Everyday cruelty toward animals may underwrite persecution of those deemed not fully human.

Evidence

Scott is somewhat unusual for his time in wanting to include the mistreatment of animals in his account of torture, and in describing their plight as a consequence of the nonrecognition of rights, for like other moderns he sees the extension of rights to be crucial for the elimination of cruelty. But in the course of arguing this thesis he hits on a profound and disturbing ambiguity. It is not entirely clear whether he thinks that human cruelty is merely an instance of bestial cruelty—that is, a working out of the supposedly universal instinct of stronger animals to hunt or attack the weaker. Or whether human cruelty is unique—not a characteristic of animal behavior at all—and that everyday human ruthlessness toward animals is essential for justifying the persecution of vulnerable people (defeated enemies, uninitiated children, and so on) on the ground that they are not fully human. In either case Scott disturbs liberal ideas of what it is to be truly human: humans are essentially no different from other animals, or they are different by virtue of their unique capacity for cruelty. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 493

Categorization

• XREF: The species/hierarchy-of-humanity logic here parallels how Cooper and Asad both trace how categories of the ‘truly human’ get constructed and policed in modern secular thought.
• QUESTION: Does Scott’s animal-cruelty framing anticipate contemporary animal-rights scholarship and its critics, or is Asad reading a distinct 19th-century genealogy?