's shame-training applied to moral concern itself, so that taking animal suffering seriously is coded as sentimental and childish — the taboo-structure policing empathic scope through the same pre-reflective mechanism it uses at every other gradient position. What this essay adds to that account is three dimensions the affective analysis alone doesn't capture. First, the suppression is architectural as well as affective: the spatial segregation of slaughter from consumption, the procedural compartmentalization within the facility, the linguistic euphemism are investments in managing something that would not require management if it were truly unperceived (Pachirat 2011). Second, the suppressed recognition doesn't merely persist — it damages: slaughterhouse workers describe the numbing not as clean absence of perception but as destruction ("it kills you on the inside" — Victor and Barnard 2016), and the condition is ongoing as well as post-traumatic, because the exposure never stops (MacNair 2023). It also leaks: arrest rates, for rape and other sex offenses above all, rise with slaughterhouse employment, and hold against other industries matched for pay, routinization, danger and immigrant workforce (Fitzgerald et al. 2009). The mechanism is structurally identical to the soldier case — Grossman's species-level resistance to killing that military training overrides at a psychological cost, and the firing squads whose psychological burden was, in Browning's account, one reason a method "less burdensome psychologically for the killers" was sought in the extermination camp. Third, the absence of counter-pressure is the real asymmetry: the targeted population cannot organize the resistance that forces form-switching in human cases, and what resistance it does offer is received at the body rather than registered, docked and debeaked away before it can become pressure on the sorting, which is why the shame mechanism runs deeper here than at any other gradient position.

Speciesism is where meritocratic reasoning operates most completely, which is precisely why it is where the work of unlearning it should start. It is most complete because the three things that come apart elsewhere here converge: the denial is openly doctrinal — and it is the entitlement that is doctrinal, not merely the ranking, which other traditions have stated openly while refusing the entitlement it is taken to confer;^[10] the frustration of need is total; and no counter-pressure from the sorted exists to force the sorting to switch its form — the species boundary is the one place where all three hold at once. If you can learn to recognize the circularity here — where social conditioning is deepest and the social consensus most uniform — you will find it 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 information

The deeper case, connecting animal use to the material structures of class rule, draws on work that deserves serious engagement. This essay has a few companions, primarily "What Sentience Is For" and "Bred into Existence".

Gary Francione and Anna Charlton's six principles have been formative for my own thinking. For a spoken introduction, see Francione's lecture on the Abolitionist Approach at Vegetarian Summerfest 2015. 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.

Taken together, they provide a starting point 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.

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