Before the white man’s footprints darkened our soil, before land was fenced and ownership written on paper, our people lived in a democracy of trust, a circle of life where every hand fed the other and every decision served the whole community.
I come from western Uganda, those days, the women care groups were the beating heart of the homestead. They didn’t hold titles or offices, yet they ruled the rhythm of the seasons.
They knew which seeds would call the rain, which herbs would heal hunger, and which trees would guard the wells. Their wisdom was our wealth.
We never spoke of food insecurity because food was shared, not sold.
We didn’t fear drought because we protected the trees, the springs, and the sacred rhythm between work and rest. We didn’t know inequality because every woman’s hands shaped the home, and every man’s strength served the family. In those days, democracy wasn’t written in books; it lived in our hearts. Elders met under the great local tree not to rule, but to reason. Families decided together about planting, marriage, and birth guided by values that put life before wealth.
The Family before Destruction
Our families were nuclear in structure but extended in spirit.
A man, a woman, their children yet the village raised them all.
A child belonged not just to the womb, but to the clan.
What outsiders now call family planning was once part of our wisdom. The elders taught that a home should grow only as far as the land and love could sustain. Women gathered under banana groves, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters to share herbs, stories, and counsel on how to care for both body and earth.
Then came the colonial shadow.
Foreign rulers broke our granaries, fenced our wells, and called our rivers “property.”
They mocked our ways, dismissed the voices of women, and tore apart the balance that held us together. They brought hunger not of the stomach alone, but of spirit. A hunger for land, power, and things that could never fill the soul.
Reclaiming the Roots
Today, our women care groups are rising again.
They are planting kitchen gardens, restoring indigenous seeds, and teaching young girls their worth. They are rebuilding what was broken the bond between people and land, family and democracy, nature and justice.
We say again:
“Culture is not backward, it is the foundation of freedom.”
True development is not when a few grow rich, but when every family eats, drinks, and decides together.
Our ancestors taught that water, food, and justice breathe as one. Without them, no democracy can survive, no woman can lead, and no child can dream.
If we heal the land, we heal our people.
If we honor our women, we restore the home.
If we return to our culture, we will be free again from food insecurity, drought, inequality, and water scarcity.
Fair Start formed in response to widespread use of an illegal assessment and reporting standard by U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, and universities. This standard evades compliance with the Children’s Rights Convention and conceals climate damage liability. Rooted in outdated and unjust metrics, it has fueled the climate crisis and led to millions of deaths.
Instead of ensuring justice at birth and political equity, this system relies on arbitrary measures of social justice. We can change that by asking key questions:
“How do you account for children’s rights when assessing your organization’s impact?”
“Are your claims based on the same flawed standards that contributed to the climate crisis?”
Justice begins with fair conditions at birth and development. We must shift from after-the-fact remedies to proactive, structural change.
The Roots of the Problem
Decades ago, world leaders removed political equity from reproductive rights, reinforcing “separate but equal” family standards. This led to unjust and unsustainable birth conditions, favoring economic growth over equity. The result? Disproportionate climate risk and political disenfranchisement, particularly for marginalized children.
Rather than investing in equitable birth and development, wealth was concentrated in privileged families, worsening inequality. Charitable efforts have often done more to enrich donors than to solve systemic issues.
The Consequences of Ignoring Political Equity
By ignoring fair power distribution at birth, social justice efforts have been performative rather than transformative. This has allowed:
Political and economic systems to continue favoring privileged groups.
Climate crisis impacts to disproportionately harm vulnerable communities.
Social justice philanthropy to obscure its failures rather than address them.
The current system scores children of color as deserving fewer resources and more risk, worsening climate-related deaths. Any organization avoiding this reality is complicit in deepening inequity.
The Need for a Fair Start Standard
All legal obligations should stem from a foundation that prioritizes children’s rights and political equity at birth. True justice must:
Ensure children are born into conditions that fulfill their rights.
Address environmental sustainability alongside political representation.
Shift funding and policy priorities toward early-childhood equity.
Steps Toward Change
Recognize Fair Start as a Preemptive Standard
Reparations should focus on ensuring small, equitable, and democratic family structures.
Organizations should acknowledge past failures and commit to a new standard of legitimacy.
Expose High-Profile Barriers to Equity
Identify individuals and institutions benefiting from inequitable systems.
Challenge philanthropists and corporations to disclose how their wealth affects children’s rights.
Launch the Fair Start “Tell the Truth” Campaign
Replace misleading impact claims with truthful assessments of harm and injustice.
Hold organizations accountable for their role in perpetuating inequity.
The Bottom Line
Political legitimacy starts at birth. Justice requires ensuring that no child is born into conditions of deprivation and disempowerment. This is not an optional intervention—it is the foundation of a fair and sustainable future.
We must stop supporting unjust systems and demand accountability. Will you join us in advocating for a truly equitable start in life for all children?
Freedom from the power of others begins with rights, and the most fundamental right is not about how we act, but how we are created. Children’s birthrights determine whether they are empowered by the conditions in which they are born and raised and define their level of influence relative to others. Freedom is not defined by artificial borders on a map but by the true boundaries of self-determination—who controls the world we must share. Freedom is compromised when people fear their fellow citizens, lack real influence over political representatives, suffer from human-induced climate crises, are denied access to nature, or are economically controlled by employers.
The First Obligation: Future Generations
Our primary obligations are not to constitutions, governments, or the wealthy, but to future generations—children whose empowerment gives legitimacy to those institutions. That means prioritizing funding for responsible family planning, ensuring that every child is born into conditions that allow them to offset their fundamental political influence equally. Those who reject these obligations deny justice to future generations and should be held accountable for reparations fraud. How else should we address a system that makes some children billionaires while others suffer and die?
Legal Responsibility and Accountability
Do existing fraud laws address this injustice? Laws must be interpreted in ways that legitimize their authority. The legal areas needed to advance Fair Start reforms—constitutional law, fraud prevention, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental law, nationality, democracy, and civil rights—must be applied to ensure true inclusion and representation. Governments and the wealthy cannot evade liability by writing self-serving laws. Treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights must be enforced by the ultimate authority: the people.
The Power of Language
How do we drive this change? Language matters. True freedom is impossible without honest communication about how we become legally obligated to others as they enter the world. If we are to be truly self-determining, we must communicate in ways that reflect our obligations to future generations. How can we claim to uphold fundamental rights without ensuring that children are born into conditions that respect those rights? Those who have benefited from past injustices should redirect their resources to ensure fair starts in life for all children—the most just and effective solution to today’s crises.
The Myth of Philanthropy and Social Justice
Neither business nor government has historically defined social justice ideals—wealthy philanthropists have. By framing reproductive autonomy in a way that isolates women, ignores child equity, and promotes unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination. This distortion has fueled a climate crisis that has killed millions of children of color while enriching privileged families.
This false narrative removed freedom from its measurable share in democracy, converting it into wealth. The illusion of progress has upheld a system that benefits white children at the expense of marginalized communities, undermining civil rights and anti-apartheid movements. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history devalued Black lives, today’s generational wealth disparities—violating enforceable children’s rights—are now causing the deaths of millions in a climate crisis driven primarily by white wealth.
A Path Forward: Fair Start Entitlements
We can secure children’s rights through parenting delay payments, structured inversely to wealth and income. Given the systemic injustices at play, the right to access wealth for these entitlements supersedes current ownership claims—especially since much of this wealth was built through unsustainable growth and externalized costs that violated children’s birthrights.
The Broken Foundation Analogy
Imagine society as a crumbling floor. Some individuals—those born into privilege—insist on continuing as usual, benefiting from an arbitrary birth lottery while others fall through, dragging many down with them. By refusing to rebuild this foundation, these free riders endanger us all.
True self-determination requires that we ask fundamental questions about how we ensure each new generation is empowered equitably. Without a just system of creation and development, new generations are either disempowered or impose unchecked power over others—worsening environmental destruction and social inequality. If we truly seek freedom, we must start by ensuring every child is given an equal and fair start in life.
The Tell the Truth campaign calls on all who claim to improve the world to report their impacts in the context of children entering the world—relative to the rights and conditions they are promised.
Are organizations truly accounting for the life experiences of the most vulnerable—infants and the animals they will impact? When we evaluate this honestly, we see how today’s ecological and political crises arose: those who appeared to be making progress were, in reality, reinforcing inequality and environmental destruction.
Exposing the Truth
We are fact-checking organizations that claim to support justice but fail to account for birth equity and sustainability, including:
The Weeden Foundation
Mercy for Animals
Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity
Animal Rights Philanthropist Brad Goldberg
This process reveals how public interest efforts often use flawed standards that hide their role in worsening the crises they claim to solve. By failing to prioritize birth equity, they reinforce systemic injustice, climate devastation, and political inequality.
The Core Issue: A Flawed Standard Driving Global Crises
For decades, nonprofits, media, and business leaders ignored the impact of population growth and inequality, creating a false narrative of progress. Their standards for measuring impact exclude birth equity, ensuring a cycle of privilege for some while disempowering others—especially children of color. This approach has:
Undermined climate and racial justice efforts
Allowed unsustainable economic growth to masquerade as progress
Ensured wealth remains concentrated at the expense of the most vulnerable
A Necessary Shift: Fair Start as the Overriding Human Right
Instead of perpetuating injustice, we must reallocate extreme wealth to ensure every child is born into a system of reparations, with access to essential resources, education, and a sustainable environment. This includes:
Parenting delay and readiness programs
Family planning incentives inversely tied to privilege
A shift in policy to prioritize children’s rights as the foundation of justice
Holding Institutions Accountable
Fair Start activists, many of whom previously worked in leading nonprofits, are exposing how these organizations profited from systems that violated children’s rights. Legal action is underway, including climate tribunals in Africa, to challenge these harmful practices.
Take Action: Tell the Truth
We urge organizations and individuals to:
Assess and report impacts honestly—How does your work account for birth equity and the rights of future generations?
Support policy reforms that place children’s rights at the center of governance and sustainability efforts.
Admit the truth—continuing to ignore this reality does more harm than good.
Justice starts with birth equity. It’s time to tell the truth and demand real accountability.
If we do not require deriving and conditioning, we start all we do from a position of contradicting our own objective values – values like enjoying moderate temperatures and access to food – by benefiting at deadly cost to others.
If we do not admit failure, and disclose how much of the value we claimed to add to the world has been undone by political inequity, we cannot be included among those who are constituting legitimate / inclusive obligations and a just future. We are continuing a family law system of getting people to think they’re democratic ends when they’re actually being treated as economic means, then getting them to do that to the next generation. We will be decrying this politician or that leader, and dealing with the symptom and not the existential cause.
4.
If we don’t start with measurable equity for children as they enter the world, and for the animals with whom they will interact, we start with injustice that illegally shifts costs onto and punches down on the most vulnerable.
Without Fair Start reforms, we are operating in a fantasy world where our obligations to others don’t arise from the actual creation of our power relations with them. Instead, they are just dictated from abstract, top-down positions that create the sort of moral inaccuracy that caused the climate crisis.
What does that punching down look like? Coca-Cola and Fairlife LLC do it. In many more legal filings to come, Fair Start will allege they manufacture numbers in their cost/benefit analysis that discount the value of vulnerable entities, who under various laws cannot be discounted.
The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.
TAKE ACTION: FOR ANYONE CLAIMING TO DO GOOD IN THE WORLD, ASK THEM THESE QUESTIONS:
How were you accounting for your work being undone, each day, by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back, and condition it on, ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems, decades ago, to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
We think the United Nations Secretary General should admit to using the same illegal standard, a standard that obligates subjects without empowering them.
Fairness comes first. Governments and the concentrations of wealth and power that influence it have no authority or entitlement to create a failed system that kills millions of people and then use that system to measure the harm as a means of hiding their liability
The Secretary General is the highest symbol of representative government, and if he makes clear the need for Fair Start reforms, change will follow. He can avoid equitywashing, or what is really constitutive reparations fraud, and join a community of truly obligated persons trying to constitute a just future.
The Secretary General should start by admitting that he benefited from an equitywashing system that illegally violated children’s birthrights and did more harm to the UN’s values, goals, and impacts than he did to further them.
Admitting failure, and communicating an obligation to future children that overrides any obligation to governments and wealth-holders, is a linguistic act of constituting a better future.
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Urge the Secretary General to do so here: Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General: Telephone – (212) 963-7160 | Fax – (212)-963-7055.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “equity” as the “value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or one of the equal parts into which the value of a company is divided.”
But why do companies and shareholders have the authority to own equity at all? There is also – earlier on – the equity one has in one’s democracy, or the share one has in their political system that makes one relatively self-determining or free, as opposed to being determined by others.
Generally, citizens receive their shares at birth, which vest when one becomes emancipated, and can vote.
And because persons are generally considered politically equal, a rule that means each person gets one vote, one’s share of their democracy, first and foremost depends on the number of other individuals in it. That is why many thinkers have been concerned with the way growth dilutes the average person’s share, a fact hidden by formulas like representative ratios that are not based on empowering those subject to the law by treating them as equally empowered, relative to a neutral standard.
But growth does not really account for other key factors that account for the equity, or level of influence, one has over one’s political system. What if that system has created macro changes in the environment so that persons are influenced, say by heat waves, against their will? What if one has a share, but because of structural racism and birth-based economic inequality, it really is not an equal share?
Equity matters because it gives us some control over the systems in which we live, and that equity depends on the number of people with whom we share those systems, the disparities in the resources each of us may have, and things like the way we impact the physical environment around us.
If one does not have equity in the political system, it’s hard to understand how they are free, or relatively self-determining. And there are hard parameters for what the amount of equity each of us deserves.
Establishing a preemptive standard for self-determination, and political obligation
One way to consider birth/political equity, or what might also be called relative self-determination and autonomy, is to contrast it with the concept of population in the field of policy, a concept used by some to disenfranchise many.
Partha Dasgupta is a brilliant theorist who has assessed optimal world population ranges. But, how do these persons actually relate to one another? What is the quality of those relations? How do we decide?
Fair Start’s main value-add to the world is to say that we should only bring kids into certain birth and development conditions, and that if we did that, the future would be better. And when we say “should,” we are the only organization in the world that has shown the “should” overrides all else because who we should be comes before what we do.
Freedom was taken out of context, and the creation of power relations was privatized using an illegal – exclusive from self-determining political processes – standard. Challenging that standard can be controversial. In fact, one former ally organization removed content referring to this approach over traditional considerations of population, through the lens of reproductive autonomy, around the time of their receiving a significant grant.
One way to tell this story involves abortion. The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave, because she could not afford air conditioning, could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules.
So just as Dasgupta has theorized optimal numbers, we can assess optimal qualitative relations, which we would practically create (whatever we do for equity after the fact) by ensuring no child is born beneath a particular line (or threshold: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/ ). That line, in many ways, represents the border of human freedom, and we could implement it in current policy measures by preempting baby bonds and similar legislation, using AI to set the line around a host of parameters that try to zero out harm, including the harm of taking the value of autonomy out of one’s political equity.
Here are many useful measures to inform how we draw the line:
Freedom from the power of others starts with rights, and the first right is not about how we act, but rather our creation – children’s birthrights that determine whether they are empowered by the conditions in which they are born and raised, and their level of empowerment and influence relative to others in the world. Freedom is not based on an assessment using fictitious borders like lines on a globe, but rather the true border of being relatively self versus other determining, and controlling who – via creation – we actually have to share the world with. It’s about who actually has influence over you, climatologically, financially, pedagogically, etc. When you fear your fellow citizens, have real influence over your political representatives, suffer in human induced heat waves, cannot access nature, and are controlled by employers, you are not free.
That means our first obligations are not to written constitutions, governments, or the wealthy, but to the future children from whose empowerment those things derive their authority. And that starts with prioritized funding for responsible family planning, where we invest enough in each child to enable them to offset their fundamental political influence equally, relative to a neutral position. Those who reject those obligations to future children fall outside the scope of deserving legal protection because they do not offer it to others in the crucial formation of legal/power relations. They can be accused of and held accountable for reparations fraud, or denying future generations justice. How else should we frame cost/benefit systems, in the constituting of our relations with others, that make some kids billionaires and kill others?
Do current fraud laws cover that? Remember that law must be interpreted to legitimate itself, and the areas of positive law necessary to carry the Fair Start reform forward, including constitutional, fraud, consumer protection, child welfare, environmental, nationality, democracy, civil rights, and others, must be preemptively interpreted to ensure inclusion and representation. Government and the wealthy can’t avoid liability by writing its own rules in ways that determine that liability. As such, treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as others must be enforced by the ultimate source of authority, the people.
How do we make this change? Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without accurately premised communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with that obligation if we are to be self-determining. How then could we account for fundamental obligations without ensuring children are born and raised in child-rights compliant conditions? If those who owe future generations for the fraud described above are willing to tell the truth, we urge them to then shift some percentage of their resources to incentivize measurably fair starts in life for all kids as the most just and effective solution to the problems we face today.
Practically we ensure this change and those rights by entitling would-be parents to parenting delay payments, inverse to wealth and income. Given the first point above, the rights to the wealth needed for the entitlements override the rights of those currently claiming to own the wealth, in part because the owners made the wealth through unsustainable growth and loss of political equity, or the externalizing of costs that required violating children’s birthrights. There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going by relying on the arbitrary privilege of their draw in the birth lottery, while others fall through and clutch at those around them, taking many down. By delaying the replacement of the floor, these free riders threaten us all. It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how our communications account for and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. Without that those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.
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Fair Start formed because of the common use, in U.S. companies, nonprofits, media, universities, etc. of an illegal assessment and reporting standard, one designed to evade the costs of complying with the Children’s Rights Convention. The standard is used to hide climate damage liability, and is based on the same fundamentally Illegal metrics that caused the climate crisis and millions of deaths with it.
The standard – deriving from efforts to subvert civil rights movements – centers on using top-down, abstract, and arbitrary measures for social justice and public interest outcomes, rather than zeroing out harm in the actual creation – in birth and development – of power relations and political equity.
We can all change that standard, and with easy conversations that begin with questions like:
“We noticed you said this about your work and impact. We worry this relies on use of the same fundamental assessment and reporting standard that caused the climate crisis. How were you accounting for children’s rights as they entered the world when you claimed to have a beneficial impact?”
You don’t get to justice by starting at injustice.
What’s justice?
It starts with existence, with birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality – or what we understand to be the commonly accepted idea of intergenerational justice as minimum thresholds for children entering the world, though those thresholds must necessarily modified to account for the fundamental driver of the climate crisis. That driver, at based, is the failure of world leaders to elevate measurable political equity as the value from which legitimate governance and legal obligation derives.
Fair Start’s research shows that ignoring this factor meant that many charities on balance did more to enrich the families of wealthy investors/funders than accomplish their missions.
By not accounting for the fair or equitable creation of actual power relations at birth, our social justice and public interest work became performative, abstracted from reality in a way that ensured the current crises. Our peer-reviewed research also shows that all legal obligations derive from language that accurately captures our first obligations to others, and given our harming future children in the climate crisis, the corrective admissions we call for here will move our language towards mutually empowering all using measurable self-determination – not disempowering exploitation for unsustainable economic growth – as the base value.
Dignity requires orienting from truth, from reaerations, not failed forms of charity and after-the-fact justice derived from injustice.
Change can start with interim disclaimers like “our work does not account for inequity,” as well as making disclosures under the Fair Start Tell the Truth campaign contrasting omissive claims that used the status quo standards with measures of actual harm to vulnerable infants and animals.
Background
The core problem originates from the subversion of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, decades ago, when world leaders removed political equity from reproductive rights regimes, essentially ensuring “separate but equal” standards in families. Without political equity, reproductive rights regimes became fundamentally unjust and unsustainable, skewing what it means to be self versus other-determining by wrongly treating the act of having children as more personal to the parents than other-determining for the child. The regimes enabled prior generations to abuse an unlimited right to have children at cost to the rights of current and future generations, creating massive inequity and ecocidal growth.
To the extent wealthy, mostly white, families owed reparative justice, this was reparations fraud, the evasion of theheavy investments in racially equitable birth, development, and emancipatory conditions child rights required.
The lack of investment, the lack of necessitating rights compliant early childhood development conditions, directly enabled catastrophic growth and massive inequality, which measurably did more harm than subsequent philanthropic efforts, all tainted by the desire to exploit the growth, did good because it blocked life-saving funds in favor of concentrating and growing generational wealth.
Those concentrations are so extreme today that they can ensure sustained propaganda of an underpopulation “crisis” in the middle of a growth-driven climate crisis killing millions. They use an illegal standard for cost/benefit assessment and reporting that was designed to benefit the children of wealthy investor-philanthropists by arbitrarily scoring their worth higher than other children, in violation of the rights of all children. Continued use of that standard gives rise to justifiable retaliation.
Those insufficient public interest efforts would have inevitably treated children of color as deserving a fraction of the resources and political influence, and exponentially more risk, meaning that today billions of persons are at extreme risk from a climate crisis they had little to no role in causing. The impact claims this philanthropy funded were wildly off base, being undone daily by the growth driving political inequity (while enriching many of the funders).
There is no universe in which those positive impacts actually occurred – they were simply reported out of the context of negative offset, omitting the largest determinant undoing the benefits every day, making social justice a top-down and performative charade.
There is no way to assess value in the world that would not be measured relative to basic infant health and life prospects, including self-determination, because infant health and development is the objective basis through which humans experience all value, and the fundamental baseline for unifying values like health, equity, democracy, etc. It is the minimum measure, or floor, for political legitimacy. It’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so justice should focus on thresholds beneath which children should not be born.
Much of the philanthropy we see today, which avoids discussion of how inequitable growth easily reversed infant development outcomes, does more to hide this problem than fix it. In fact, funders have blocked some efforts to reform the standards, thereby minimizing climate damage evaluations, including amounts, the weight or priority of claims, universal enforceability, and priority uses of funds.
But continuing that tradition and policy of ignoring political equity in reproductive rights goes beyond racism. By hiding from policy the actual creation – at birth – of power relations, it skews how we see the world, treating the most interpersonal thing – having kids – as personal. This moves values, like nature, equity and democracy, from defining a subject-level “we” towards being minimized objects in our sentences, which has enabled things like discount rates and other top-down inaccuracies that exacerbated the climate crisis. The focus will be on emissions, ignoring how growth undoes reductions while bringing children into the world without the resources to deal with the impacts.
Against all of this, Fair Start, or equity, is the preemptive standard to assess reparations and reparations fraud because governments cannot create their own definitions of legitimacy in lieu of the objective measure for that value.
There are a few tactics we can use to change the standard:
Why? Bringing future children into the world is the largest determinant of outcomes in the long run, and because who we should be – fundamentally relating to one another based on rights and not growth commerce – comes before what we do, we can take radical action to move the incentivizing funds. Would we really think it racist to deny employment to someone because of their race, but to ignore climate risks to millions because of race-based differences in generational wealth?
Climate change and inequality are birth-interconnected crises that disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, requiring immediate, systemic action.
This is not a choice on a menu of public interest interventions. This work relates to the inescapable system of costs, benefits, and obligations we are all born into, the largest driver of outcomes, and the choice to exploit that system or legitimate it.
If we care about a particular value, like animal liberation, wouldn’t we be eager to account for a fundamental cost/benefit analysis that accounts for the harm wealth has done, and what it owes going forward?
2) Identify and make examples of high profile barriers (nonconstitutive free riders, or “noncons”), many of whom would have funded social justice decoy philanthropy.
Failure to resolve this injustice takes the debtors outside of deserving public (legal/inclusive representative) protection because their bypassing child-rights compliant positionality and formation of relations, means impossible to account for their being included in a comprehensive system of obligation/rights that actually accounts for the costs and benefits of birth positionality. They are not included in any organization of mutual obligation, and deserve as much as they necessitate for the most vulnerable.
Their wealth was fundamentally made at cost to our freedom, and the freedom of others, and there is no reason we should not take it back in order to fundamentally liberate. Their behavior, each day, is evidence of whether they ensure legitimacy, or collective freedom from power, or assume illegal entitlements to benefit at deadly cost to others while masquerading as free.
This tactic can begin by asking government officials, wealthy individuals and families, and key leaders across all sectors whether they think kids deserve a fair start on life; how they are accounting for entitlements that ensure children only being born into conditions that comply with their rights under the Children’s Convention so that we can all share a legitimate, or rights-based, political system; and to admit their entitlements derive from and are conditioned upon an obligation to measurably empower the constituents in a way that actually justifies governance.
This can include focusing on the adult children of key targets, who under the preemptive standards above would inherit the death debt of their parents.
For decades the majority of assumptions in population ethics, as a field, have been fundamentally premised on welfare improvements that the climate crisis has now reversed. There is no room for continued debate under the status quo entitlements, as the death rate climbs. Illegal power derives from the illusion of representative authority, used to to justify the exclusive right to the use of violence. But free persons will only follow rules that are fair, and the first rule accounts for our creation or positioning into the system of rules, so that we are more self-determining than determined by others.
3) The Fair Start Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign: In the campaign we take omissive impact claims that were relative to an impact and assessment standard that scored children of color as deserving less resources and more risk, and instead include the full impacts to create contrast. Language matters, because it would be physically impossible to be free without communications that capture how we fundamentally become legally obligated to others as they enter the world, and we are thus preemptively obligated to communicate in accord with shared values to be self-determining.
There is no such thing as an inclusive, representative, and hence legitimate legal system without that.
The TTT campaign allows everyone to relate their experiences to the dynamic reality of the most vulnerable, children entering the world and impacting animals – in the actual first creation of unjust power relations – rather than relating those experiences to decoy points (politicians, celebrities, advertising, etc.) created by the powerful. All legal obligation derives from language, and ours should mutually empower – not disempower – at the base.
Language that accurately reflects and forms obligations has to be accessible to the people who are engaged in the discourse – meaning it definitely is not a traditional constitution in the sense of abstract words. To exemplify this Fair Start is targeting key examples of fraud that go well beyond greenwashing, and in some cases involve criminal conduct that will be investigated before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
There is an analogy for the shift that is needed: All work is done on a floor that is falling apart, and some want to keep going while others fall through, clutching at the others around them as they fall. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask how and then assure that persons are created, developed and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
Those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
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