Abstract

In this essay, I first demonstrate that Beth Dixon’s central arguments challenging Karen Warren’s “logic of domination” do not succeed. Second, I argue that the logic of domination not only connects the oppression of women and animals—a possibility that Dixon disputes—but it in fact plays a significant role in connecting these oppressions, and many others besides, in its capacity as a component of a larger oppressive conceptual framework. My negative arguments against Dixon provide a foundation for the positive arguments in the second half of the paper, wherein, in contravention of her project, I establish that humans and animals clearly share emotions in a philosophically interesting sense, that this affective similarity allows us to draw conclusions about the oppression of animals from situations oppressive to humans, and, the main thesis, that the suffering of women, animals, and other oppressed groups is the symptom of a ubiquitous mindset morally untenable, psychologically dysfunctional, and characterized by an ideology of superior/inferior-dominator/dominated thinking