Singer prioritizes food reforms as a form of animals rights and liberation. However, Singer is part of a larger, broken and divisive system of birth privilege that was never equitable or sustainable – and had no protections for animals.
The full title of his famed 1975 book, Animal Liberation, is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. His failure to promote an “our” consistent with animal liberation – ensuring entitlements first drive smaller and more equitable and empathetic human communities – vastly undid his work and masked the key drivers of the climate and inequity crises killing millions today.
Humans are animals, so inclusive animal personhood just means functional human rights – something Singer undercuts.
Fact: Not ensuring all children a fair start in life, as the first and overriding human right, does more harm to animals than Singer’s work on food reform does good – by far. The inequity and growth he ignores causes more suffering and death to animals, and humans, than vegan food reforms save.
And it’s only getting worse as the climate crisis sets in. Don’t get scammed. Ensuring children a fair start is the most effective way to free children, animals and the rest of us. Instead of backing justice, Singer benefits at deadly cost to others by hiding how his positionality harms humans and nonhumans – allowing him to appear as an altruistic savior when in fact the wealth he guides in the effective altruism movement was made at deadly cost to the animals he claims to value, and in contravention of the utility he uses as a base metric.
What are real animal rights?
Again, humans are animals. Animal rights and law focuses on nonhumans because of their unique vulnerability. Why then not focus on infants and animals, and the creation of fundamental power relations? Those like Singer and others do not because that level of comprehensive vision involves equity, race, democracy, and other factors that require true tradeoffs against one’s positionality. Effective animal rights is expensive.
It’s easier to ignore all of that.
True animal rights and law focuses on the creation of power relations, and limiting capacity to harm others – the capacity that is the core of the Anthropocene and the antithesis of animal rights.
Singer uses the same legal approach to intergenerational justice as Exxon. He has for decades, and now continues, to conflate bodily autonomy with the capacity to harm others, free riding on the collective action problem of racial, generational, national, etc. birth positionality, using fraudulent omissions and benefitting from legal systems that oblige others without empowering them.
How is that animal liberation? How is it not racist to refuse children of color a fair start in life? Would Singer not be eager to ensure the fertility delay and readiness reparations discussed below because (among serving other values), they compensate for the absence of animal rights in human reproductive rights regimes, and evade harm to animals in the future?
He (and others, like Heather Gerken, who oversees animal law programming at Yale Law School) should admit they were wrong to not have done this before, and aid in moving the deadly wealth their work mis-entitled – much of it sitting with effective altruism funders – to now save human and nonhuman lives via fertility delay and readiness reparations. We can also make legitimate claims against the privileges of his children, whom he benefited through a performative form of animal liberation at horrific cost to other children.
The animal rights movements has been like a garden club celebrating nature on a micro level, while refusing to intervene in the clear cutting of the forests around the club, often because they benefited from their own silence. That happens enough and ecological catastrophe sets in, while effective altruism and other offshoots now use wealth made at cost to the professed values to drown out black and other more vulnerable voices demanding effective reforms, like treating black birth equity as the overriding human right. Animal rights advocates and lawyers often choose to continue the charade because their illusory audience and impacts seem better than not talking about these things, even if the underlying system undoes them. A better approach would be to choose a system that does not undo the work.
Who is responsible for the climate crisis?
Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals – media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. – to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides liability. The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few.
Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.
Singer’s beneficial impact is being undone as children enter the world without the resources their rights require, resources that would empower children to constitute – to be included – in legitimate political systems of self-determining peoples. Singer instead starts his proposed reforms by ensuring the capacity of the powerful to punch down and exploit the vulnerable, and in a way that benefits a few at cost to many. This burdens the children of wealthy families with increasing death debt – a debt which must be paid at some point, and saddles businesses with billions of dollars in increased climate costs.
Singer’s life, and the life of his kids – these are worth no more than other lives.
The fix?
Singer could simply support Fair Start lead Esther Afolaranmi and her efforts before the United Nations to legitimate political systems by ensuring accurate and equitable climate reparations for the harm done. These reparations ensure debt/savings accounting for children as they enter the world. It is impossible to choose who has influence over you, to be truly free, without this reform in how we communicate, and act. 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 government and the wealthy.
“What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?”
Martin Luther King
Singer’s work, which does not benefit nonhumans on balance because it ignores the necessary family reforms, replicates the historic undercutting of the civil rights movement by white, wealthy entities – entities that had no intention of allowing equity by ensuring birth, developmental, and emancipatory equity.
We can do better.
Fair Start reforms and debt/savings birth accounts mean no child’s life will be made worth more than the life of another. This reform targets the fraud wealthy white families and fake charities in polluting nations have been using for decades to hide liability for the climate crisis.
These families and their concentrations of wealth and power have not created value. Instead they first used poor family planning to create their own audiences and artificial demand by ensuring dismal standards for child development and education, treating people as economic inputs rather than citizens while benefitting from the appearance of inclusive and functional democracies.
This is fraud, falsely claiming entitlements, and hiding the larger impacts, in a way that benefits some at deadly cost to others. You can spot this nonsense when anyone siloes off social justice from the creation at birth of actual power relations, and thus evades the need to include others as ends – and not means – to accurately determine truth and value.
TAKE ACTION: Urge Singer – here – to admit these truths, and to say whether or not he backs a political system that moves towards equity and self-determination for all, a system where all entitlements derive from including and empowering others? Will be back the idea of an overriding human right to share equity, or continue to just elevate his positionality in a fundamentally illegal system rather than legitimating it?
You can also find other icons, quote them in a way that identifies the values they seem to want to further, and then show how their ignoring share inequity in democracy as children enter the world does more harm to their values than they do good.
Ask them: How do you account for children entering the world on what you value, and claim to do? How do you ensure self-determination for all? You are looking for sustainability, or impact, fraud.
You can also take legal action. States attorneys generals are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.
In the core sustainability scam that drove the crises, many charities focused on sensational, micro-level campaigns while quietly undoing beneficial impacts with macro-level and inequitable family policies that enriched management as well as those funding the entities. You can urge your attorney generals to correctly account for the harms, and ensure preemptive justice for the most harmed.
