Bad Faith, Speciesism, and an Existential Mode of Production

On February 26^th, John Sanbonmatsu, Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, gave an inspiring online talk on his most recent book The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves, published in 2025 by NYU Press.

In his book, Sanbonmatsu, draws on a wide range of thinkers to analyze the existential dimensions of speciesism and to deconstruct how the hegemonic system reproduces itself. Borrowing Marx’ concept of “totality” Sanbonmatsu emphasizes two central contradictions that define our capitalist system. The first is ecological: what John Bellamy Foster calls a “metabolic rift” between humanity and the Earth. Industrial animal agriculture is a major driver of climate change and mass extinction, tearing apart the ecological fabric on which life depends. The second is moral: the discord between our enlightenment ideals and the reality of a structure of grotesque violence against both humans and nonhumans. As these contradictions deepen, new narratives rush in to stabilize the order. Accordingly, a – if not the – central question at the heart of the book is: Why do we put so much effort into papering over these contradictions?

Sanbonmatsu’s book can be read as a response to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), a highly influential book that continues to be widely read 20 years after publication. Pollan’s rhetoric not only plays to the mob but is couched in age-old rationales that construe the animal as machine (Descartes) or as slave (Aristotle). In his work, Pollan stabilizes the aestheticization of violence against animals and legitimizes animal agriculture through language that describes the cycle of birth, growth and death as an opportunity for small-scale farmers to reconnect to nature. The slaughtered animal’s body is rendered a symbol, within a romanticized pastoral drama, of the supposedly inevitable cycle of nature rather than a testament to sheer human violence. Rhetoric, Sanbonmatsu argues, that is received with open arms by the public.

This acceptance is connected to “bad faith”, one of the central themes in Omnivore’s Deception. Similar to how Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not simply a belief or prejudice but a way of structuring one’s identity and existence – a choice to flee one‘s responsibility and self-knowledge – Sanbonmatsu argues that speciesism is a mode of production that produces human existence through the abjection of “the” animal. While many antisemites would not themselves actively harm jews, they also would not, as Satre claimed, bother to raise a hand to protect them from violence either. Sanbonmatsu likewise argues that even though many people would declare themselves “animal lovers” or “against factory farms”, few would bother to act on behalf of the animals. He continues:

“In our unchecked supremacy over other beings we thereby apprehend ourselves as what we are not, the world’s only intelligent lifeform and the only being whose existence has worth, while pretending that we are not what we are – animals ourselves. In short, we use both our differences from and similarities to other animals as justification for our violence against them.”

Therefore, the animal system is existential not just in the sense that it threatens human and nonhuman existence, driving mass species extinction and contributing to the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem, but also in the Sartrean sense of bad faith.

John Paul Sartre is a key thinker when it comes to notions of "Bad Faith" (Photo credit: Gisèle Freund, 1968 - Britannica)

 In its attempt to understand the existential dimensions of the animal system, The Omnivore’s Deception offers an original and insightful perspective. If speciesism is a mode of living, then this explains why it continues to prove so resistant against efforts to overcome it. At the same time, this perspective suggests that we need to think of animal advocacy as embedded in a wider project of civilizational reform, as Sanbonmatsu emphasized. Even though the capitalist system reinforces speciesism to the point of making it seem inevitable, places such as VINE Sanctuary (Vermont, USA) figure as sites of hope that provide the lineaments of a society in which animals are treated with compassion and care and in which they are not units of production but equals.

Sanbonmatsu’s talk did not resolve feelings of discomfort brought on about the disjuncture between the just vision of multispecies relations at VINE versus the reality of suffering and death visited upon billions of animals every year but perhaps this discomfort is precisely what is needed.