Peter Singer has for decades made broad claims about creating beneficial impacts for animals and some of the most vulnerable human communities in the world.
His advocacy has steered billions into charities that make equally broad impact claims.
Funders like Jim Greenbaum of the Greenbaum Foundation, as well as direct action advocates like Wayne Hsuing, have backed the “effective altruism” approach Singer advocates.
Singer’s approach has been consistent with that of those managing large networks of funders claiming broad beneficial impacts on animals, like Shannon Campion of Senterra Funders, which routinely makes specific claims about the significant impact they have protecting animals.
The facts:
Extreme Heat Is Rising Faster for Black Americans, and Researchers Say the Gap Is Growing
How did this happen?
Public interest advocates like Singer have for decades created fantasy worlds of progress that have hidden the growing political, social, and ecological costs of the polycrisis. Public interest work, exemplified by the work of Singer, enabled massive power disparities that now threaten democracy.
These advocates make claims out of context, moving the goalposts from objective metrics to ensure they can claim progress. The models used assume the legitimacy of a random birth lottery, one that uses growth to disenfranchise.
Singer and others have engaged in illegal discounting, assuming children deserve what they are born with rather than what their rights and constitutional equity require, and legitimacywashing, routinely omitting from their valuation and impact reporting countervailing information, including the way inequitable and disenfranchising growth has been undoing the claimed benefits.
Relative to that growth and its impact on the environment and child equity, Singer and the others have had a negligible beneficial impact on animals. Why focus on animals? The claims, relative to growth, are the most falsifiable, and many Fair Start activists started in animal protection efforts in the United States and witnessed the misconduct there.
Fair Start activists have interacted with each of the claimants and witnessed the systematic omissions.
They witnessed, and researched back, decades of out-of-context claims where the system of exploiting future generations causing the climate crisis was simultaneously using public interest claims to hide the unfolding harms, and costs.
Singer and the other advocates were not accounting for costs of children coming into conditions without the resources to deal with the growing threats they face, and with increasingly diluted influence over their political systems, influence they would need to end the threats.
Given massive standing birth disparities, this entails illegally shifting costs by treating children of color as worth fewer resources, more risk, and less political influence than white children. It derives from the historic subversion of decolonial and racial justice movements via “separate but equal” reproductive rights systems that effectively blocked empowerment thresholds of intergenerational justice, ensuring that voting power was never correlated to real world ecological, political, and social thresholds.
The claims and underlying model also use manufactured numbers to replace political freedom with economic growth, and in a way that skews the baseline for life-saving climate reparations in order for the claimants to benefit at deadly cost to those who need the reparations.
There is a history of organizations intentionally omitting information from their valuation models and impact claims regarding the largest driver of the outcomes at issue – growing birth-based constitutional inequity – to personally benefit, and in a way that has disenfranchised communities of color.
Organizations like the Animal Legal Defense Fund (the same organization where Singer’s modeling largely began) have intentionally attempted to skew the baseline for its public interest work, in one instance withdrawing federal litigation to avoid accurate valuations. Overlapping funders used programming at the University of Denver to create a charade version of animal liberation with wildly inaccurate claims, even shifting dedicated funding away from programming that would have required protective climate reparation standards.
When Fair Start activists noted that Wikipedia and the Center for Biological Diversity were undervaluing ecological damage assessments, Wikipedia deleted the Fair Start Wiki page.
In this practice of omission, micro, downstream victories have hidden the way macro, upstream forces were undoing them every day.
Singer’s statements are false under preemptive state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition, and civil rights, laws because there is no valuation and impact reporting outside of one’s birth positional context, birth-empowerment is inseparable from all other values, and accounting for costs of children entering the world relative to that threshold (constituting) is what justifies the benefits one gets.
There are no legitimate valuation/business models and reporting systems that value others beneath the threshold of their being minimally empowered, because that empowerment is what justifies all of our benefits.
Their discounting the lives of others does more harm than Singer does good, by their own metrics, like safe temperatures, and is skewing the baseline for things like climate reparations and voting rights, putting millions at risk.
How can someone be an animal rights activist and set no minimum threshold for their protection in the actual birth-creation of their relations with humans? In the history of human-animal relations, why not consider the recent decades, as the polycrisis unfolded, and who benefited and who suffered the costs?
Ignoring these issues is more distractivism – using animal rights to hide systems that abuse them, to avoid liability, and for the on-balance benefit of the abusers.
The fix?
This is not philosophy. Singer is part of a legal system, the legitimacy of which is premised on empowering others. Birth-positioned constitutional benefits land at the level of individuals – so do liabilities.
Urge Singer to join other organizations, public and private, that back constitutionally preemptive birth-equity standards in their local, state, and federal jurisdictions.
Governments can’t interpret their constitutions, or any of their derivative authority – including state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition and civil rights laws – in ways that disenfranchise persons, especially to the point of risking their lives.
One way to start the fix? We can all tell the truth and admit that #illegaldiscounting and# legitimacywashing in our valuation models and impact reporting does more harm to our values than we do good.
Urge Singer to back the Constitutional Campaign.
Fair Start Movement is urging the California Attorney General to take action against #illegaldiscounting and #legitimacywashing.
Contact those offices here and report illegal discounting and legitimacywashing as violations of unfair competition, civil rights and constitutional law.
This work is part of the Fair Start Movement Constitutional Campaign which tests the ultimate political question – are the costs and benefits we experience in life contingent on our being empowered enough to control the outcomes?