Singer fails because he does not push for what true animal liberation, the title of his famous book, requires: Restoration of the nonhuman world through family planning entitlements. Had he done so during the climate-crucial decades in which could have, he might have helped mitigate the climate crisis, the greatest threat to nonhumans.
His mistake is what we might call the constitutive fallacy. The fallacy means Singer never accounts for the actual relations between humans and nonhumans (a random person abusing their companion animal, growth driving extinction, utility-based consumerism demeaning the nonhuman world more generally, etc.) because he never accounts for the creation of those relations.
But the fallacy does something more insidious. It robs us of our freedom, or relative self-determination.
When we create people, we are also creating the fundamental power relations between them, and between them and their otherwise nonhuman ecologies, and in a way that precedes written constitutions or other binding sets of rules. If we want justice, bottom-up in the style of true democracy, just creation must come first. Imagine this process as a sort of “first election” – the one that means we all consent to be a “we” then capable of doing things like electing officials. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals.
It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health. Singer might counter that “ought to imply can” and effective family reforms were not politically feasible. But as discussed below, incentives/entitlements work where coercion does not, but were never promoted by people like Singer, even when the wealth the absence of these incentives created was shuttling into the hands of a few during the critical decades we had to evade the worst of the crisis.
TAKE ACTION: Find and urge Singer to admit the overall impact of the changes he promoted could not have, and did not, liberate animals.
Many promote his dietary focus because they are invested in plant-based companies, companies that embrace growth even though it does more harm to humans and nonhumans than these companies do good. His mistakes here, turning animal liberation into mass consumerism, bleed into his work on Effective Altruism, risking millions of lives with misleading information about entitlements and what has impact. His work siloed off animals from social justice, and the natural alignment we find there.
Cheerful African Ethnicity Infant Carrying Healthy Water for a dehydration concept
He should embrace true animal liberation, and not mislead as to what that means. We don’t liberate animals by humanizing the world.
Solution:
Ask anyone – like Singer – claiming to promote certain values about how their approach to families and child welfare undid and is undoing the values they otherwise promote. Exploiting children to ensure economic growth is the system we are all used to and largely ignore. We do this, rather than requiring equitable investments in their birth and development conditions. That move has now reversed most of the progress in fighting the climate crisis, and inequity. That fundamental injustice, which made a small percentage of mostly white men wealthy by violating human rights, will kill millions.
In the climate crisis reparations in the form of family planning entitlements save lives and restore biodiversity. They return wealth to those who deserve it. We can leave wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, and millions will die, or we can pay it back to the future generations – those on which its true costs are being imposed.
Eloísa Trinidad is Executive Director of Chilis on Wheels and a well known liberation activist, drawing all forms of liberation into one form of activism that furthers the interests of all vulnerable entities.
Listen to her vision and methods here:
People can follow Eloisa and connect with her here:
Eloisa is working on food justice, among other things.
TAKE ACTION:
The USDA is inviting public comments from US-based organizations, schools, and individuals on its once-every-five-years proposed revisions to the child nutrition meal patterns. There is a real opportunity for these new rules and regulations to facilitate more nutritious, plant-forward, and culturally appropriate menus. We know this is your goal, so I am providing a resource to help you share your position with USDA by its May 10 deadline for public comments.
The Healthy Future Students and Earth Coalition has created an extensive set of template comments for allied organizations centered on how the updated child nutrition meal patterns can support plant-forward menus and plant-based, climate-friendly, and culturally appropriate options. Additionally, we created a shorter template and toolkit geared toward parents and students.
There are two major ways you can help:
Include some or all of the asks in our template comment to USDA in your organization’s comments by May 10. The top of the template includes instructions for how to submit your comment.
If you have students or caregivers in your network, share the caregiver/student toolkit with your network as soon as possible. The toolkit includes a sample outreach email and social media posts. Personal stories and challenges accessing healthy food are of the utmost importance when submitting comments.
We greatly appreciate your partnership with these two actions. Additionally, please let us know if there is anything our coalition can do to support your efforts around the meal patterns or school food advocacy more broadly.
Please feel free to share this email with partners, organizations, groups, and individuals in your state and across the country.
When we talk about freedom we are really concerned with relative self-determination (some level of capacity to consent, or level of choice), which would logically start with an account of our deontological population ethics – including egalitarian thresholds for entry into the world that free us from others – because all systems derive from some level of obligation. The climate crisis has taught us that the borders of human power are not lines on a map, but the creation of humans into the nonhuman world. We would thus have to start with a creation norm, or first and overriding principle / universal family planning policy, that looks to comprise systems of governance where populationgrowth is directly inverse to absolute self-determination. This would look like systems akin to 0123…0, with point zero being the absence of power (nonpolity or nature), self-determination being relative to point zero, and offset equally as new persons enter, up until division or subdivision of the system is required.
That norm would precede and thus override all competing norms and rights, including property rights that would otherwise block the redistribution of wealth and resources children need to be empowered enough to offset others equally over the phase in which they enter our systems.
Even if we reject the demanding norm above we can ask anyone making any sort of claim what minimum levels of: 1) welfare, 2) equality of equality of opportunity, 3) ecological biodiversity and health, 4) ability to meaningfully impact the rules under which one must live, and of 5) efficiency in terms of ensuring high levels of personal development, they would require for each child born.
Most will give answers that show they have little, if any conception, of ensuring any levels for any child. After all, having kids is private stuff – the business of would-be parents.
This is not about traditional notions of population as counting people, but power relations created between people – and with their ecologies – as they are born, and a unity of value (one that far exceeds what Ronald Dworkin saw) that is within reach during this process.
Put another way, try to think, say, or do anything that does not derive from some set of theoretical or actual power relations, relations that would have had to derive from whatever norm created the people between whom those relations exist. Not possible. So we always start everything with an ecosocial fair start in life – and the ecocentrism of starting at zero – in order to maintain the capacity to consent to the power of others. Older theories of justice missed this, never dealing with actual relations because they ignored the creation of those relations. Without this account we cannot be free because we cannot account for our obligations to others, and their obligations to us. Those ignoring or blocking this account inevitably contradict the values they exhibit in their own lives, refusing them to others. They are preconstitutional and a threat to freedom, and can be targeted – as described in this Newsweek writing – as such.
That right to a fair start precedes and overrides all others because we have to first empower each new person equally, and from the time that it was feasible to do this – around the middle of the Twentieth Century – it should have been the baseline for assessing all costs and benefits. The right comes before nations can assign property rights that otherwise derogate from fairness.
Unless someone is willing to claim that people should not be empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live, then they must admit they made a critical mistake by not using that baseline (seeing creation of persons as the first human border of human power and freedom, or compliance with the Children’s Convention that ensures minimum levels of welfare, equity, biodiversity through climate restoration, the efficiency of maximizing each person’s potential, and participatory democracy) in the past, a mistake that harmed many.
This is not altruism. Free people will want the capacity to consent, as equals, to the influence others would have over them – including incoming citizens. They will not submit to sharing democracy with those not prepared by the conditions of their birth and development for self-rule.
In practice this looks like redistributing wealth as climate reparations to pay young women to collectively plan their children with delay and smaller families, with that being done as the praxis of the first and overriding human right as recognized by the United Nations. It would look like avoiding babies dying in the workers’ bathrooms at U.S. slaughterhouses. Wealth at the top was built at cost to freedom by using ecosocially unsustainable family policies that for decades slowly converted town halls to shopping malls via growth and a lack of investment in kids. Those at the top owe the difference in value, with that amount to be used to reverse the process and create natural participatory democracies in the future, the most effective way to protect the most vulnerable.
Many concentrations of wealth and power fund distracting nonprofits that appear to do good work but are actually blocking effective reforms that challenge the power structure. There is an easy way to test these nonprofits – do they advocate for using the Convention, climate restoration, birth equity etc. as a family planning standard? I have seen funders choose organizations that refused to do this, and have been wasting millions of dollars letting growth undo their own work, rather than fund a mostly-volunteer organization whose work would benefit billions of people, but which threatens the growth funders want and rely upon.
I have sat with the heads of foundations (the wealth of which was built by externalizing ecosocial costs on others) who were passing control – in nepotistic moves – to their own children, and who would rather see the missions of the foundations fail than turn to Fair Start reforms.
Free people will fight for a restored and democratic future, and against the shill organizations and those funders behind them that hide this truth about the baseline for costs and benefits, as well as the white supremacy that the hiding – including refusing to ensure birth equity – entails. To think that one is obligated to follow the law when they were created for shopping malls (and media covered falling fertility rates shows that we all were created as such) rather than town halls is called the “constitutive fallacy” – basing one’s obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower people without disempowering others, and in an objective and measurable way. The acts of mass violence we see today could very well be driven by this disempowerment, and ending them may require the sort of empowerment family reforms can ensure.
Under this new approach Congress would have no authority to reject your legislation, or better yet to reject a more radical version of it that ensures true equity, not nominal equality. This is an argument that transcends reliance on written constitutions or even international law.
This is the argument: Nations are not magically constituted in the past, but either constituting inclusive democracies or not, depending on the laws and policies that surround having children. If those laws and policies ensure minimum levels of welfare in the birth and development, at least begin to ensure equality of opportunity, restore the climate and biodiversity using ecocentric approaches, and treat the addition of each new person to our nation as inverse to the absolute self-determination of people already here, those laws and policies are constituting legitimate societies.
If we wish to maximize relative self-determination, where else would we find that value but family reforms? There is nowhere else.
An easy proxy for all of this might be the Children’s Rights Convention – and pegging family planning to it to ensure birth and development conditions consistent with it. We can also think of it in terms of a new vision of Roe v. Wade.
If nations do not do this, they are constituting something other than democracy.
This new model – where we take human rights and their ability to limit governmental authority – could present a difficult choice. It will mean abandoning the privacy model of family planning based on the Cairo Consensus as a failure that helped ensure the climate crisis and massive inequity, though it was the model we all relied upon. And it’s a pro-growth model many of your wealthiest funders made a lot of money on.
The alternative would be for everyday citizens, like the our members, to simply wait for Congress to mitigate the climate crisis, and protect and ensure the development of the children who will comprise our future, while watching Congress operate in total attenuation from its constituents, and amid widening inequity that empowers some at cost to others.
Free people would not be willing to do that. We are not willing to do that.
Thinking along these lines might ensure a fuller form of DEIJ, not just for us but for the majority of persons (human and nonhuman) – those who will live in the future. One way to bring this all into action would be by focusing funding on bottom up grassroots movements that are decentralized and operate around a central organizing principle of maximizing capacity for consent by all, putting freedom over property.
TAKE ACTION: The most effective change we can make involves family reforms. Take an action now.
Humans are adept at fooling themselves, whether thinking the Earth is flat, or that our ecosystems can absorb limitless amounts of pollution – like climate emissions – before failing. Many might believe they are not racist, but when put to an empirical test, show massive racial bias.
It’s certainly possible that humans could have imagined and theorized concepts like justice, democracy, freedom and liberty without positioning themselves to actually experience those things. The luminary John Rawls is well known for characterizing justice as fairness, and if the first rule in any set of rules is that which accounts for our creation and existence, then for justice – and the freedom he saw as contingent upon that – to exist our creation should be fair. But that’s never been the case, with some children being born into poverty while others are born with million-dollar trust funds, and generations of past inflicting their destruction of the environment – including our climate – on future generations.
Growth limits each person’s time at the podium of democracy.
If government derives from the people, then we have to consent to the power each one of us does and could exercise over one another. And that requires changing the way we plan families to make it more just, at the very least recognizing that children have more at stake in the process of creation that their parents, and using things like the Children’s Convention as a standard for family planning. That move would allow us more consent to each other’s power – ecologically – by restoring nature as a buffer that stops companies like Exxon from threatening us though the climate crisis, and socially by empowering people in a democratic way and with equal opportunities in life.
This leads to an impossibility theorem: If we reject fairness in creation, we either have to 1) reject the idea that government and the obligation to follow the law flows from people as the ultimate authority, 2) we have to reject the idea that people should be politically equal, e.g. have equal time at the podium, 3) we have to reject the idea that people should be empowered in order to make government legitimate, or 4) we have to define power in strange ways that quickly begin to exclude things like climate emissions and bad parenting, and make no sense. “Power” means any form of human influence, which means national borders on a map are nonsense, and the true border of power/consent is the norm that accounts for our creation.
Truly free people will ensure they can choose – through Fair Start – who has power over them. Conversely, preconstitutional people, or precons, will block this process. Targeting them to make public examples of their harming others may be the most effective way to change the direction of our future.
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.
Who we should be, in terms of the norms that create and develop us, precede and justify what we do. And not accounting for this fact, in all we do, leads to misleading results and a fantasy world of progress that does not exist. And yet many funders have pushed ineffective and distracting projects because those projects do not threaten the fundamental power structure, and its role in degrading democracy.
We can change this paradigm by recognizing that the extreme concentrations of wealth built today were created by not having to comply with the expensive and growth-reducing ecosocial requirements of the Convention, and by redistributing that wealth in the form of family planning reparations and entitlements that move the world towards the restored climates and natural democracies required by human rights.
Free people will condition their obligation to follow the law and respect property rights on this change, and on being democratically empowered using a simple inversion test, because only these changes ensure they will not be impacted by others – through even subtle things like the climate crisis and bad parenting – against their will. The obligation to follow the law stems from systems being fair and free, and systems start with family policy.
Peter Singer is regarded by many as a founder of contemporary animal rights, largely based on his book Animal Liberation. But few realize that he has also taken public and influential stances on family and population policies, in this 2018 public lecture, for example. He avoids making concrete conclusions about population policies in this lecture and elsewhere,
Nowhere has he advocated for effective interventions – like overriding property rights to wealth in order to fund Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements – and other peremptory norm measures would have bent the arc of unsustainable growth downwards towards what many see as optimal world population ranges. Those ranges, like all population matters, actually involve people – and the fundamental creation of power relations between them. And power and population ethics begin with human rights, the objective frame that after WW2 should cabin utility, Effective Altruism, and all other lesser and more subjective forms of policy Singer normally employs.
How is animal liberation possible in the face of a wave of human population growth causing massive extinction? How is promoting veganism for what is effectively a small percentage of a growing human population that mostly exploits, tortures, and kills nonhumans true animal rights? How does that growth further human rights when the growth enriched relatively few people, at cost to equality and the political stability it brings?
Singer’s work is based on an error called the constitutive fallacy, or 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 nonhumans. Who we are might be different mixes of nurture, or nature, or influential power relations, but all flow (and among self-determining peoples should flow) from our creation. We cannot separate values like nature and equity from who we are and our power relations with others, which stem from our creation.
For example, our economic birth position mostly determines whether we are rich or poor as adults. Another example would be that it is impossible to ensure the empathy people need to treat nonhumans well without addressing the conditions in which people are born and develop because empathy largely depends on years zero to three in childhood maturation.
Another example would be that if we assume we ought to treat nonumans well, we would have to structure an effective legal system that would obligate that. But because there is such massive attenuation (caused by the growth that is eradicating the nonhuman world) between people and their representatives, we cannot do this. Another example would be world leaders attempting to determine the costs and benefits associated with Anthropocentric environmental baselines like the Paris Agreement, a mistake that only accelerated ecocide, rather than using an organic baseline like beingrelatively self-determining people and the conditioning of wealth on equitable family planning investments that make that possible. (This last example gels with the constitutive fallacy as political adherence to national constitutions, or even international law, as basic and overriding norms, as opposed to adherence the obviously antecedent and more basic family planning norms that create us, the people.)
In other words, in Singer’s prescriptions for animal liberation come from outside of who people ought to actually be, in terms of the creation of the fundamental power relations that define them.
Some have argued that it’s unfair to say that Singer’s population comments (or lack of comments) have “undone” his work for animals, given that virtually no one knows what his views on population are. Per this argument, there are probably zero policy-makers who’ve done anything based on Singer’s population views. Perhaps few or none have decided to procreate or not procreate based on Singer’s silence on the issue.
This response treats population as something, an issue, that we can separate from what we do. But how can we do anything, or suggest that others should do something, without first determining the acceptable power relations that determine who we are, and should be? We cannot separate what we narrowly think of as population – or who we are – from what we do. The former is always a factor and precedes the latter.
Singer’s claim that “we should help animals by not eating them” is wrong on its face because the “we” in his claim – the fundamental creation of power relations that permit growth, relations he accepts – does more harm to animals than changing diets does good. That’s the constitutive fallacy at play. And that mistake – not requiring things like the Children’s Convention standard in family planning policies to improve those relations, which would physically constitute just communities – does more than just harm animals. It fundamentally permits anthropocentric changes that cause irrefutable harm to all, against an absolute standard like infant health.
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 communities, massive disparities of wealth, etc.) others have over them, and by all means effective. They will condition their obligation to follow the law on their actually being empowered, assessed via a simple test, in functional democracies.
Singer never seriously addresses this issue, through redistributive birth entitlements that empower us in terms of who we are before turning to what we should do, for example. That mistake of ignoring the primacy of who we should be (and the best answer is fair), given his position of influence and the crucial time for mitigating the climate crisis in which he was working, harmed future generations.
And as a result his work does not effectively protect nonhumans, promote equity, restore democracy, or even protect considered parental desire. An alternative approach which does not make the error would value each person born, and the value of self-determination, above the growth Singer never seriously opposed.
Is this type of fairness a threat to the ongoing processes of decolonization. antiracism, and other forms of anti-oppression? Eliminating the massive birth inequity caused by colonization – the one that disempowers the majority of people, those who will live in the future – and doing so while restoring nonhuman autonomy is the height of anti-oppression. Though admittedly, all of this argument flows from Eurocentric framing and should also be done from more indigenous frames.
It would treat ensuring minimum levels of welfare, and freedom, as more important than total welfare indictors like gross domestic product. It would elevate ethics in the creation of people – and the conditioning of political obligation on family planning policies that ensure people will matter – over the constitutions and governments whose authority to assign property and other rights derive from such people, again something Singer never considered.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer to #tellthetruth and admit that his family and population ethics undid his animal liberation ethics. Urge him to support a pivot from parent-centric family planning to child-centric planning. He should admit that before we can engage in Effective Altruism we are politically obligated to constitute just communities – and total liberation – through socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms like Fair Start.
Without this, his work could in the end do more to protect concentrations of wealth and power than nonhumans.
He should not allow his work on animal ethics to mislead people from the truth that we are committing ecocide through poor family planning, and should support paying back the costs to freedom that population growth has imposed on future generations. Also urge him to lead by example and treat property claims – like the extreme wealth he helped create in the plant-based industry – as conditional on our fulfilling every child’s right to a fair start in life.That wealth, and the power disparity it represents, is defended by the threat of state violence, not the true justification possible amid fair power relations.
