[Author’s Note: Humans are animals too. In this article, animals is used as shorthand for nonhuman animals.]
At age seven, sitting at the dinner table with my family, I prodded my fork into a thick, squishy brown shape on my plate. My grandmother, who lived with us, had cooked her traditional Lithuanian-Jewish Litvak meal, and everyone had dug in. “What is it?” I asked. My beloved gran whispered back from across the table, “tongue.” I stuck out my tongue. “This kind?” She smiled. “Yes, darling, but from a cow, not a little girl.” It was my first moral shock. Animals are our friends, aren’t they? Certainly, my dog Bronnie was, and all the animals in the picture books and animated films I saw as a child suggested this. Do we cut out our friends’ tongues and eat them? My second moral shock came years later when I saw images of the horror of industrialized animal agriculture and factory farms. How can grown-ups allow this? What I didn’t know then was that some of the most influential thinkers in Western history had already answered these strange paradoxes. The answers to these questions, and Western society’s broad agreement, have led to the systemic violence resulting in animal cruelty we see today, which I have spent my life trying to fight.
Our toxic relationship with animals has existed for more than 2,500 years. And while it may feel like humanity has advanced and we are progressive, we have inherited an ancient school of thought that normalized animal suffering and integrated it into our social structures; it is the water we swim in today.
Around 88 billion land animals were slaughtered globally in 2024. Meanwhile, people catch trillions of fish each year. These figures show a huge surge in meat consumption since reporting systems were established in 1960. Sentient Media reported that “poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, [as] the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg—an increase of almost 600 percent.”
Despite decades of animal protection advocacy, suffering keeps growing. Sentient (feeling) animals are subjected to what many consider torturous lives: impregnated, separated from their young, caged, mutilated, and killed daily. Their suffering is not only legal but also unremarkable, part of the systemized functioning of our industries, institutions, and daily meals. Animals are legally classified as property, and many governments do not consider them sentient or as having inherent moral value. They are objects under our control.
Scholar Lori Gruen distinguishes between two kinds of anthropocentrism, or human-centered thinking. One is inevitable, given our human vantage point. The other kind, which she terms arrogant anthropocentrism, rests on the claim that humans are superior to all other beings. It is this belief in human superiority that justifies animal exploitation and is the focus of this article. We begin by asking, where did this idea come from?
Humans have eaten animals and used them for labor for time immemorial. This was supported by several ancient influencers and thinkers, almost all of whom were European men, who sanctified their use in the Western worldview. This moral permission structure has been carved into the bones of our laws, institutions, pedagogies, and civil societies. Philosophy didn’t invent our use of animals, but it justified and normalized that use.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work reflected views similar to those of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, believed that human life is deeply social and that we each inherit ways of thinking from the culture and society we are part of. Bourdieu said, “In each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result.”
Ancient Foundations
Scholars tracing the historical origins of the ideas that shaped our treatment of animals often arrive at the same starting point: the ancient Greeks. Their rationality and reasoning provided the human-animal hierarchy with its philosophical backbone.
Plato imparted his teachings to Aristotle, and their ideas accumulated into a tradition that became foundational and ingrained in every aspect of life. Plato argued that rational men possessed immortal, superior souls, while enslaved people and barbarians lacked the capacity or strength for reasoning, and animals had inferior souls driven by desire and emotions. This theory shaped the rationale behind our worldview and was used to determine the moral worth of humans and nonhumans. Today, we can recognize this hierarchical thinking as the kind of overlapping inequality examined through an intersectional lens, which Merriam-Webster describes as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”
Aristotle reinforced this hierarchy. He argued for virtue ethics: Every living being has a characteristic nature and a capacity to flourish in accordance with that nature. For instance, humans have reason, and so flourishing means justice and contemplation. Based on Aristotle’s theory, rationality measures moral worth, and the world is accordingly structured in a hierarchy. Plants exist for animals, and animals exist for humans. He said, “Since nature does nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.” Finally, the Stoics, despite their positive legacy in promoting equality among men, primarily maintained a doctrine that elevated human fraternity while denying animals ethical consideration.
Pointing to the works of Aristotle and the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis, which states that “human beings share a kinship with other humans but not with other species of inferior intellectual endowments,” the journal Arhe states that in the 21st century the doctrine of “human exceptionalism” is used “to justify the wholesale slaughter worldwide of non-human animals for food, clothing, medical and entertainment purposes.”
Alongside the Greek philosophical tradition, monotheistic religions conferred divine authority on hierarchical systems. The word “dominion” in Genesis has been understood, for centuries, as a social license for humans to use animals for their benefit. Monotheistic religions also broadly denied animals a soul, placing them squarely outside the circle of moral concern. The Church Fathers cemented this into institutional doctrine. St. Augustine was one of the most influential theologians and philosophers in Christian history, and he argued that animals existed for human use. He is credited with first cementing the interpretation of dominion as part of Church doctrine through scripture. Centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas linked Aristotle’s hierarchy directly to scripture, helping embed it in Catholic doctrine. Aquinas, however, cautioned that one must be kind to animals, not because they have inherent moral value, but because cruelty to animals makes us harsher to one another.
However, dissent existed within the religious tradition, with certain voices challenging orthodoxy. For example, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the mystic St. Francis of Assisi preached reverence for all creation and urged people to treat animals as kin rather than property. He was later named the patron saint of animals and the environment. However, sadly, Francis was an exception. Pope Pius IX, in the 19th century, reaffirmed what had been an institutional doctrine for over a millennium: We have no duties toward animals.
I first discovered the theological debate about animals many years ago when I read Richard Schwartz’s Judaism and Vegetarianism. Exploring current scholarship, I have come to understand that the meaning of the word “dominion” in Genesis, and even its translation, is hotly contested. Some theologians argue that humans’ God-given role was intended to be stewards, a duty to care for creation rather than a license to exploit it. However, historically, the dominion interpretation became ingrained in Western law, science, and culture.
On the consequences of this view, Bible Odyssey, a biblical scholarship resource, points to “the abuses that notion has seemed to lead to in the modern period.” It adds that “Human activity is a key factor in the currently galloping rate of species extinction. The factory farming of animals and fish is a major driver of environmental degradation in North America and, increasingly, around the world.”
Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
René Descartes further entrenched animals’ low societal status in scientific thought. Animals, in his view, were automata, unfeeling machines. In his framework, kicking a dog was no different from kicking a clock. This justified the expansion of vivisection practices (live experimentation on animals) because if animals cannot suffer in any morally relevant sense, it does not matter what we do to them. Descartes’s influence was not merely academic; it shaped laboratory practice and legal frameworks whose legacies remain. The Enlightenment promised liberation and reason. For animals, the news was less liberating.
Baruch Spinoza both disagreed with Descartes’s claim that animals were mindless and famously rejected religious authority (and was duly excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community for it). However, his views on animals were more conservative. While he accepted that animals feel, he concluded it didn’t matter. He wrote that those who cared that animals were slaughtered were led by “womanish pity.” In his view, pity is irrational, a feeling rather than a thought, and therefore beneath serious philosophy. He concluded, “[W]e are… permitted to… use [the lower animals] at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us.”
Immanuel Kant’s exclusion of animals from moral consideration has had great and lasting influence. For Kant, the capacity to represent oneself as an “I,” that is, to be a self-conscious, rational subject, is what gives a being moral worth. Animals, lacking this, are things. “All animals exist only as a means, and not for their own sakes,” he wrote in his Lectures on Ethics. “We have no direct duties to animals.” Kant also drew on the Book of Genesis to justify human authority over nature, forging a direct link between the religious tradition I explored earlier and Enlightenment philosophy. Echoing Aquinas, he argued that we should avoid cruelty to animals not for their sake but because it might lead us to treat each other badly.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought this tradition to a kind of culmination. For Hegel, full consciousness—or the capacity for self-awareness, reflection, and shaping one’s place in history—marks what it means to be truly human. In his theory, animals are trapped in the present, driven by instinct, and incapable of the self-determination that generates moral standing. Humans are therefore naturally superior. (By the 19th century, this dismissal of animals having moral worth had acquired a clinical label: zoophil-psychosis, applied to women activists deemed “obsessively” sensitive to animal suffering, their concern dismissed as nervous and overly tenderhearted. The term is no longer used, but the contempt lingers in other phrases such as “crazy cat lady.”)
Even as anthropocentrism is taken for granted today as simply the way things are, and eating animals is considered natural, necessary, and normal, we can trace articulations of this hierarchy and entitlement back to a handful of European men. Without the long tradition of dominant Western philosophical thought, from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Kant, our relationship with animals may have looked entirely different.
Those Who Argued Back
Despite what many scholars consider the prevailing orthodoxy of a Western anti-animal worldview, a long and rich history of heterodox voices dates back to the sixth century BCE. These thinkers held an unusual worldview and, in some cases, a diet that rejected animal products. They questioned and abandoned the view of animals as separate or lesser; rather, they argued that animals have inherent value and moral worth and deserve equality and rights. These philosophers defended animals on the grounds of sentience, kinship, and compassion.
For example, Pythagoras, considered one of the first recorded ethical vegetarians, claimed that humans have no innate superiority over other animals. The Cynics argued that happiness came from living according to nature rather than convention, and Diogenes famously held up dogs as models of the simple, unselfconscious life humans should aspire to. In the Roman era, Plutarch posited that animals were rational and sentient, possessed virtues that humans lack, and deserved justice. His treatise On the Intelligence of Animals is arguably the first major philosophical work to argue that animals possess judgment, memory, and language. He wrote: “But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”
Two centuries later, Porphyry went further, arguing that justice should extend to animals. In On Abstinence From Animal Food, he approvingly quoted the earlier philosopher Dicaearchus, who wrote that “together with the slaughter of animals, war and injustice were introduced.” Later, in the 16th century, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne argued that our own processes of understanding are limited, and that animals may possess forms of reason and sociality that we are simply unable to perceive.
During the Enlightenment, David Hume argued that animals do have thought and reason, and a generation later, Arthur Schopenhauer formed an elaborate ethics of sameness: Compassion, he argued, is the only true foundation of morality, and it cannot stop at the species line. “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality,” Schopenhauer wrote in On the Basis of Morality. Meanwhile, much of contemporary animal advocacy draws on Jeremy Bentham’s famous utilitarian formulation: It is not “Can they reason?” but “Can they suffer?”
These thinkers did not necessarily win their argument in their own time. But they kept the question alive: Do animal lives matter?
Other Ways of Knowing
These histories of philosophical thought were primarily written by European men and filtered through the lens of those who defined what constituted knowledge. These ideologies conveniently left out the vast diversity of human cultures that never adopted the human-animal binary in the first place, and offered a radically different vision of the human-animal relationship. Through this article, I hope to provide brief insights into the richness of these diverse traditions.
Many Indigenous cosmologies are grounded in kinship with animals rather than dominion over them. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose described many Indigenous Australian understandings of Country as a living community of people, animals, plants, waters, and ancestral beings, where relationships of care and responsibility sustain life, and where Country is home. Rather than a human/animal division, the world is understood as full of persons, only some of whom are human, who live in partnership with each other. As the late Yolngu ceremonial elder David Gulpilil once observed: “We are brothers and sisters of the world. Doesn’t matter if you’re bird, snake, fish, kangaroo: One Red Blood.”
In Mi’kmaq culture, in what is now Canada, animals are considered siblings, beings on the same spiritual and physical continuum as humans. In Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe traditions, ecosystems are understood as societies with ethical structures and interspecies treaties, and animals are active members who directly influence how humans organize themselves. “The Euro-Christian imagination firmly divides nature from culture and associates human beings and animals according to this binary logic. Animals are assumed not to possess culture or reason or morality or language. This is not true for Indigenous knowledge systems,” states the journal Religions published by MDPI.
Ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood observed that while Western thinking sets humans apart from nature, many Indigenous traditions conceive of animals, plants, and humans as sharing a common life force with continuity and fluidity between all life. As Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Whyte writes, “Kinship refers to qualities of the relationships we have with others—whether others are humans, plants, animals, fishes, insects, rocks, waterways, or forests.” In this worldview, the line dividing humans from animals does not exist, and what matters is the quality of relationships and their reciprocity. Together, these perspectives suggest that arrogant anthropocentrism was—and is—not inevitable.
Rethinking Our Relationship With Animals
The suffering of trillions of animals stems from ideas developed over centuries, embedded in law, language, and institutions, and passed on so thoroughly that most of us have never thought to question them. It is a sea of speciesism, in which animals are assigned lower or no moral worth solely based on their species membership. But a counter-tradition has always existed. And something is shifting. A growing body of scholarship in critical animal studies, multispecies justice, and ecofeminist thought is actively challenging our anthropocentric foundations. And the animal movement is growing and becoming more mainstream. For example, legal personhood cases for animals are being argued in court, and the animal agriculture industries are investing in plant-based food tech. “With this increased exposure to posthumanist critiques of the legal system and its status for and treatment of animals, an increasing number of those involved in legal education are rethinking the law’s species-based hierarchy that places humans at the apex. This flourishing interest in animal law is paralleled by growth in the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS),” stated an article in Animal Law Review.
Even our grammar is slowly changing. As Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has observed, the language we use shapes how we relate to the living world. For example, many animal advocates, myself included, do not use the term “it” to refer to an animal.
But much remains to be done to undo the injustices of the past. After more than 180 years of organized animal advocacy, many of the systems that exploit animals remain firmly in place. Lasting change will require developing new moral frameworks—frameworks that ensure our treatment of other animals aligns with fundamental principles of justice, equality, and rights while also respecting, revering, and caring for relationships with all beings, human and otherwise, allowing us all to flourish. Ideas can be deconstructed, and unjust systems can be rebuilt.
The historical origins of the ideas that shape the human-animal relationship remind us that they are not fixed or inevitable, but rather assumptions shaped by cultural and philosophical traditions we have chosen to accept. We can discard these learned patterns that taught us to see animals as resources or property and instead rebuild a relationship based on interdependence and kinship.
As a seven-year-old at the dinner table, I didn’t understand how my friends could be considered food or treated so cruelly. Now I know it was the water we were swimming in. The history traced here reminds us that this water was neither natural nor inevitable, but shaped by ideas that became embedded in our institutions and everyday lives. And because those ideas were created, we can question them, too.
