Zoe Rosenberg wasn’t interested in stealing jewelry, money, or a car — she was interested in stealing chickens. As she broke into Petaluma Poultry on a quiet Tuesday evening, she couldn’t help but notice the scratches and wounds on four little chickens, taking it upon herself to rescue them. To the law, she was a remorseless criminal with a felony and three misdemeanors for theft, but to the many supporters who tirelessly protested against her sentence, she was a hero who rescued chickens from confinement and slaughter. Her story was seen as both a crime and an act of compassion. This contradiction brought to light a deeper flaw in our society: Perhaps we live in a world structured entirely around human interests — a world where we can so casually inflict harrowing trauma on countless animals without a second thought.
Such a flaw has a name: Anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are morally superior to all other animals. More broadly, anthropocentrism reflects a general impulse, speciesism, the tendency of any species to place its own moral worth above that of others. When Rosenberg saved those four chickens, she did more than simply rescue them. She challenged the anthropocentric hierarchy that treats animals as property, asserting to the world that animals deserve moral consideration beyond their usefulness to humans. Taking this argument further, I believe that animals are morally equal to humans. To see why, we first need to understand patterns underlying the emergence of speciesism and anthropocentrism in society.
Speciesism seems to arise whenever a species becomes organized enough to build shared institutions. Humans are the clearest example. Our laws, farms, labor systems, and governments have always been designed to serve human interests first. While most animals lack the ability to justify such hierarchies through explicit reasoning, many species still instinctively organize shared systems. For example, ants build highly coordinated colonies with complex labor divisions, going so far as to enslave other colonies and farm aphids for food, demonstrating their ability to develop elaborate labor and agricultural systems. By reducing other insects to mere tools and livestock, the ant colony practices a rudimentary form of speciesism, proving that the exploitation of other species does not require conscious malice but is instead instinctively wired into organized societies. Although these behaviors may be driven by instinct, they reveal a pattern: Once a species can organize, it tends to create institutions that favor itself and place its moral worth above others. In this sense, speciesism is not merely a human or biological phenomenon, but a natural byproduct of organization itself.
If speciesism is built into the fabric of any intelligent society, then perhaps we can never entirely erase it. But progress begins with recognizing that putting our own species first is not justified. Therefore, we should aim to build a society that mitigates anthropocentrism as much as possible.
In 1902, theorist Peter Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” drew widespread attention for contradicting long-held Social Darwinist beliefs. Kropotkin proposed that the dominant rule of nature may not be competition among the fittest, but rather cooperation and mutual support. He observed that across many species, animals that built “mutual-aid” institutions — or institutions that benefited all species involved — tended to be the most resilient within their ecosystems. This phenomenon naturally extends to humans: If we were to replace modern-day exploitative institutions with mutual-aid institutions, we could, in theory, become a more resilient species.
To be clear, an exploitative institution is one that helps only one species, usually by harming another. Industrial farming, for instance, gives humans food but condemns pigs to lives of forced breeding and slaughter. By contrast, a mutual-aid institution benefits everyone involved. When we train dogs to help elderly or disabled people and, in return, give them shelter, food, and affection, both species gain something of value.
But there is a problem with applying Kropotkin’s idea to the case for biocentrism. There is no clear understanding of what constitutes “benefiting” versus “harming” an animal. Some might say that even factory-farmed pigs benefit, since they get food and shelter before they are killed. To answer this, I suggest a revised definition of what a mutual-aid institution actually is. A true mutualistic institution must help each species live and flourish according to its own nature, or its telos.
The term telos was coined by Aristotle in the 4th century BCE and refers to an organism’s natural drive to live in accordance with its own nature. Birds, for example, are driven to fly and build nests, and they have the freedom to do so in the wild. However, a pig that is fed, caged, and then slaughtered is unable to freely express its natural behaviors and desires, and therefore, it cannot flourish in accordance with its telos. By this measure, modern agriculture does not qualify as mutual-aid. Furthermore, by recognizing that telos is the golden metric that determines if species are being treated fairly and equally, we can now clearly define what a biocentric society looks like. A biocentric society is a society in which every species can flourish according to its telos.
This way of thinking changes everything. If building mutual-aid institutions is not only beneficial for animals but also for the future of humanity itself, we have every reason to pursue a biocentric society. And in order to pursue a biocentric society, we must take the initial step of recognizing that humans and animals are moral equals, because each has an equally valid right to flourish in accordance with its telos.
So then the path ahead seems obvious: We should replace our old exploitative systems with mutual-aid ones. But if mutual-aid is so clearly better, why have we never built such institutions before?
Early humans, especially during the Old Stone Age, lived in constant resource scarcity and predation. Survival came first because it was nearly impossible, leaving little room to worry about the lives or desires of the animals they fed on. Although, according to Kropotkin’s observations, mutual-aid institutions may offer many advantages for humanity, they are significantly harder to build with scarce resources than exploitative institutions. So exploitation became the norm, and over time, it became ingrained in the institutions we see today.
Yet recognizing the inevitability of anthropocentrism and the hurdles of developing mutual-aid institutions does not mean moral progress is impossible. Throughout history, humans have developed a second, naturally occurring pathway for change by gradually widening the group of beings we consider worthy of moral concern. In early human societies, moral considerations were limited to small tribes and communities. Over time, that circle expanded to include people of different races, nationalities, and genders who had once been excluded from equality by various tribes. The philosopher, Peter Singer, describes this process as a naturally expanding circle of moral concern, writing, “the circle of altruism has widened from the family and tribe to the nation and race, and we are now beginning to recognize that it ought to include all sentient beings.” If this historical pattern continues, the next step in the expansion of our moral community may very well be the inclusion of animals in a biocentric society.
In that sense, Rosenberg’s act was not just passionate defiance, but also a stance against anthropocentrism and a glimpse of what a more biocentric society might look like.
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