If you are worried about Trump and Musk as threats to democracy, ask yourself what your company has been doing – at the most basic level of measurably empowering and freeing children as they entered the world – to actually protect democracy.
What in your company’s cost/benefit analysis covered the costs of children only being born into conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, the basis for human rights and democracy? Or did your company, like Trump and Musk, assume those kids were valuable economic inputs in your growth model?
Were you quietly enjoying growth-based investments that exponentially undid climate and animal protection reforms, and enriched those you criticize? Did your company make money on veganfood investments relying on growth, and massive wealth differentials for black and white kids, that did more harm than good?
We don’t get to justice through injustice, and punching down on infants and animals with zero actual birth equity protections.
Hypocritical companies, fake charities and nepotistic foundations that did nothing to ensure fair starts in life for all kids, which means measurable equity or effective shares in one’s democracy, created Trump and Musk at the most basic level.
Take action: If you knew your company, foundation, or charity was making fake impact claims where benefits were being undone by growth that enriched some families at deadly cost to those in vulnerable hot spots around the world, please contact: info@fairstartmovement.org
If we want to protect democracy our companies have to build it through the creation of actual power relations by starting at birth and, in the name of intergenrational justice, targeting key bad actors who lied about impacts while making their money at cost to children and animals. They owe that money because they used fraud and unfair competition, omitting deadly costs in their public impact statements, in order to make it.
We have an obligation to take that wealth back and ensure – through delayed parenting and collective family planning incentives inverse to wealth – that no child is born beneath a line of being empowered.
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Free riding on what one Nobel laureate called the shell game/ponzi scheme of our birth positionality is not climate justice, and doing so does more to protect white wealth than actually save lives.
Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded legal scholar.
But his most recent book on climate justice is based on a critical baseline error, in which he does not account for the harms of one’s arbitrary birth positioning, that he was warned of years ago.
The error results in illegally accrued wealth because it never has to pay the cost of ensuring children’s and animals’ rights in the creation, at birth, of relations. But rights are first step in legitimating a system. The error thus disconnects the system from those values in the physical world – like low greenhouse gas emission levels -the deviation from which through the creation of children cause the harms we see today. This error harms progress towards the ideal of freedom, or self-determination, as one’s capacity to influence the political, economic, and social systems in which one lives, equal to others, relative to a neutral background.
In other words, his call to action is great, but must be oriented from a different base in order to be just.
An initial question: Default obligations while academics debate
Yes, academics can debate this, but why should Cass have the benefit of systems of state violence backing his rights, systems that are also based on that error, while the debates ensue? Why should those least empowered and liberated by birth-positioning respect the rights and the benefits he received from the unsustainable economic growth that was also degrading democracy, or what one Nobel laureate called a Ponzi scheme, in such a system, especially if ignoring children’s rights was used as a way to ensure economic growth?
Harvard may platform what are arguable violations of the law to liberate animals on an abstract/micro level, but would it go too far to do so on a macro level, holding Sunstein and his family responsible for their birth positioning in a deadly birth lottery / system of reproductive rights in which animals and future children had no rights and Sunstein and his family won, relative to heat, flood, and malaria-stricken infants in Uganda today, to say nothing of decades from now?
If Sunstein’s argument is based on the fallacy that governments and wealthy entities don’t need to derive and condition their authority and entitlements on measurably empowering children as they enter the world so that governance is consensual, what more would one have to do than defeat that fallacy to change the default for legitimate preemptive action against institutions like Harvard?
And if we assumed each person should have equal capacity to influence their political system, we would arrive at an ideal of how to constitute the future with more collective family planning systems focused on birth equity overriding conflicting norms. That can slowly replace the power relations of the current world—a spectrum where some, like Sunstein, have massive influence and others on the other side of the spectrum—like these families—have little or no influence and await whatever those like Sunstein have planned for them.
We can use the primacy of becoming who we should be to replace a spectrum where some are other-determining of many, towards a future where all are relatively self-determining.
Children have a preemptive right to birth and development conditions that ensure political equity and self-determination, a right necessary to legitimate governance. There is no obligation, on any of us, that precedes this existential right, the one that determines who we are. Complex documents and bodies of impenetrable law do not constitute nations and obligations, even though law professors, whose rarefied positions hinge on that being the case, want us to think so. People constitute nations.
Sunstein ignores that right, choosing to assume governmental authority and the entitlements of many to control extreme wealth without actually deriving it from, and conditioning it on, the measurable empowerment of those from whom authority and entitlements derive: The people.
By ignoring the primcy of the right, Cass engages in nonconstitutive discourse, using omissive language that constitutes free riding the birth positionality of his having won an illegal birth lottery.
If he and his family want justice, will they give access to their air-conditioned homes this summer to those who need it? Their property lines may be better examples of the border between self and other determinaton, or freedom, than national borders. Shall we test justice, in the real world?
Who is more fitting to suffer the costs of the climate crisis—a influential man responsible for the policies over the last several decades, or Black infants who had nothing to do with benefiting from or making the policies that brought us to today?
If Sunstein does not owe infants their birthright to freedom, why do we owe him and his family any obligations? How would he be included in a “we” group among whom obligations are owed? Would such language, relations, and obligations magically flow from a document like a national constitution? Why orient from a default system of public protection where Sunstein gets the benefits of status quo entitlements and authorities without having to legitimate them through radical birth equity reforms?
We can ask Cass, in our Tell the Truth campaign:
Tell us what was going on in terms of children entering the world without what their rights promise them, on each day you said you were engaged in doing justice, keeping in mind the increasing decline of children’s ecologies, in conditions of increasing political disenfranchisement, and as many of those children were without any of the necessary resources to deal with the consequences?
He will have been undoing his claimed work and ignoring the fact that it would be physically impossible to constitute obligation without a shared conception of a value. The campaign is now urging attorneys generals to measure harm to infants, and the growing debt that falls on the wealth Sunstein helped to avoid its true cost, from a zero baseline that captures the full measure of harm and priority for reparative justice.
This is not complex.
Intergenerational justice requires, as a first priority, minimum thresholds beneath which children should not be born, and there are irrefutable reasons a self-determination threshold would override conflicting interests, like the entitlement some claim to the wealth that is needed to fund those threshold. Funding the thresholds – through fertility delay, readiness, and equity – moves us towards relational optimality, who we should be, which comes before what we can then choose to do.
The greatest form of justice in the world today is finding those who benefitted from that and ensuring they suffer the costs of moving their wealth to the victims.
Until he changes to a threshold of empowering children to be self-determining, Sunstein will be using collective pronouns in his sentences that reflect relations which undo his claimed impacts. In the real world of actual relations, Sunstein and Singer are both and have been for decades as exploitative of their birth positionality – racial, generational, national, etc. – as the worst polluters.
Instead, Sunstein should be protecting the most vulnerable from the unsustainable and exploitative growth policies he ignored for decades, costing countless lives. Sunstein’s work in government allowed for what one Nobel laureate saw as a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable—and for many, increasingly deadly—economic growth premised on the illegal discounting of the lives of infants (especially of color), and nonhumans. Sunstein used a left v. right charade to hide the reality of the powerful from above dominating the vulnerable below.
The policies and standard Sunstein uses are illegal because they require violating child welfare, civil rights, environmental, and animal protection laws, including the law of democracy / rule of law, that instead have to be preemptively interpreted to fundamentally derive their legitimacy and content from the measurable empowerment of those subject to those laws.
Instead the policies and standard use arbitrary baselines and metrics to “equitywash,” which blocks accurate damage assessments and reporting, ensuring the daily undoing of value claims and impacts and costing countless lives as a result. There is no universe in which most of the beneficial impacts claimed occurred—they were simply taken out of context, acting more as a charade enabled by the daily birth-violating of children’s rights than change.
The deadly lie: World leaders privatized freedom in the birth-creation of political relations after 1948 by conflating the act of having and not having children under a singular umbrella of autonomy, rather than treating the former as requiring political equity for the child. This hid the nature of freedom by privatizing the creation of political relations. And it led to the measuring, assessing, and reporting of public interest outcomes based on standards meant to take oneself out of one’s birth and development context, ensuring children of color were treated as deserving less and placing them at increased risk.
This was the hiding, linguistically, of birthright white supremacy and massive death debt with a fraudulent assessment and reporting standard that inverted political obligation, hiding the need for nations to invest equitably in each child just to have basic authority over citizens—to be “representative.” Leaders conflated the two by defining power narrowly as the violence of the state, rather than any form of human influence, so one would be free to terminate pregnancies without law enforcement blocking you, only to now die in a heat wave because one had no influence over climate policy, and could not afford air conditioning. See https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/disparities-in-access-to-air-conditioning-and-implications-for-heat-related-health-risks/
Our benefitting from a system of growth that illegally robs children of birth and development conditions consistent with political equity and their rights has degraded our ecologies and political systems, doing more harm than we are doing good. Sunstein assumes a fundamental system of language, and entitlements, in which children of color receive a fraction of the resources as white children, and exponentially more risk.
Fact: Not deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on its first measurably empowering all through high investments in the birth and development of each child, has done more to harm our freedom, than we have done to further it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimate legal systems and public protection from injustice by others, through the violation of children’s rights—by exploiting others. We can’t constitute a nation without actually obligatory, or constitutional, language that begins with admissions of what we owe children.
Legitimacy and obligation begin with rights, and the birthright of a line of resources, beneath which no child should be born.
The default for political obligation—for following any rules in a society—is measurable inclusion in the political process. If academics are using growth economics to instead commercialize democracy, it’s on them to now offset that by accounting for birth positionality and the benefits and costs of intergenerational, racial, national, and other birth-lottery positions.
Not doing so is tantamount to using violence to defend the owners of a shopping mall, who inherited it, against the impoverished persons squatting and shoplifting there by making the latter think they are really in a democratic town hall and were part of the process of choosing all of the entitlements and rules to which they are now subject.
Take Action
Urge Sunstein’s daughter, who takes her commitment to justice to the extremes of wanting to protect nonhumans, to admit these truths and make clear her birth positionality relative to children who will die this summer from a system that without Fair Start reforms remains unjust. Urge her to Tell the Truth, as animal abusers are being urge to do.
Those children should have had at least some what she has, and maybe this summer as heat rises and wealth affords air conditioning, some of them still can.
Humans have a blind spot when it comes to privileging their kids. But that’s no excuse for creating bad policy fundamentally leading to autocracies and the deaths of millions.
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 others and dragging them down as they go. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to ask and then assure that persons are created, developed, and emaciated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.
If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not that at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally. The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations, and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, 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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How were they accounting for the actual experiences and life trajectories of the most vulnerable, infants and the animals they will impact?
When we do that assessing, we see how the ecological and political crises we face today came about, as those who seemed to be making the world a better place – on balance – were not.
In this truth telling process we should all determine, and admit if need be, that we have quietly been using the same fundamental standard causing today’s deadly climate and political crises in order to hide our liability for those crises, and in a way that is costing millions of lives and doing more harm to our values and causes than we are doing good.
Instead, we should all be backing policy reforms that ensure extreme wealth is reallocated so that no child is born outside of a system of reparations accounting – as the first and overriding human right or grundnorm. We should act so that children get a fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, via parenting delay, readiness, and equity reparations / family planning incentives measured inverse to privilege and positionality.
Climate change and inequality are 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.
Fair Start activists came together because in the nonprofits in which we have previously worked, our collectively violating children’s right to a fair start in life, and assuming children of color deserved much less resources and much more risk, was doing more to harm our values and missions than we did to further them. And in many cases those organizations went out of their way to hide this. Liability for this will be litigated soon in various fora, including climate tribunals in Africa.
Background
For years Fair Start activists in prior employment were paid well for public interest work, and gained goodwill among many, while enriching the families of those funding the work.
And yet the vulnerable entities they claimed to represent – infants, animals, indigenous communities – are now, on many levels, worse off.
The standard ensures our values operate abstractly, disconnected from the creation of power relations as children come into the world, hiding fundamental causation. It siloes social justice efforts into various categories like environmentalism, democracy, animal rights, etc., decoying them away from birth equity, and assessing and reporting impacts out of context.
The standard allows for value and impact claims that are not pegged to an ecosocial baseline that actually protects human and animal health, allowing some to claim their behavior is sustainable, while enriching some children at deadly cost to millions of others. Social justice derives from birth equity, but for decades philanthropists have developed decoy branding around more downstream issues, enriching themselves on growth and inequity that was slowly undoing environmental and other efforts.
The illegal standard allows for a shell/ponzi scheme that hides political inequity under a shell of unsustainable – and for many, deadly – economic growth. The standard omits information to ensure false assumptions regarding entitlements and authorities, ensuring audiences assume the legitimacy of entitlements, state authority and traditional political borders rather than actually legitimating them through child rights and political equity. In doing so, it hides vast inequalities derived from birth, and blocks the primacy of black birth equity as an overriding human right.
This is illegal because it violates the rule of law, but also positive laws surrounding child welfare, civil and animal rights laws, as well as the law of democracy. The standard works by weighting autonomy or self-determination outside of the context of one’s political equity or effective share in their democracy, which makes value assessments (and things like discount rates) wildly inaccurate.
One’s arbitrary birth positionality, one’s draw in the birth lottery in terms of race, intergenerational positioning, nationality, etc., is assumed to be fate or the hand of some magical deity, rather than a product of bad policy now requiring offsets to ensure equity. That skews how we see the world, and in ways that ensured a climate crisis likely to kill those least responsible for it. Seeing things out of the context of our creation, in an abstraction of justice, versus a view from a physically constitutive standard, leads to horrible results.
While racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century made relatively cosmetic advances in terms of voting, education, housing, etc., birth inequity combined with ecocidal growth ensured a caste status that today will mean millions of persons of color will die in the climate crisis, and fundamentally because white wealth was illegally held back from black families.
Anyone could see this standard at work, just by asking a few questions of the organizations making claims. There are now legal actions underway to eliminate the use of the standard. Allowing its continued use enables funders and public interest organizations to exploit unsustainable growth, political inequity, and the subversion of racial justice to profit at deadly cost to infants and animals.
The standard – which we rarely not talk about – has been doing more harm to our causes and stated impacts than we have been doing to further them because it has degraded the capacity of the earth to ensure infant and animal health – the only true measure of value, while disempowering the average person, taking what their birth rights give them in democracy and selling back the rights as goods in an economy.
There is no accurate evaluation of values outside of that truth.
The Tell the Truth campaign asks all:
How are you accounting in your value claims for children entering the world, relative to what their rights require? Do you realize that entitlements to claim ownership of wealth, or any governmental authority, is contingent on not violating those rights, and on empowering citizens so that representative governance is possible? How would one get entitlements to protection, if infants and animals don’t get theirs? If one received the benefits of a system of values, including things like moderate temperatures, access to food and water, and relative security, would we not be eager to ensure those values also limited fundamental systems of entitlements so that others could enjoy them?
More formally, Fair Start is seeking to override the illegal standard at the United Nations, arguing that our collective debt to those dying from climate and political systems from which we benefitted preempts or overrides conflicting policy choices. We begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against rights-based and restorative measures, the deviation from which is leading to things like higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality.
Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated very child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
We don’t get justice from injustice, or earn obligations from others by ignoring our own. And governments can’t come up with their own definitions of things like legitimacy, and define what things like fraud (which at base means benefitting at cost to others through misinformation), harm, and sustainability mean, in order to hide their liability for using a fundamental system of entitlements that kills millions of innocent people. There are objective measures for such things.
How can new standards be implemented?
Free persons will not follow rules in a legal system that does not give them the control over those rules, and Fair Start is organizing free persons to take action. All theories of political obligation require some measurable level of inclusion and participation by those affected by it.
The replacement standard is simple. Having children in not a matter of personal autonomy or freedom relative to the would-be parents. It’s interpersonal, impacting the children and the communities they comprise more than the parents. It’s capable of being constitutive, or deconstitutive, of a just society. If we assume that everyone should be relatively self-determining in that society, then the fundamental rule or standard by which to assess value and justice would require we offset each other equally, relative to a neutral position. That ensures accurate parental autonomy, balanced against other values, and the best standard for assessing climate policy, including climate reparations.
It allows an accurate measure of the loss of freedom we are seeing as the climate and related crises unfold.
It’s physically impossible for nations to be free, as in relatively self-determining, without elevating measurable birth equity and children’s rights as our first and overriding obligation. Being a free or self-determining nation is impossible if we start by violating children’s rights to self-determination. In doing that we become other, rather than self, determining. Being free means treating future children as means and not ends, and measuring harm from to them a neutral or zero position, rather than the hiding fundamental liability that attaches to generational wealth.
Law and obligation are first about how we are positioned relative to others, not how we act, so our language has to be constitutive, answering these questions – and admitting undoing relative to truly fair and sustainable measures – in order to form actually obligatory relations with future generations that free all. Where else would these obligatory relations come from? If government derives authority from its constituents, there is no other source. Hence we can use the Tell the Truth campaign to see who chooses to be unjust, fall outside the scope of legal – by which we mean inclusive – social protections because they refuse to pay the costs they owe each of us for the loss of our freedoms, and who by so doing saddle their adult children with their death debt.
Our theory of change is that language has to be accurately obligatory and inclusively self, as opposed to other, determining. That’s what it means to constitute a nation, or have supreme obligations – from the bottom up – to others. To do so outside of that process would be physically impossible.
Again, we begin Tell the Truth, in part, by urging organizations to publicly contrast their impact assessment and reporting standards against restorative measures described above. Given this contrast, we urge those engaging in the campaign to admit that benefitting from a system that violated every child’s right to a fair start in life has done more harm to our values and missions that we have done good.
Why? Scammy nonprofits ignored every child’s right to a fair start in life, and the need to incentivize better birth and development conditions that would have reversed growth, and reduced suffering. Many lied for the growth-based funders they served.
That means more children and animals are worse off, and that’s not even considering deadly climate crisis as shown the graphs below.
Fact: As we show in this work re-published Stanford University, violating children’s rights, and assuming children of color deserved a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk did more harm to all of our values – like moderate temperatures, food security, and representative government – than any of our philanthropic efforts did good.
If you are worried about Trump and Musk as threats to democracy, ask yourself what your company was doing – at the most basic level of measurably empowering and freeing children as they entered the world – to actually protect democracy.
What in your company’s cost/benefit analysis covered the costs of children only being born into conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention, the basis for human rights and democracy? Or did your company, like Trump and Musk, assume those kids were valuable economic inputs in your growth model?
Were you quietly enjoying growth-based investments that exponentially undid climate and animal protection reforms, and enriched those you criticize? Did your company make money on vegan food investments relying on growth, and massive wealth differentials for black and white kids, that did more harm than good?
We don’t get to justice through injustice, and punching down on infants and animals with zero actual birth equity protections.
Hypocritical companies, fake charities and nepotistic foundations that did nothing to ensure fair starts in life for all kids, which means measurable equity or effective shares in one’s democracy, created Trump and Musk at the most basic level.
Fair Start begins simply with the fact that wealth in the world today was made through growth and at cost to children’s rights because nations illegally evaded their obligation to only bring children into conditions compliant with those rights.
That standard – a demand for family planning resources to ensure children’s rights, which is the most basic standard for who our species should be – is how we can move that same wealth to try to fix the problem.
Many entities in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis are using the same fraudulent impact assessment and reporting standards, ignoring how children entering the world undid sustainable development impacts, that drove the crisis in order to hide their liability or the death of millions.
The rule: All climate reparations must be based on measurable collective self-determination. There are no values outside of that system, given climatological impacts on infants. We find and out those using any other standard, and hold them fully accountable. Government and those they entitle to wealth cannot redefine “harm” to avoid liability for the deaths of millions.
Language matters, and we cannot be free or contextually self-determining without communications that reflect or most fundamental obligations to others.
If we want to protect democracy our companies have to build it through the creation of actual power relations by starting at birth and, in the name of intergenerational justice, targeting key bad actors who lied about impacts while making their money at cost to children and animals.
They owe that money because they used fraud and unfair competition, omitting deadly costs in their public impact statements, in order to make it.
This year Fairstartmovement.org will engage in the Tell the Truth campaign, urging prominent social justice figures to admit failure as the climate crisis accelerates and kills millions.
At the base of all of the failures is their not having accounted for children entering the world, or the actual creation of power relations, when they urged reforms. That factor was undoing, every day, the benefits their reforms would have ensured. Instead, that factor resulted in the enrichment of a small percentage of mostly white families at deadly cost to countless families of color.
I and many others were encouraged to ignore that issue in our activism, for decades, so that the wealthy funders could take advantage of the growth and inequity driving the crisis.
This is not a debate. Tell the Truth means just urging key figures to disclose how the values they championed were undone – over the last three years – as children entered the world without the resources they need, and in ways that degraded their ecologies and disenfranchised them politically.
For example, we can urge Peter Singer to disclose how his animal liberation work, from the numbers of animals suffering and general impacts on welfare to daily violations of rights, was undone in the last three years by growth that benefitted his backers.
Ask him to relate the numbers to zero baselines that account for actual harm including the value of self-determination, like these, and not projections for food investments.
If we account for the climate crisis the numbers – in both fields he championed – will show him enriching vegan food and other investors, not benefitting animals or vulnerable humans. It’s not about intent. Yes, Exxon and others’ supply-side work drove emissions, but only in response to the same growth-based demand that Singer and others enabled (even if done so simply as a matter of negligence). And Exxon never claimed to be liberating animals.
Animal rights claims are the most falsifiable when we run the numbers. Is hype and a questionable legacy more important than staving off deaths in the crisis?
This goes beyond greenwashing towards fraud, and as deaths mount legal systems are evolving to prohibit drivers of the crisis like moving wealth in deadly ways through omissive messaging.
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The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has a lot of influence on family and health policy. They make decisions that impact our futures.
We are urging their lead, at the end of this message, to act.
The Fair Start Movement arose from a growing body of undisputed research that traces the climate and political crises we all face to a very specific mistake, made decades ago, in reproductive rights policy making.
Because we collectively used a false assessment and reporting standard disconnected from accurate measures of ecological and social harm, we never assured children birth and development conditions consistent with their rights. This allowed enough inequitable growth to degrade our ecologies and disenfranchise the average voter, leading to environmental catastrophe and the concentration of power in a few.
Those involved in Fair Start worked previously at nonprofits where leadership were knowingly undoing their claimed impacts, while enriching mostly white kids at deadly cost to countless children of color.
Fact: As we show in this work re-published Stanford University, violating children’s rights, and assuming children of color deserved a fraction of the resources and exponentially more risk did more harm to all of our values – like moderate temperatures, food security, and representative government – than any of our philanthropic efforts did good.
Did KFF value their growth-based investments and endowment more than kids? How did they not do that?
The fix? All must admit that truth, and now back a universally preemptive and restorative standard that treats the old standard as illegal, and reallocates resources into equity-based family reforms that encourage parenting delay, readiness, and child entitlements inverse to their parents wealth.
More specifically, we are bringing legal actions before state attorneys generals in the United States urging key target organizations making claims of beneficial impact to disclose how they were accounting for children entering the world in their claims for the last three years.
We believe that contrasting claims with the facts of declining infant and maternal health will show continued use of the illegal standard, which in many cases will give rise to legal liability for inaccurate claims leading to the deaths of millions. There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable.
Act Now
Drew Altman leads the KFF. Contact him on Twitter, or find and engage him in person, to admit fundamental system failure and to back this reform: https://fairstartmovement.org/fair-start-today-moves-to-standardize-climate-damage-evaluations-at-the-un-and-override-any-conflicting-standards/
Please consider making a contribution through Donate. Together, we can create lasting change to save next generation.
She remains so until she takes account of the primacy of her positionality, and acts on it.
We can’t get to justice, legitimacy and an obligation to follow the law from the injustice of violating children’s birthrights and assuming children of color deserve exponentially less resources and more risk. Doing that has done more harm than we did good. How? Exploiting mothers’ vulnerability to ensure growth, and not first ensuring reparative family reforms that assure children birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Condition, does more harm to all of our missions than we are doing good, because the power dynamics that choice creates is degrading the ecological capacity of the planet to ensure infant health – the first and only measure of value.
At the end of this post we ask her to prioritize intergenerational justice, not as an issue siloed from her animal work, but as the correct basis for it.
Introduction
The climate crisis is intensifying, and killing millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it. At the same time a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy. Many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice – in the actual creation, at birth, of power relations – that we should all address. Many entities in those nations most responsible for the crisis are using the same fraudulent political systems, and impact / reporting standards, that caused the crisis in order to hide liability.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Nussbaum and other luminaries have done to further it. There is no form of justice, and certainly not animal justice, that ignores the actual creation of human and nonhuman relations. And it’s very hard to change a future child’s prospects once they are born, so true justice first focuses on thresholds beneath which children should not be born. Most thinking about that threshold seems focused on welfare. But if we use a metric or value like self-determination, the idea of intergenerational justice actually becomes a the first necessary condition for political obligation, the first rule, or what is required to owe others our allegiance to a legal system. Nothing is more primary than our birth-determined relations to others.
When the reproductive rights regime was developed and put into law, the architects conflated the acts of having kids and not having kids equally as a matter of parental bodily isolation. But creating a child is the least isolating thing one can do – it’s interpersonal in nature, not personal, and it is in fact the basis of our relations – it’s constitutive: https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/family-planning-offers-the-best-means-for-combating-climate-change-an-interview-with-carter-dillard-fair-start-movement/.
Autonomy as isolation, out of context, was effectively an extension of the racist “separate but equal” thinking at work at the time.
Nussbaum’s work ignores this primary issue – the largest determinant of animals lives.
This is a failure many funding the fields of animal law and justice are eager to ignore because they made their wealth on the growth and inequity that together are killing many as temperatures rise. Climate change and inequality are 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.
There is no universe in which beneficial impacts, taken out of context from their relative position to birth equity, occurred. Use of such-out-of-context claims hides the fundamental driver for the deaths: Enabling the powerful over the vulnerable
Fair Start is writing Nussbaum openly for a reason
That backchannel and time consuming discourse is what one might call distracademia. In light of the immediate horrors of things like growth-exacerbated heat waves, much in the modern animal protection movement – like the academy and its questionable impact – seems more like a self-aggrandizing garden club that has been funded by the clear cutting of local forests than drivers of a true social justice movement.
At a meta level, beyond the façade, is Nussbaum assuming entitlements she should not?
Liberalism, and freedom, mean being empowered. How could that possibly happen outside of the context creation, development and emancipation? Are academics exempt from this relative positioning? Those who reject fair creation obligations limit themselves to a version of freedom that is leading to the death of others. Why not change the entitlements default while engaged in the discourse to avoid that? Would Martha have focused on this change, decades ago, if she had known how the climate crisis would unfold?
It’s very possible we should define fundamental political group membership, and the deserving of collective protection, based on the level of protection members would extend to infants and animals. Those rejecting self-determining protections for these vulnerables through things like parental delay and readiness incentives would themselves fall outside the scope of being owed protection because there would never be a way to explain why they have shown the reciprocity necessary for membership. They are not included in any collective “we.” Deserving that, being included in a legitimate system, is not onerous and could just require backing high level birth protections for infants. For those who do not, it’s unclear why they deserve basic protection in political systems which are, at base, premised on inclusion.
That is all we are asking Nussbaum to do – to consider resetting the default for obligation, and protection, while she engages in discourse.
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. These free riders threaten us all. Why? It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we cannot ask and then assure that persons are created, developed and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, 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 their degradation of the environment around us. We should instead empower the governed, not the government and the wealthy.
All evidence suggests that not ensuring all children a measurable fair start in life, and birth and development conditions consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and the Human Right to a Healthy Environment, has done more to harm all social justice goals, including individual freedom, than any other efforts have done to further them. In many cases when one factors in loss of political equity, or one’s effective shares in democracy to control the influence of others, many public interest organizations have spent more on lavish travel and events than furthering their missions.
But we don’t talk about this because it means admitting the historic subversion of civil rights through family inequity, and the treating of children of color as deserving a fraction of what white kids deserve, while assuming those children of color should suffer the brunt of the climate crisis. The wealth we see in the world today carries massive debt because we all benefitted from the violation of children’s rights to make it, bringing children into the world as means and not rights-bearing ends.
Whatever Nussbaum said, she lived a life of benefiting from not having to assure her own values in the birth-creation of others’ power relations, for example, in the funding that would have backed her work. All of that wealth would have been made in disregard of the lives of animals and the most vulnerable children because their interests are absent in the fundamental family creation norms that entitle wealth.
Nussbaum clearly avails herself of the benefits of our legal system, to protect herself for example, without deriving that system back to, and conditioning its legitimacy upon, measurably empowering those subject to it. That is the problem – one the impacts the freedom of others in a way that calls for a reaction.
Abstract academic debates about ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to exacerbate the results of the climate crisis by forestalling law and policy reforms. Many of the debates derive from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism described above – the historic entitlement of wealthy families to exploit birth positionality relative to colonized nations – nesting in the human-rights regime.
Academia should be objective and that doesn’t mean ignoring one’s positionality. It actually means first accounting for it, especially to avoid contradictory exploitation and entitlements that conflict with one’s values.
They will silo off values, like animals’ rights, from the issue of who the humans – the performance of which those rights depend on – should be. They will avoid discussions of their full positionality. They will avoid explicitly conditioning state authority on empowering each person equally.
If the micro-liberation of nonhumans looks like open rescues at factory farms, the macro would look like “real new deal” social contract demands for reparations in exchange for child-centric planning that would ensure a truly climate-restored and bio-diverse future in which humans are empathetic enough to be inclined to treat nonhumans well. But many academics, whose interests do not align with macro reforms, ignore the latter.
These academics often assist funders in coaptating the values, imitating and redefining things like animal rights and mutual self-determination of humans and nonhumans, creating something that looks like the value but more aligned with their interests.
Fair Start has shown that a necessary condition for something to constitute “animal law” would be that it can actually benefit nonhumans, including accounting for the creation – through our birth and development – of their relations with humans. There are influential funders in this space however that define the field to specifically avoid that issue, going so far as to selectively report developments in the field to hide the way macro forces like growth undo the value of granular “victories” at a macro level. This benefits the funders, and wealthy their kids, as deadly cost to nonhumans and mostly vulnerable children of color. Both Nussbaum and the funders have affirmed their views of animal law and justice in this regard, with Fair Start activists in communications the activists can provide.
Our language, by not including the impact children entering the world has on our values, work, and missions, hides costs we foist on others and blocks our ability to derive obligations to follow the law back to a condition of its actually measurably empowering those subject to it. The hiding means we value the things in our lives by taking the idea of self-determination out of context, ignoring how our lives very much determine others – climatologically for example. At a subject-subject level of animal liberation, it would not mean that we have social contract obligations with nonhumans as voters or contractors. It would means that their presence influences who the human persons we share our democracy with are and should be. That’s what matters to nonhumans.
As discussed below, one solution is to legally require disclosures contrasting claims about values with the actual ecosocial baseline children need to experience value, and how their birth and development alters that baseline in a way that harms infants’ needs.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible given their decoy effects.
We should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring all children the fair start in life justice required. Doing so now, and changing policies to internalize the costs we foist on others, can save lives. Doing so would allow us to require fundamental social coordination around a norm which is infinitely easier to use than a written constitution of the sort we have in the U.S., a thing unknowable to most – and more backed by guns than collective reason and understanding.
Nussbaum’s work and claims contain the same self-serving baseline error as the work of Cass Sunstein. Instead of self-determination in the accurate sense, law and policy forced our thinking into an immediate focus on other humans that veiled our creation. How? Again, our legal and political systems treated having children as an act of autonomy, bundled up with the act of not having children, because that form of autonomy would define the concept of power in a way that avoided questioning certain entitlements.
The dangerous and powerful were the men with guns in government, and the castle of the home was an autonomous zone to be protected from it. That’s not the definition of the conception of power that makes democracy work. Power is any form of human influence, the mass aggregate of human activities that is killing millions in the climate crisis, and it begins as we—and our relations to others—are created fundamentally through birth and development. Watch for others entering the world, not the leaders with money and guns they will become.
This was power over others, not self-determination for all, and the misconception mainly operated by taking the element of time out of the equation and assuming certain relations rather than requiring birth and developmental self-determination. However, families are not just part of the social contract but constitutive of it.
Instead of racing others to the bottom for how bad we can act or be, the natural and temporalized threshold for being is based on hard metrics linked to physical conditions in the world, and it is much easier to see and achieve in a collective setting, like care modeling, than a nuclear family. This is a binary choice between acting obligated towards bottom-up systems of investment and inclusion, or top-down systems of governmental violence that exploit low levels of child welfare to create growth that kills animals and destroys nature.
But as the climate and relate crises worsen, there are fewer reasons to continue to make that mistake. In essence, if we do not change the standard, we are inclined to “double dip,” to ignore birth positionality – the fundamental system most driving the outcomes, the main determinant, while pretending we are saviors ensuring justice. The Fair Start, “Tell the Truth,” theory of change takes claims each of us have made that assumed state authority and wealth entitlements not conditioned on the actual empowerment of constituents, has us admit those claims were fallacious, and urged us to now commit to elevating the empowerment threshold as an obligation above state authority.
This mimics some of the truth and reconciliation work in other contexts, but with future children.
Nussbaum is a luminary. She is also a person who simply benefitted at deadly cost to others, as many of us have. She can be a leader in fixing the fundamental cause of that. Martha will have air conditioning this summer. Some infants near her in Chicago will not.
For example, we could ask whether she would consider who – between wealthy families uniquely responsible for the climate crisis seeking to defend their wealth, and impoverished would-be mothers needing resources to defend their future children’s choices in life, would have a superior claim to use state violence?
But as the climate crisis intensifies and kills millions who had little role in causing or exacerbating it, and at a time where a small percentage of persons have become obscenely wealthy, many are asking if there has been a fundamental failure of justice that we should all address.
Fact: The failure of world leaders for decades to ensure a measurable fair start in life, both ecologically and socially, for all children has done more to harm the practice of justice than Sandel and other luminaries have done to further it.
We have all benefitted at deadly cost to future generations, a fact quickly manifesting now as as the climate crisis intensifies.
None can be allowed to ignore creation ethics / positionality. Where, when and with which resources we are born is the largest determinant of outcomes in things like the climate crisis. And in terms of justice, and political obligation, there is no more basic a choice than how to deal with and offset our creation positionality, and the benefits and costs it conveys, intergenerationally for example.
Our collective failure to deal with the unjust and unsustainable system of growth that created our own birth, developmental, and emancipatory positionalities is leading to the death of millions. Academics are not immune from this systems of benefits and costs. In fact leaders in the academy are some of the most responsible, and we should all admit our benefitting at deadly cost to others based on never ensuring children the fair start in life justice required.
Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world to account for children being born without what the Children’s Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.
