Professors are influential, and when they make public benefit claims, they should do some from clear baselines, and in a way that does not hide inequitable and disenfranchising growth. Not dealing with baselines is evidence to support the Fair Start thesis: That wealth obtained by violating the rights of future children now drives public interest narratives and outcomes to hide and violate those rights.
*This critique is intentionally done outside of customary back and forth academic discourse. A constitutive discourse is more public, and rather than treating values like animal protection as abstract, it assesses the value and impact claims influential people make that fundamentally benefit them, through a system of illegitimate and disentrancing growth and birth positionality, at deadly cost to others and in contravention of academic neutrality.
Professor Kristin Stilt is Faculty Director of the Animal Law & Policy Program, Harvard Law School, and in leadership at the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy.
The Program’s website states it is: “Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system.”
That statement is inaccurate. Stilt and the program use an illegal baselining and equity fraud standard that creates a fantasy world of benefit for animals that is undone, upstream, by inequitable and disenfranchising growth.
Stilt’s work on the illusory concept of “rights of nature,” the benefits of which are undone by growth every day, is exemplary of her approach. Claims of using animals benefiting animals are the worst example of the Winners Take All phenomenon because animals are the most numerous category of vulnerable entities, and because claiming our current political inequity-based system of growth can benefit them are outlandish.
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than the program ever did good. Use of that valuation and reporting model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the absolute infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Relative to that harm, on many levels, our work was insignificant and thus performative – and in terms of the underlying business model – mimics Coca-Cola’s model of discounting future lives, especially lives of color, at exponential levels.
Fair Start and Truth Alliance will be taking legal action, in addition to our petition before the United Nations, to block the use of the standard by Harvard.
Backgrounder on Equity Fraud
The fundamental unit of moral currency is the influence one has over the outcomes of their political system, or what is loosely understood as political equality / equity though common conceptions are incomplete. Other currencies, like welfare, cannot exist outside of systems of political and legal obligation or “oughtness” and the primacy of how people are positioned relative to others and Earth’s ecologies at birth.
This equity is consistent with an objective “one person, one equal and influential vote” (equal offsets of influence relative to zero) standard, empowering persons to limit the influence others have – including ecologically and socially – over them. This is also consistent with more collective systems of family planning in which no child is treated as worth more than another, an outcome ensured through a threshold or level of empowering birth and development conditions and relations outside of which no child should be born.
While world leaders after World War Two were obligated by the emerging human rights regime to use this standard as the fundamental baseline for governance, this was functionally blocked by use of the dominant “separate but equal” standard in universal reproductive rights regimes – in the birth and development-based creation of actual power relations. This system reversed the concept of freedom by treating the act of having children as more self-determinative of the parent than other-determinative of the children and the communities they would comprise – determining political equity for all in the process.
This physically disembedded persons from any effective role in their political systems. It also allowed those in power, both with political authority and entitlements to wealth defended by that authority, to avoid having to legitimate their power by actually, and measurably empowering those subject to it. Rather than seeing the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, nations treated symbolic or representative instruments like treaties and constitutions as themselves authoritative.
While civil rights movements made headway in areas like housing, employment, and education, the notion of autonomy without equity amounted to the privatization of the creation of power relations, and the totally arbitrary basis for the concentration of extreme levels of generational white wealth – over the span of decades – that drives many of the outcomes we see today. That wealth never had to pay the costs of legitimacy – and the full impacts are now being revealed.
Within less than a few generations the regime caused unsustainable growth, vast political, social, and ecological inequity, the destruction of world ecologies, and the decline of democracy. This inequitable and disenfranchising growth breached political, ecological and social thresholds for objective values we all share like comfortable temperatures, equality of opportunity,
Public interest work and outcomes during these decades and into today have generally oriented from arbitrary, ever-changing and illegal (both because they disenfranchise and otherwise harm children, relative to a host of accepted legal standards usually only applied to existing rather than future children) baselines that violate the “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard. High levels of climate emissions championed by “environmental” organizations that enrich some at deadly cost to others, still permitted and defended by coercive authority of nations, are an example.
Use of these baselines represents an undemocratic, diluted and commercial form of freedom, rather than values consistent with political freedom, that is more akin to “free market” choice” of a shopping mall more than the political influence of a functional town hall.
Public interest interventions to challenge greenwashing and humanewashing have failed because they themselves did not account for the massively countervailing impacts of growth on the interventions themselves – growth that for instance has created more climate emissions than the interventions removed, while bringing children into the world without the resources or political influence to deal with them.
And yet accounting for growth by itself would not account for the inequity of the relations formed by that growth.cIt would not account for how some benefit at deadly cost to others based simply on their birth and developmental positionality, with benefits defended by nations on the false premise that all are empowered equally at birth. One of the false assumptions at work was that some children were magically born poor and others rich, instead of the reality of a policy choice to elevate family autonomy (and not in the sense of being free of the climate crisis, but free in a “free market” sense) over family equity and political legitimacy.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, living in poverty, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. They are subject to top-down abstract rules, not rules derived from the inclusive creation of power relations by those subject to them.
Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth – like Tim Midura – have helped conceal this with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
For example, Fair Start activists were funded by such funders in their work with prior organizations, and prominent activists turned business owners today benefit from having used assessment and reporting models that each year allowed them to claim progress for vulnerable entities – like animals – that was easily being undone on exponential levels by birth-inequity based growth. The hallmark of equity fraud involves the fraudster omitting from evaluation and reporting the largest driver of the relevant outcome – the birth-based creation of power relations – in order to exploit that process.
The solution?
The FalseClaimsChecker.org accounts for this minimum necessary condition of political equity by replacing those assumptions – and the illegal baselining – with a base assumption that political authority and the entitlement to wealth it can generate must be derived from a “one person, one equal and influential vote” / “no child is worth more than another standard,” thus situating those making the value assessments and impact reporting themselves as part of, or outside of, a discourse legitimacy moving towards a just future. This accounts, at a most fundamental level – at a constitutional or basic system of obligation level, for the driver of the polycrisis.
This allows us to begin to see the creation of actual (relative to the legal baseline) empowering relations as the source of political authority, and treat how each person assesses value and report impacts to determine the alternative baseline from which they proceed.
These claims situate them in their political system, and allow us to assess how they arbitrarily benefit from, or suffer the costs, of the “separate but equal” standard.
When someone makes a value assessment and impact claim, we should ask: Relative to what?
You will find rampant use of shifting baseline – moving goalposts – that allow claimants to appear to create value and beneficial impact with no functional protections for the most vulnerable, infants and animals, as the climate crisis, autocracy, and massive inequity worsens. That means the impact is being undone relative to the minimum legally required threshold, or an illegal baseline – illegal because it does not account for legitimacy, or the need to measurably empower those subject to the legal system, including ensuring minimum levels of health-as-enfranchisement for all infants.
This is called growthwashing, or more accurately equitywashing. Why the latter? Because to treat humans quantitatively as numbers is less accurate than to see them as living in complex qualitative relations, and because past certain ecological, social, and political thresholds, growth has devastating nonlinear impacts – with climate emissions triggering things like ecological feedback loops.
We can use these claims to demonstrate the problem, that the values and impact they claimed would have been undone relative to the legal / preemptive as opposed to arbitrary baselines, and encourage reforms towards the legal baseline and their becoming part of an empowering system of truly self–determining persons by realigning fundamental authority and entitlements around a system of fair birth positionality, consistent with the values that they are signaling in their claims This is a state of autonomy through political equity by rearranging constitutional entitlements, sufficient to ensure Dasgupta’s optimality, but in the qualitative sense of empowering relations.
Given that few if any use the legal “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, this exercise generally entails their having to admit benefiting from arbitrary birth and developmental positionality (national, racial, intergenerational, etc.) at deadly cost to others, and having disparate influence over others defended by unlegitimated authority, and threat of coercion, of the state.
We admit: Being part of a system of birth inequity that treats children of color as deserving fewer resources and influence, including omitting this as a countervailing factor in our value assessments and impact reporting, by overshooting ecological, political and social thresholds does more harm to our values than we do to further them.
This “Tell the Truth” discourse creates an opportunity for permanent resistance to oppression because it protects, through the use of an intergenerational justice threshold, the most vulnerable, Infants and animals and identifies those who reject that protection, and systems of mutual self-determination with it.
See the fallacious claims by prominent food entrepreneur Paul Shapiro, who ironically started his work as an animal rights activist climbing to a level of national influence on a false advertising campaign against egg producers for humane washing, His claims to have saved animals while explicitly refusing to back equity reforms or qualify his claims, make them inaccurate and out of context because he omits how he chose underlying policies that did vastly more harm to animals than he did good. His omission enables him to exploit financial systems – as lead at a profitable food company with military contracts – that in turn growth exploit animals and elevate his voice above those pursuing on-balance reforms.
Initial attempts, in other scenarios, by Fair Start Movement and Truth Alliance advocates to implement this preemption were met with sabotage by public interest entities hiding liability for decades of inaccurate claims, usually for micro interventions undone – relative to a true system of empowerment – by macro forces that enriched those involved, and their funders, at deadly cost to others.
As a practical matter one can challenge illegal baselining, or political equity and impact fraud, using inexpensive and widely available consumer protection and unfair competition laws to enjoin public and private business valuation, and impact reporting, that don’t comply with the minimum baseline of inclusive legitimacy.
Given that political authority, including to entitle wealth, derives from having to empower those subject to the authority, these cases get to the ultimate question of political freedom: Are we obligated to a political system that does not empower us? And what are the limits of self-defense against such a system?
After 1948 and the inception of universal human rights that limited national authority, nations were obligated to derive their authority and any entitlements protected under it from the equitable empowerment of their subjects. This requirement is widely reflected in the Bill of Human Rights instruments and their references to the right to self-determination – and one person, one equal and influential vote. This requirement should have created an interpretation of the collective pronoun that premises those documents, like the reference to “we the people,” treating a level of influence in one’s political system (“oughtness” or an “influl” that precedes a “util”) as a fundamental currency that precedes utility and welfare.
The textual basis for this interpretive rule is clear – these pronouns are the linguistic premise of the language that follows. Such a currency and universal linguistic rule of interpretation would have entailed a harsh principle: Each person in a system of law and obligation would be owed the level of public protection, or oughtness, they would account to the most vulnerable: Infants, and the animals whom the infants would impact. The value of self, versus other, determination would require it. Again, a racist system of self-determination blocked this change.
Regardless, the principle creates a textual basis to interpret law as requiring the inclusion and empowerment of those subject to it, consistent with standards for intergenerational justice, and ensuring equal offsets of influence relative to a zero baseline and the idea that no child is worth more than another. At a policy level this would have required a fundable, minimum threshold of empowerment beneath which no child should be born, with future children holding entitlements sufficient to create collective family planning systems based on readiness, delay, and the equitable distribution of levels of influence among children. The threshold ensures equal offsets relative to zero, or the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from things like a climate crisis, autocracy, deadly inequity, etc.
Put simply:
If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims has been using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
Those willing to pay the costs of a legitimate political system that avoids arbitrary benefits of birth positionality and conditions authority on empowerment could never compete against those willing to exploit others, and they need not given that any authority to govern or assign wealth derives from first empowering those subject to these things. The other solution to inequity-gained wealth backed by state violence – as the oppression it is – is to treat that violence as illegitimate and triggering the right to self-determinative self-defense against “trolley targets” who benefit themselves at deadly cost to others.
It’s this truthful and obligation-creating discourse, a Tell the Truth campaign, that is most preemptive and legally authoritative over all conflicting obligations, including treaties and constitutions.
Take action: Urge her here to tell the truth.