Professor Philip Alston at NY is a leader in the field the field of international human rights. But like many in the field, he has relied on a failing system has put parental autonomy over child equity when it comes to family and family planning law and policy. That has fundamentally caused the climate and inequity crises we face today.
The Children’s Rights Convention sets out what children need to physically constitute just, sustainable and legitimate democracies, and it was designed to address the fundamental or familial political relations that make up the systems we all support (through taxes and otherwise), benefit from, are responsible for, and from which we cannot separate. What we often think of as population is really a matter of fundamental power relations.
And yet the current and almost universal paradigm for family and population policy does nothing to ensure all children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the Convention. That paradigm is based on what is called the constitutive fallacy: Basing our individual obligation to follow the law on things like top down written constitutions rather than just and sustainable family policies that actually empower people bottom up to constitute just and legitimate nations, and do and should account for our actual relations and lived experiences. Law and policy derive from basic systems of rights, which are mandatory obligations.
The powerful do not need those obligations; the vulnerable, including nonhumans and future generations, do.
Philip Alston is influential. Getting him to admit that he UN knowingly used family planning policies that were illegitimate, and harmed people, would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
Here’s what to do: Almost every organization has workplace employment policies that quietly exacerbate child inequity. We can change that by urging leadership at those companies to adopt scaling of certain discretionary benefits.
We encourage corporations, for-profit and non-profit, to adopt more equitable discretionary benefits that would start to level the playing field for the children of employees, using the base principle that discretionary benefits impacting kids should be scaled inverse to wages. We should do this to avoid passing massive privilege – including race-based privilege – through a process that fundamentally impacts the majority: future persons and nonhumans.
The Climate Crisis Happened Because World Leaders Evaded Regenerative Family Policies. Enacting Those Policies Now Is a Must Do.
Anytime you hear that something is sustainable, or even better, regenerative, consider asking the person making that claim what family policies underly it. Businesses and sham nonprofits claim to be sustainable all the time. And yet inevitably they are intentionally undoing progress on things like climate emissions by pushing population-growth policies that produce unmaintainable profits through cheap labor, and lots of consumers.
That lie – using family policies to undo with one what we do with the other – fundamentally created the climate crisis. Taking the money the lie created, from companies like Exxon, and using it to fund truly regenerative family reforms does the greatest good in the long run.
Don’t confuse chaos with freedom. Truly free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions, the impact of bad parenting on children and communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. And that limiting starts where power begins, with better family policies that focus on what children need, and the degree to which we are willing to actually empower (versus exploit) them. There is no other way to enable people in a democratic and bottom-up way. The act of deriving political obligation and freedom from something other than a just creation norm that actually accounts for fair power relations is a scam perpetrated on the vulnerable by powerful people.
Free people – on both ends of that creation – will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple inversion test, in functional democracies where children are born and raised in conditions that comply with the democracy-building Children’s Rights Convention.
That test shows whether someone is orienting from a fundamentally just or unjust position. Fair and empowering creation is what obligates us to follow the law because it ensures we help make it. And we can start empowering people with discourse and direct action that makes property rights conditional on investing what we need in children and paying the true costs of wealth. Property is contingent on our constituting democracies where we are actually empowered – in order to obtain the resources to fund better family planning and stop things – like constant violence – that flow at the bottom from disempowerment. Many funders are recognizing this and acting accordingly, and you can too.
* Special update: After writing this open letter Professor Philip Pettit of Princeton University called the claims in it “home truths” and allowed us to share his good words publicly. Take action below to urge Gerken to admit the fallacy in her work and support Fair Start legislation that moves us towards the first condition of being free.
Dear Dean Gerken,
This is a great headline: “‘You cannot be an academic or a lawyer and not believe in free speech’: Dean of Yale Law.” And the points you make are compelling. Yale Law School (YLS) is clearly taking a position on the value of free speech in the context of elevating controversial speakers, including some who might reinforce unjust hierarchies based on the history of colonization (Elon Musk leaving South Africa during apartheid with the wealth his family made under it would be an example).
YLS and its alums will have intimate knowledge of what concentrations of wealth and power – like working on or with the Supreme Court – look like, even when those concentrations are totally attenuated from the citizens over which they have authority. Would YLS take a position on ensuring liberating power relations through family reforms that should precede free speech forums, especially if the changes needed to ensure that would – by empowering people with meaningful voices in participatory democracies – would long-run mitigate the climate crisis?
And from your work on democracy, I will assume you want those relations to be formed bottom-up, in which case there seems to be only one pathway:
Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems where they are not actually empowered. How do they do this? Fair Start family reforms, like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance using an inversion test, ensure that people are actually empowered long-run – in places like town halls – to make the ultimate rules under which all must live.
This evades the undemocratic concentrations of power that – as Robert Tsai saw – prevent people from constituting true legalities by creating relationships between people that are more empowering than disempowering, relative to a neutral point, like Rawl’s original position. It evades the aborted version of freedom Joseph Raz exposed.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of supreme political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place. If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations and relative self-determination more than “population.”
From your work I will assume you see the U.S. Constitution as supreme, perhaps limited by some form of international law. Could a more supreme norm exist in the form of whatever norm would best account for creating the people from whose authority these other norms derive?
One can imagine this process simply as using good democratic representative ratios to move toward what many see as optimal world population ranges. If government is to derive from the people, there must be a first election in which the people decide who is in their polity. Immigration/emigration might have determined that “first election” at one point, but how can we ignore family policy as a more primary form? We cannot and remain in a preconstitutional modes, choosing things like the creation of large populations in the hopes of geniuses magically emerging rather than seeing the genesis of efficiency as actually developing each child to their full capability, as long as we make that mistake.
Fair Start family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people. Wealthy people, and the unscrupulous politicians and charities that shill for them, will hide the fallacy, and its overriding nature.
But without these reforms people will continue to try to wrongly empower themselves through acts of violence., and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of their wealth and refuse to change course. They will harm innocents, rather than those extracting personal power from collective freedom by crowding people (including the future majority) out of town halls and into the shopping malls, the move that fundamentally created the climate and other deadly crises we face today.
Freedom requires forums of speech, like democracies, be bounded by objective norms of human rights, the first of which is the right to have children.
Help us make that right ecosocially fair, to decolonize the future and become sufficiently other-regarding to actually constitute just communities.
But that process was designed before the climate crisis, surely a threat to human freedom as it represents the imposition of others influence upon the natural (or nonhuman) background world that buffered us from one another for millennia.
Can we do more than family planning interventions designed decades ago? Yes – we can use this crisis as a chance to become – existentially – free.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based.
Family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people.
Without these things people will try to wrongly empower themselves, and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of wealth by crowding people out of town halls and into shopping malls, through acts of violence.
TAKE ACTION: URGE CALDER, @vanessabcalder, AND CATO TO TAKE FREEDOM TO THE EXISTENTIAL LEVEL, APPLYING THE INVERSION TEST TO MAKE FAMILY POLICY FAIR AND LIBERATING.
Climate loss and damage payments are now being approved by governments. RAFUG, Amboseli, Fair Start, and others are all partnering and quickly scaling up because the questions remain what the true amount of compensation should be, and how that money should be spent. Given that not ensuring family planning pegged to the Children’s Rights Convention, or what is called child-centrism, is what helped create the crisis, we are interceding to urge the funding to go to climate restoration and child-centric policies. We are asking donors to lead by example.
We are asking them to give for that purpose with the understanding that child-centrism overrides other policies.
TAKE ACTION NOW: DONATE TO THE AMBOSELI LOVE EFFORTS THROUGH RAFUG’S DONATE OPTIONS BELOW, AND URGE THE NEW YORK TIMES TO CORRECT ITS REPORTING ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS TO REFLECT THE NEED FOR CHILD-CENTRIC POLICIES.
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Please follow this form when disbursing donation to Rejoice Africa foundation. This form must guide you in doing international wire transfer and any inquiry you reach us info@rafug.org or robertmwesigye1990@gmail.com
The Council for the District of Columbia made history recently by moving towards #birthequity with baby bonds. Why should only rich kids get trust funds? Isn’t freedom about equality of opportunity?
TALE ACTION: Urge the Council to adopt Fair Start, and you can also work from the bottom up – urging relatively wealthy residents of the Washington D.C. area to lead by example and support Fair Start moves by donating in ways that all children get a fair start in life.
The reporting is based on a false assumption, and thus misinforms readers in a way that exacerbates the crisis and its impact on the most vulnerable people.
The reporting assumes the funding is contingent on the decision-making authority of current governments, like the Biden Administration. That is incorrect. There is a fundamental and existential human right to a safe environment now understood to require climate restoration, and such rights override governmental authority and authorize direct demands for payments – citizen to citizen if used to further the right.
Ignoring that right will lead to children being born into conditions in which they will needlessly suffer, while a handful of wealthy companies – many of whom advertise in the New York Times – profit from the status quo.
By hiding this fact, the reporters place excessive control in the hands of the leaders who caused the crisis and ignore the fundamental driver – power relations between people. Thus, these leaders are not properly held responsible, and the role power relations play in climate injustice is unrecognized. This is especially true given that family reforms and the correctly constructed right to have children (born into a healthy environment) precede and override competing rights and interests, like the property rights that prevent funding for effective family planning incentives/entitlements.
The existence and implications of that right are a fact, a much more important one than many of the facts covered in that article.
What is the most good we can do? This is a question effective altruists (EA) grapple with. And that community, which is large and comprised of many viewpoints, answers the question in a variety of ways.
But doing the most good is a question that has already largely been answered by the Children’s Rights Convention, which acts as a binding assessment of the ecosocial conditions in which children should be born and develop in order to comprise just communities. These conditions include a restored climate, and relatively equal opportunities in life that are currently out of reach (see the chart above).
In other words, while we may wish to do good, we have a primary obligation to protect future generations, and in compliance with the Convention. EA is limited by this human rights regime and deontological population (or really, power) ethics, because while many in EA value economic growth, that growth is conditioned on our complying with human rights norms that – in instruments like the Convention – show how to empower people. We need to first use human rights standards to create people for town halls, rather than the utility-producing shopping malls many in EA favor, because the latter are only legitimate if they are regulated by functional – human rights-compliant – versions of the form.
For example, some in EA might assume a good use of corporate profits would entail charitable donations to things like animal welfare reforms. The reality is that if we do not use human rights to assess the true costs of those profits on people and future generations, we actually end up doing more harm than good to humans and nonhumans, as measured against things that override EA principles, like biding human rights instruments. Instead of a focus on stripped-down welfare, a human rights-based approach enables consent to power – a more basic value the precedes and allows us to truly do good.
Invest more in kids.
Admittedly the Convention has not been applied as a standard for family planning, but it could be, using family planning incentives/entitlements geared as climate reparations for future generations, with distributions/fees scaled inversely to wealth as a means of promoting climate restoration as well as parental readiness, birth equity, and sustainable families. How can we possibly be effective, or efficient, without developing each child to their full potential, in the freeness of nature that Henry David Thoreau described as the fundament of economy?
The climate and inequity crises we face today fundamentally flow from denying the eco-social conditions promised by the Convention (denied to them per one Nobel Laureate to ensure the growth the enriched a few), because in self-governing communities where authority flows bottom up, our fundamental power relations and development becomes the exclusive reason for such outcomes.
The fossil fuel industries currently being targeted at COP27 seem like ideal targets to urge to first fund this transition from parent-centric to child-centric planning. And using the Convention, perhaps reinterpreted as requiring that we take democracy seriously by applying this inversion principle, would avoid what might be called the constitutive fallacy, or treating anything other than a fair creation norm that empowers people (from whom the legitimacy of things like state constitutions derive) equitably – per the inversion – as the ultimate obligation. How can we separate our values from ourselves, and our creation?
Without ensuring minimum levels of welfare for future children, and the autonomy of the nonhuman world that is part of that welfare, EA is simply using its platform to exploit the most vulnerable entities. They were committing a simple baseline error – randomly assigning costs and benefits without first being a group of people who can inclusively engage in such analysis.
If we reject the fundamental fairness described here, we end up with a system that does not allow people to meaningfully participate in creating the rules under which they must live, a system that is thus backed by violence rather than consent. And we would force people to live, disempowered as such, amid massive and growing inequity and in an increasingly hostile environment.
We can use the great concentrations of wealth that growth created (wealth now defended by systems of violence) to fund incentives/entitlements to bend the arc of our existence away from that future, and towards a biodiverse future where each child gets what they need, and participatory democracy – or freedom – is the reality. It would be wrong not to shift that wealth, by all means effective, given that its true costs were externalized on the women and children the incentives/entitlements would go to.
If we do not, and the situation degrades as described above, many people in that situation will turn to self-defensive violence, free people who through effective leaderless resistance models will limit and decentralize the violence-backed power (like the property rights EA now relies upon) others have over them, in part by taking the resources necessary to invest in young women’s constituting true democracy through better family policies.
TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO PROMOTE TRUE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE. CHOOSE ONE NOW.
