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.
Legitimacy requires accounting for vulnerable children entering the world in conditions that do not fulfill their rights, and at levels that degraded their environment and disenfranchised them politically, as a factor impacting our claims. Was that factor undoing the work we were doing, and maybe even doing more harm to our missions than we were doing good, especially because the status quo scored children of color as deserving substantially fewer resources and political influence, and exponentially more risk that is now causing them to die in the climate crisis?
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 the heavy 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.
We know that this did more harm than good because evading children’s interests brought them into conditions that not only violated their rights, but thereby degraded – through things like extreme heat – the capacity of their ecologies to support what all children need. That inequitable growth simultaneously disenfranchised the average voter, seeding vast political inequity and blocking their ability to halt what was unfolding.
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.
For example, funders claiming to protect biodiversity from growth, or animals under the legal system, have siloed the issues away from birth equity in ways that benefited them, and their families, at cost to the values they claimed to be furthering. They have avoided covering costs at the level of subject-equity, and got the benefit of seeming to be saviors at a charade-object level, through charities that focused downstream on issues of biodiversity and animal welfare.
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:
1) Elevate reparations to the highest level of measurable level of self-determination, and treat them owed and payable to would-be parents to bend down the arc of growth and consumption towards child-rights compliant families that are smaller, equitable and democratic. Every corporation, nonprofits included, may be obligated to read their current civil rights obligations as preemptively directed by that standard. Fair Start is urging the United Nations Human Rights Committee and other human rights bodies to admit fundamental failure and to recognize an overriding and fundable right to a fair start in life for all children as the solution. This standard overrides national authority to define citizenship and other designations of political membership.
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.
These are some of the people who are most harmed.
These are some of the people who most benefited.
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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