This is a common claim about Singer:

Singer is best known for his views on animal ethics. In his book Animal Liberation he popularized the term speciesism, which he defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species”. See https://utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer/

Singer was instrumental in developing the Effective Altruism framework described as:

Effective altruism (EA) is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. See https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Facts:

There is no evidence that Singer, or most persons and organizations identifying themselves as doing effective altruist work, ever included or now include either the protection of animals or minimum thresholds of wellbeing for children in the basic system of birth, development and emancipatory entitlements from which Singer or the EA adherents were actually benefitting.

Instead they assumed and assume now the existing entitlements – which contradict their work on almost a dozen levels, but which ensure personal benefit to themselves at deadly cost to others. They chose, and continue to choose, top-down coercive systems that do not actually include future generations as empowered citizens, and  that exploit a lack of functional protections for animals as well as the children who impact those animals as the children enter the world. 

 

 

On any given day Singer or EA enthusiasts made claims about creating benefit, those claims were being vastly undone as children entered the world without entitlements to share equity (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) and beneath minimum thresholds of wellbeing, thereby degrading their own environment and exacerbating the climate and other crises we see today.

Millions are dying because of these mistakes. Some might have questioned the legitimacy of a system likely to cause the death of hundreds of millions of persons, and exponentially more nonhumans. There is no evidence Singer or EA enthusiasts are questioning it, even as it enriches them.

Singer, and the funders who backed him, made animal rights more about selling vegan food in unsustainable growth-based economies than what it really is: The fundament of social justice, a requirement to first be a species that co-exists and cares for others. This cost countless lives, but enriched many.

Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most 

Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy. Given mounting deaths in the climate crisis, the exploitative and unsustainable growth Singer and EA adherents enabled will do more harm – by the metrics of how they lived, what they said, and the legal systems from which they benefitted – than they will have done good.

Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes. But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.

Animal rights is a human idea, and must come from a legitimate human rights orientation consistent with animal rights outcomes. Micro animal rights, like open rescue, cannot come from a macro orientation of anthrocentric domination.

The public prominence of Singer and EA was funded by wealth made under this illegitimate system, at deadly cost to many, drowning out the voices of the unentitled. Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and other EA favored outcomes, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children. These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth, e.g., vegan food investors.

One in particular was specifically advised that growth was undoing the claimed benefits for animals, and risking ecological catastrophe, but he continued funding the work – lauded by the recipient organizations for doing good. He knowingly risked lives with his lies, and as the crisis unfolds he will be made an example of – to show how it was caused.

 

 

TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer here to admit these facts and to call for EA enthusiasts to back reforms at the United Nations that would prioritize share equity as the fundamental value necessary for legitimating any system. To the extent that he and EA leaders do not, they are hiding liability for climate reparations and illegitimately holding and using wealth  – backed by the violence of the state – that could save innocent lives.

For many who understand that their own freedom is contingent on the birth and development thresholds for all children, this will take Singer and EA leaders outside of the protection of a legitimate legal system where each persons is empowered, because Singer and EA leaders would have refused the first term of the social contract – to be fair.

This makes them key targets in efforts to legally preempt and – through crowdsourced action – shift illegal entitlements in order to evade millions of climate-related deaths. Claims of animal liberation,  on the edge of countless deaths caused by the Anthropocene, that exacerbate that situation may be the most glaring example of Winners Take All – a but also a chance to make examples of those involved, to show what it means to do better, and to decolonize wealth and the nonhuman world at once.

 

For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders.

We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them. Why focus on Singer? Animal liberation, and the legal system necessary to achieve it, is perhaps the highest ideal of human progress to date. Defining that idea in a way that evades critical protections for nonhumans, and enables today’s catastrophic state of affairs, causes harm by decoying efforts away from effective work. Singer is well aware of the failings of his work, and should use his substantial wealth and influence to fix obvious errors.

Here are eight metrics, and how then can be used to assured share equity entitlements, including reparations for climate harms. We cannot evade impacting all these values when we have children, hence Singer’s focus on animal liberation as an abstract concept accomplished neither liberation for humans or nonhumans.

1. Welfare – ensuring things like health, nutritional and educational outcomes that are measured based on the world as it would have been had the United Nations in1948 actually used self-determination – rather than reproductive isolation of families – as the standard for who we should be. 
2. Equality of opportunity – ensuring that one’s birth and developmental positionality is not a dominant factor in things like the income or savings one accrues in adulthood.  
3. Nature/environment (e.g., measurable emissions) – limiting emissions to levels that would not have caused the crisis, generally less than 280 ppm, and requiring the restoration of full biodiversity towards optimal ranges consistent with low-end UN growth projections. 
4. Successful parenting – ensuring that parents do no regret having children, including eliminating cases of neglect of abuse, through successful planning. 
5. Having an equal and influential share to determine all laws, including constitutional provisions – limiting  representative ratios to those fitting with low-end UN growth projections. 
6. Democratic, not economic, levels of trust – Metrics for trust among citizens must show their willingness to trust each other with legislation, and all lesser included forms of trust that implies. 
7. Real efficiency – Ensuring outcomes, like gross domestic product, are based on the inclusion of others as equals, not exploiting others in disregard of the capacity of all to contribute highly.
8. Self-determination, or share equity, to limit the influence others have over you – Whether you are free requires an amalgamation of the other metrics above.