Chaos Enabled by Irresponsible Behavior Is the Antithesis of Freedom
What do pandemics like Covid-19, and ecocidal things like the climate crisis, have to do with the idea of human freedom? For some, these events will be perceived as opportunities for governments to limit human freedom. For others, they will seem like limitations on freedom, along with governments’ failure to prevent them. Whatever the view, these events are largely driven by human behavior, which in turn is driven by values and norms, like freedom. How we further these events, and react to them, fundamentally derives in many ways from our perception of freedom and how it limits or justifies behavior. Dealing with these crises could then fundamentally start with examining the concept. Below are three particular perspectives, centered on isolation, inclusion, and creation, respectively.
A common view of freedom is the right to do whatever one wishes, absent some obvious and unjustifiable harm to others. The vision here is that one is and should be autonomous from other people, a vision captured in statements we see all the time: A gym owner in Arizona who refuses to require masks or close his business despite Covid-19, landowners who refuse to comply with the endangered species act, companies in trade associations that push back against consumer regulations, or coalitions fighting regulations that would limit climate emissions. The entire concept proceeds from intentional myopia, or the decision to view oneself in isolation from others, in time and space. It is the maintaining of willful ignorance of how people came to occupy different positions in society, the subtlety of harm, and the importance of things beyond harm – like obtaining the considered consent of others we influence. That myopia makes these claims of freedom easy to contest, but they endure to the extent our political systems position people so that they are – in an antisocial way – unwilling or unable to examine them. Collective problems, like the climate crisis and Covid 19, are primarily seen as presenting a risk that the collective will have a new opportunity to interfere with the will of individuals.
A second and less common view of freedom evades these problems we find in the first view. It takes many forms, but the general idea is to more comprehensively account for one’s position in the collective, and ensure a shared arrangement that allows one to do what one wishes as part of a system that simultaneously allows others to do the same. The goal is to not prevent each other from self-determination in the process. The philosophers: Joseph Raz, in The Morality of Freedom, or Philip Pettit, in a recent Ted Talk, exemplify this more comprehensive view. It cannot easily be picked apart by examining how the autonomy of the individual relates to the collective – they have accounted for these complex and relevant connections. Under this view, both the climate crisis and Covid-19 present direct risks to the autonomy or freedom of all, as well as those in the future. It is consistent with the objective value of people getting to do what they want that we require all to change their behavior in response to these events. This vision is more complex and accurate – but beyond the capacity or willingness of many to grasp.
But the truly myopic, and even the more comprehensive visions of freedom, aside, there is a third view of freedom that involves something unique. Is there something odd about the two visions of freedom just discussed? There is no account of how the people in them came to be. It’s as if they dropped from the sky. But if freedom entails freedom from other people and their unwanted influence, as well as the freedom to do things – like choose among the valuable options in life enabled by particular types of social organization – don’t we have to first account for the creation of people? Don’t we have to assure all some minimum levels of welfare or even equity of opportunity at birth, some meaningful role in controlling their governance, and political entities physically defined by nature so that we can be free from others? In other words – we first need a norm that accounts for the creation of free people.
This third view of freedom – which we might call a fair start, is centered on the act of creating other people to ensure they live as free and equal persons. It is not exclusive of the first two but rather precedes and enables them, and would be furthered through a very specific process of reforming family planning and population policies – specifically treating the act of procreation as more other-determining for the child than self-determining for the parents. It asks: How can we be inclusive without first accounting for the creation of the people to be included? The impact of these family planning reforms would exponentially surpass many of the downstream reforms underway to alleviate child poverty, ensure equity, restore democracy, and protect our environment. So would the long-term impact on the climate crisis, and the impact and risks of pandemics.
Lastly, this third view has a unique feature: Because it always proceeds other behaviors, in that we are before we do, it overrides conflicting interests. We may do whatever it takes to ensure all children a fair start in life or to continuously recreate the people who actually – or physically – comprise free societies.
The crises we face today arise from and depend on values, like freedom. Starting at the source of the problem entails examining what we mean when we use this word, and what it means for others.
As the growth explosion began to unfold world leaders scrambled for solutions to the catastrophic social and ecological problems the growth was causing. At the time, in the wake of World War II, human rights had emerged as a fundamental framework for universal policy making and world leaders used it to intervene. While the interventions did set a pathway to reverse the growth, world leaders (mostly men operating under a paradigm of religiosity and ongoing colonization) intentionally misinterpreted the fundamental right to have children in an isolationist way, ignoring the collective obligations around family planning policies and in a way that ensured a certain level of growth. All of this was based on a patriarchal and parent-focused right to have children that ignored the interests of future generations, communities, and the nonhuman world. They intentionally treated family planning as if people lived in caves, isolated from one another.
That move accomplished several things.
First, it ensured continued male control of the family by establishing familial autonomy from justice systems, despite massive power differentials between men and women.
Second, it enabled continued population growth, which by creating an ongoing supply of consumers, cheap future labor, and lots of taxpayers, increased economic growth and ensured greater wealth and power for those at the top of the population pyramid. It’s crucial to keep in mind that this was not just about growth in numbers of people, but the model enabled massive inequity, evaded minimum provisions for children, and treated nature as a human resource. The system of exploitation that created the population and wealth pyramid one Nobel Laureate recently noted actually involved four aspects of injustice that, in effect, replaced democracy with marketplaces. And all aspects were hidden behind the veil of familial privacy and autonomy. The things that fundamentally degraded the opportunity for self-rule and equity – family planning and early childhood development – were treated as nobody’s business. This process intentionally replaced citizens who might have voices in their governance with consumers whose choices were limited to markets.
Third, the growth enabled many nonprofits and civil society organizations to financially benefit, while also appearing to champion human rights, despite the growth reversing most of their programmatic progress. These groups often took money and support from those at the top of the population growth pyramid. Instead of dealing with growth they focused on less impactful, but more sensational, downstream programming. For example, massive environmental organizations focused on protecting particular areas of land or species, knowing full well that population growth would eventually create irresistible demand that would degrade those species and lands.
That growth, and our division into cycles of rich and poor families, ensured the ecological and social crises we face today.
Facts: Those that designed the the isolationist family planning model took risks with relatively unknown factors, like climate emissions, and enabled growth that multiplied – exponentially – their impact.The risks and the harms that resulted and will result would have been avoided through alternative modeling that actually complied with human rights, like Fair Start zero baseline modeling. The modeling moves the world from organizing societies based on coercion, or even self-interest and incentives, towards self-actualization, and maximizing freedom by aligning values in a way that can make us truly self-determining. Look back at theories of social organization, like those based on self-interest, and you will find the proponents hiding the role our creation plays in the process.
The people responsible for the continued population explosion in the 20th Century fundamentally created conditions that lead to, and will lead to, massive suffering and death, especially when we consider ongoing intergenerational impacts like the climate crisis. Their followers are continuing to promote growth as a means of enriching themselves, despite impacts on children, animals, and the environment. Now the world stands at a crossroads between continued growth, or a move towards an optimal world population.
The solution at this crossroads must be to embrace the family planning and reproductive justice systems that are actually compliant with human rights requirements. That means shifting from our current systems focused on what parents want subjectively, to a system focused on what all children need objectively: An eco-social Fair Start in life.Doing that puts justice over power at the fundament of life. That start is the first human right, and the first necessary condition of freedom, or of not being subjected to others power (including subtle things like bad parenting and climate crises) against one’s will.
Help us at Having Kids identify and hold accountable those who benefitted the most to pay for what has happened, and those alive today making the situation worse. We have a right to redistribute power by taking their resources to fund Fair Start reforms and there is no greater act of justice that would liberate me, or more vulnerable, entities.
For many reasons it’s popular today to want to eliminate divisions between people in an effort to unite. But sometimes divisions are crucial, in identifying racists and racism for example. The same can apply to a new form of division that could move the world towards intergenerational justice, including human rights and democracy, ecological restoration, and birth equity. This form of division can sweep together all of the repressive “isms,” and address them all at once by focusing in on the fundament of injustice: The way we plan families, and the impacts on the most vulnerable and numerous category of entities, future children and nonhumans.
This is how it works:
Because of cognitive dissonances the vast majority of people do not account for how power, and human freedom or self-determination, actually operate. Their use of language will show this. Instead of accounting for humans’ dynamic and intergenerational nature, and for how subtle forms of power to which we do not consent dictate our lives – like childhoods (ours and others’ with whom we interact), inequity, changes in our environment, etc. – our brain will default and refocus on icons, like celebs, politicians, institutions, and business leaders. We will ignore how we actually constitute ourselves into groups and create the power relations that actually determine the extent to which we consent to others’ influence over us.
Precons are those who, even when shown the relations behind the icons, choose to ignore them, and as such cannot orient from justifiable forms of social organization like Fair Start.
Those who refer to the current trend towards reduced fertility rates as “baby bust” are emblematic of this class of persons, and their isolation modeling. They are not accounting for the welfare, equity, self-determination, political empowerment and ecological positioning of the babies to whom they refer. They just want to use those babies as economic inputs to grow the icon of the U.S. economy, usually to grow their own investments. They ignore how these births will improve, or degrade, justifiable, inclusive, and legitimate communities – communities where each voices carries less weight as they grow. Precons, and preconstitutional thinking, for example, seek to make us consumers rather than citizens.
More simply, precons cannot ethically account for the power relations between the things they objectify.
Beyond the baby bust, precons take no steps to ensure minimum levels of empathy and socialization in all children, a prerequisite for social cooperation and democracy, because they don’t really believe we are or should be engaged in such things, but are willing to rely on top down rule by violence as a form of governance. Precons hide the actual power relations behind icons, allowing a cycle where big government to blames big business, and vice versa, for oppression, when in reality it is the concentration of power driven by massive and incapable populaces that are fundamentally at cause. That distraction allows those at the top of our political systems to move the average person even further away from any role in their own governance.
In contrast, free (or reasonable) people do the relational math between people. They will choose to reject iconarchy in favor of actual relations, and choose to create those relations in ways that maximize self-determination. They will constitute – which simply means to limit and decentralize power – just communities. Liberating our species involves identifying precons, and using them as negative examples in family planning/reproductive justice reforms to ensure future generations are more capable of dealing with human power than we and prior generations have been. It also means finding those who most benefitted from converting citizens into consumers by maintaining preconstitutional family planning systems, and holding them accountable to pay the costs of what they did in the form of funding Fair Start family planning reform.
As the rights both of and to nature emerge and solidify in the minds of the public, and in law and policy, they will entail greater investment in and empowerment of future generations. This panel will explain why.
It begins with the lead attorney, Jessica Blome, in a case currently pending before the Ninth Circuit that argues the Constitution implies a right to nature, including a regenerative standard for environmental policies, under the liberty doctrine. That right aligns with the international rights of nature groups like Earth Law Center promote, and it would help further them, legislatively and otherwise.
Tony Zelle, will present on those rights, from an international perspective, detailing their history and future. Cat Hughey, will explain what the rights to/of nature entail for reforming our family planning systems, from the United Nations to state ballot initiatives. And finally, Michael Swistara and Max Broad will discuss the local implications of these movements for the District of Columbia, where efforts to promote legislation that would ensure every child a socially and ecologically fair start in life might begin.
Because intergenerational justice makes us who we should be, it is inevitably the first and overriding obligation, or that which first constitutes just communities and enables our consent to the power others would have over us.
Therefore no system, law or policy is legitimate if it does not first promote minimum levels of wellbeing and equity at birth for children, as well as their development for, and inclusion into as adults, self-determining democracies situated in biodiverse and regenerative environments where each of their voices will be politically influential. Any law, policy or system that does not first do these interconnected things – providing children an eco-social Fair Start in life – violates human rights, prevents consensual/inclusive governance, promotes preconstitutional systems of oppression, and is a threat to freedom.
Myths: The right to have children, as a personal and private matter, allows parents unlimited discretion to have children. Some are born wealthy and others poor, as a matter of magical fortune, rather than human decision-making.
Truth: The idea that the right to have children is self-determining of parents more than other-determining of children is a misinterpretation of the right foisted on us by colonially-minded patriarchs designed to evade our equity-building collective obligation to children, and to maintain population growth as a means of exploiting future generations as consumers, cheap future labors, and compliant taxpayer. Like all rights the right to have children is limited, collective in nature, and base on the needs of future children whose interests are inherently greater than parental interests. Applying those limits – to level the playing field for all kids – can have ten to twenty times the mitigating impact on the crises we face today, including climate, inequity, and child poverty, and would protect the most numerous and vulnerable categories of entities: Future generations and nonhuman entities.
Myth: Social justice organizations in the fields of equality, human rights, child welfare, environmental and animal protection accounted for the impacts of family planning policies on their missions.
Fact: Most organizations ignored the impacts of poor family planning and population growth on their missions, and instead mislead supporters, donors, and the general public, something that enabled many of the crises we face today.
Myth: Intergenerational concepts are too vague to apply in law, policy and practical ethics.
Truth: Every normative claim uses implied or express pronouns (“pregnant pronouns”) that – because they refer to people – implicate Fair Start and can be modified to promote it. If a claim involves people, it involves a position on Fair Start, which can be achieved in most parts of the world through enacting specific thresholds for 1) parental readiness before having kids, 2) distributions to give all kids a fair start in life, and 3) smaller and sustainable families. Together these moves represent relative self-determination, or the limitation and decentralization of power.
Myth: The written constitutions of nations, subject to some international law constraints, are the dominant set of rules under which we must live.
Truth: The most fundamental and overriding law is that which creates us, or physically constitutes – through procreation and parenting – our communities. That law overrides things like property rights, which would interfere with Fair Start. That law is what most accounts for our lived experience, and should, if we believe that governance derives from sovereign people. Moreover, power is not simply centered in the violence of the state, but includes subtle things like bad parenting and climate emissions, and its borders are represented by actual groups of people, not artificial lines on maps. Those borders can be divided into free people, and people who refuse to further children’s rights to an eco-social Fair Start in life that would allow them to constitute just democratic communities, or precons. The fight for freedom lies at that border.
Myth: The things people value, and the market demand they create, are naturally occurring and justify free markets over democracy.
Truth: Valuation, demand and population growth were created by poor and unsustainable family planning that ensured no minimum levels of welfare for children, abysmal levels of education, extreme inequity ensuring cheap labor, and bloated nation-states where the average person had no real voice in political outcomes. Businesses today profit from a system that mass produced consumers instead of developing capable, and truly free, citizens.
Contact the heads of these key organziations and urge them to support Fair Start family planning or other models that are as effective:
Tweet: • Carter Roberts, @Carter_Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund • Annie Leonard, @AnnieMLeonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA • Michael Brune, @bruneski, executive director of the Sierra Club and urge them to take a stand on the most effective way to protect our future: policies that promote sustainable and equitable family planning.
Congress Could Have Recognized Children’s Right to a Fair Start in Life. Instead It’s Treating Them as Cheap Future Labor.
The Senate’s debate of stimulus legislation that includes significant child-care and tax changes is an opportunity for the United States to recognize every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, ecologically and socially, and radically transform the way we plan families.
Instead, per the New York Times and Forbes, the Senate is pushing what one Nobel Laureate called a population growth Ponzi scheme. The legislation does not eliminate the massive wealth gap between black and white families or encourage sustainable family planning that does not severely exacerbate the climate and other ecological crises. Smaller families can have 20 times the impact on the climate crisis as other measures.
Fair Start, the better approach, would pivot to: • Cut all benefits for wealthy families and dramatically expand them for poor families, making the rich pay to offset the unearned privileges their children enjoy in life. • Incentivize better family planning, and smaller and more sustainable families for everyone, through things like delaying childbirth until parents are really ready. • This is key: These moves can make the legislation antiracist and regenerative and can lay the groundwork to eliminate child abuse and recognize our fundamental human right to nature.
We can do better than pushing women to have kids. Let’s restore nature and level the playing field at birth for all kids. That’s how we create a legitimate society. It’s called Fair Start. It’s the first and overriding human right, and as such, we may achieve it by all means effective. Here is an example of that type of better approach, one that Sen. Cory Booker can easily promote as the Senate debates. We should use funding to fundamentally change the way we plan families to maximize investments in future generations and to compensate them for the harm we have caused.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Mormon with five wealthy children, is using the excuse of child poverty to push population growth as means of creating cheap future labor, increased consumption, and a bigger tax base that will benefit his privileged kids. It’s similar to the Ivanka Trump approach to families and the future.
The current proposals do nothing to ensure all children some minimum level of well-being, equal opportunities in life, a safe and natural environment, and an effective voice in democracies or systems of self-rule. The proposals further the exclusion of people from their own governance, rather than inclusion, and are setting the stage for further political violence in the future as the gap between rich and poor, in a degraded environment, worsens.
What You Can Do Today
Call Kamala Harris and these four key senators today, and make your case for every child’s right to a Fair Start in life:
The zero baseline model (ZBM, or constituting) is a concept used to reform family-planning laws and policies to correct critical errors made in prior modeling. These errors owe to treating the inherently interpersonal act of having kids as a matter personal to only the parents. The problem with previous models (like those based on the harm principle) is that they ignore our collective obligations to invest in children and fail to view the idea of power (and hence consent and determination) in a comprehensive way that includes any form of human influence or affect (such as bad parenting or climate emissions). These errors have hidden key linkages between objective values and choice, like the impacts that crashing ecologies and poor early childhood development have on degrading the choices that legal and political systems can offer their members.
These and other errors have also seeded subjectivity and exploitation in the first and constant step for all human rights systems – the creation of persons – and fundamentally caused the climate crisis, vast inequity, and other threats to our collective well-being. Our daily experience is most determined by the norms that created us and those around us, much more than by any other group of laws or policies, the impact of which is always suspect. And if we believe governance derives from the people governed, our creation and sovereignty should most determine our experience. We improve our experience by improving the creation norms, and by constituting just communities through the limitation and decentralization of power as it applies to the two most numerous and vulnerable entities in the moral universe: Future generations and nonhumans.
What’s the Zero Baseline Model?
Imagine that you are designing a constitution or a similar set of overriding rules and that you want to ensure the people subject to it can exercise some measure of personal freedom or self-determination. For example, you might create a rule that all must be allowed to speak freely or that property rights allow some degree of autonomy from others.
In the process described, you would have skipped a crucial but easily overlooked step: What accounted for the creation of you or anyone making such a list of rules? The first rule is inescapably the rule that creates people, or the creation norm (a concept that can be best understood through practice, using what might be called “pregnant pronouns” thought experiments). That norm would have already determined much about the freedom of the people in the system. While we can imagine the freedom to do certain things, who we are also determines our freedom: the social conditions into which we are born, our positioning relative to others, the ecological conditions into which we are born, how our birth impacts systems of self-rule, etc.
If the obligations that surround our creation must come first and we want those obligations to be comprehensive, they must start at zero, or the reference point of the absence of human power. This step – of being comprehensive – was skipped in the design of almost all political and legal systems that exist today. Instead, political theory treated the absence of human power (states of nature or original positions) as juridical, rather than physical. And instead of focusing on including future generations, those in power set out static rules. They did not keep people, dynamically and intergenerationally, in the position to consent to others’ power and influence — the position in which people must be maintained to continuously constitute just societies.
As such, those rules do not guarantee children minimum levels of well-being, equal opportunities in life, effective voices in their systems of governance, or the freedom of a natural world. And they don’t account for the way these rights intersect. The zero baseline model corrects this mistake, limiting and decentralizing undifferentiated human power, or any form of influence or affect, so that relative self-determination or consensual governance becomes possible.
The zero baseline model requires that we treat the act of having kids, or creating persons, as counting/constituting along a scale of freedom and equality that might be represented simply as 0,1,2 . . . 0. That scale, in the real world, looks like this vision of the future and aligns with other approximations of optimal populations. This is correct state of relative self-determination, and it enables us to orient ourselves from the perspective of a justifiable community where our obligations are self-reflective.
We achieve it through things like redesigning our system of family planning incentives to ensure children an eco-social Fair Start in life as the first human right. If achieving an optimal world population is always the first “ought,” because we are before we do, achieving optimal procreative justice in fact precedes even that, and begins with accounting for – or limiting and decentralizing – human power. We also achieve the baseline by identifying and excluding, intergenerationally, a class of pre-constituting persons we might call “precons” by altering the borders of polities from traditional abstract borders to actual borders defined by groups of people, and the nonhuman world.
Using the Zero Baseline Model for Consensual Governance
Correcting that oversight with models like the ZBM is crucial and creates significant benefits. But we must keep in mind that the ideal rules for family planning are complex and that they’re not analogous to traditional notions of population. We must view the creation of persons as more qualitative than quantitative, dynamic in nature, strictly bound by the International Bill of Human Rights, and so on. Rather than counting people, we have to use an approach that makes each person count.
This is one way to think about it: What can we infer from words like “We the people,” which are expressed or implied at the beginning of almost all democratic constitutions? What is assumed about the people within that “we” in terms of their quantity, commonalities, literacy, equality, relationship to nature, and so on? Their ideal positioning, which we can imagine, creates a pathway to understanding freedom from others, or relative self-determination.
The ZBM modeling begins with certain fundamental values that make up the state of being relatively self-determining or free, such as minimum levels of well-being and positive birth conditions for all future children, equality of opportunity, nature or the nonhuman world, and democracies in which each person’s voice is effective. The model then employs these values to fill in the often-skipped step described above, using a simple but comprehensive scale where undifferentiated human power or influence (which can be measured much like a currency) is limited and equally decentralized.
The ZBM scale seeks to start everyone at the same baseline. This includes (1) creating social and ecological policies that ensure equity and autonomy in and between current and future generations; (2) treating every person with the same weight in our assessments of those policies; and (3) establishing an ecological baseline and restoring the natural world with regenerative policies.
The scale, simply put, limits and decentralizes power through child-centric family planning reforms focused on fairness so that we can remain relatively (to zero) self-determining, or free.
Our family planning laws and policies must be redesigned to maintain this scale that, applied in the real world, will mean a future of smaller and truly democratic communities surrounded by nature. They will be constituted of free and equal people. In these communities, each person has a meaningful role in making the rules under which they live, and each is empowered by the conditions in which they were born and raised. That is what freedom looks like. No system can be described as inclusive without accounting for democratically empowering people right from the start.
How Does Better Family Planning Free Us?
The ZBM model makes possible freedom, autonomy, liberty, consent to the influence of others, etc. — which are all simply ways of talking about states of relative self-determination. How can we consent to others’ power, and thereby self-determine, without this scale and the use of a physical reference point to make coherent the idea of being free? We can’t. Without using a baseline of zero, we cannot maintain our future generations as constantly free and equal people, the position implied in phrases like “We the People,” which is a necessary and antecedent condition of constituting just political and legal systems.
And without maintaining that position, we cannot be free from others’ power over us, whether in how others impact our environment (e.g., through climate change), the advantages others have over us based on the social and economic conditions in which they are born (instead, imagine “zero” as people all beginning at the same start line), or the way our individual voices become lost in large crowds. Without anchoring our systems to the reference point of “zero,” or the absence of human power, we remain subject to the unlimited power of others, usually concentrated in small groups with massively disproportionate control.
The zero baseline model replaces traditional, abstract, and arbitrary political and legal borders — such as socially constructed lines on a globe — with borders defined by actual people, their power or influence, and nature or wilderness, putting the real and physical over the symbolic. Under this model, we are constituting as free and equal people, with fluid borders that reflect our sovereignty; without it, we remain in states of preconstitutionality.
For these reasons, the zero baseline model acts as a deontological, anterior, and overriding method for determining the optimal populations of the world, which is a necessary first step in the development of any political or legal system.
How does all of this actually free us? Here is an example: The market values and demand that define our world today are not some naturally occurring phenomenon. They simply reflect a world populace created in violation of human-rights standards (such as the Children’s Rights Convention, or CRC) and defined by extreme birth inequity, rather than a population created through collective investment in our children in order to liberate them into functional democracies where their voices would matter and where they would enjoy the safety and freedom of the biodiverse and natural world — promised in laws like the United States Wilderness Act — that is a byproduct of those democracies. Using dysfunctional family planning systems, the wealthy and political elites created the demand through which they were enriched, including birth-driven hierarchical cultures that encouraged greed and consumption. This is especially true in today’s market-based zeitgeist, a high-stakes game that all are forced to play, driven by an exploding world population.
In other words, by our own professed ideals and laws, such as the CRC and Wilderness Act, we are not who we should be. Zero baseline modeling helps reveal and reverse this easily hidden form of oppression.
What Policies Come From the Model?
In policy, the zero baseline model treats the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles 16 and 21 as comprising the overriding constituting norm (or the properly constructed, and thereby limited, fundamental right to have children). This requires refocusing family planning systems to a child-centric focus on the objective needs of future children. This new focus centers on the need to give all children a Fair Start in life, both socially and ecologically, by ensuring the scale above. This means the right to have children looks more like the right to speak freely, which has certain limits (one can’t yell “Fire!” in a theater), than the right not to have children, which is based on autonomy and is absolute.
Rather than seeing lower fertility rates in the 21st century as a “baby bust” threat to economies, the zero baseline model treats them as consistent with humans evolving toward sustainability, with filling functional democracies, and with the currency of relative self-determination (perhaps envisioned as large town halls) that must precede and regulate economies and their currency of utilities, with people capable of trusting one another and engaging in social self-rule. In other words, while pre-constitutional systems created large groups of unprepared people in order to expand power for big business and big government at the top of what one Nobel Laureate called a Ponzi scheme pyramid, constituting ourselves as free and equal people requires investing more in each child to create a smaller population. Without that change, we will continue to bring children into socially and ecologically discriminatory conditions that make relative self-determination impossible.
Crucially, the zero baseline model accounts for how all of these things interrelate — for example, how the restoration of nature improves welfare, how improved welfare reduces inequity, how reduced inequity furthers democracy, etc. Zero is the point of interconnection, or intersection, of objective value and truly subjective choice.
To illustrate this: Studies show that temperature rise from the climate crisis is causing premature birth, which harms the affected children for life. So moving away from a zero, or pre-Anthropocene climate baseline, harms people. At the same time, it does not harm them equally. Rich people can offset the harms more than poor people through efforts like moving, healthcare, and nutrition. So the lack of an equal starting line — or zero baseline — compounds the harms through inequitable distribution. A climate policy of 300ppm or less, combined with Fair Start redistribution — both of which we have specific policies to ensure — is moving toward a zero baseline, or ecosocial fair start in life.
And because this zero baseline proceeds any other norm or rule, it overrides them, enabling us to further it by all means effective. This last part is key to how the model enables reform, because that override can apply to property rights, allowing us to distribute Fair Start resources and incentives over the baseless defenses of the concentrations of power hoarding those resources. In practice, this entails merging the margins, or progressively redistributing the resources (money here is a proxy for power) from the most to the least influential communities through family planning reform to eventually create smaller, more inclusive, and better communities.
What Does This Mean in Practice?
Would-be parents at the bottom of the pyramid of social influence who want to give their future child a fair start in life have an overriding claim to the resources concentrated at the top and may secure those resources by all means effective. Concentrations of power, both private and public, will wish to prevent implementation of the zero baseline model, which limits and decentralizes their power. They will choose policies that favor growth and inequity, preferring to pit people and generations against one another. The organization HavingKids.org was created to help would-be parents and anyone who takes social justice seriously to overcome those concentrations of power, and achieve changes that will have exponentially greater impact on the crises we face today than the alternatives being proposed. We do so in dozens of ways, some of which are described here.
Controversially, the ZBM sets up new borders for liberating political conflict. Per the model, we have to reform family-planning policies in order to be free or operate in relative states of self-determination. No system is legitimate without this change, any more than it would with the absence of free speech. And we do not have to follow the laws of an unjust system. Unlike other and more static explanations for why a system is just or unjust, Fair Start provides the best reason of all: Under that model, we would have been created by an objective, or fair, creator.
In other words, systems must create people in a way that intentionally includes, empowers, equalizes, and frees them, or we may overcome it. As such, the model intentionally divides people between those who would use the ZBM or similar modeling to constitute new political entities that ensure freedom — in the form of minimum levels of welfare and equality of opportunity for all kids, regenerative environments, and the assurance that all have an effective voice in their systems of governance — and those people who are opposed (who we might call “precons”) and who, as such, stand as the fundamental threat to freedom.
To identify the latter, just assess a person’s position in the pyramidic structures of power and test what they are doing to further or impede the values described above: Do they advocate pushing more and more people into the world through failing educational, health, and other systems of development so they can exploit them as consumers, workers, taxpayers?
Abandoning our current and decoying categories, like the political left and right, and using the ZBM to identify the relatively few people alive today who truly prevent freedom by opposing the model and thereby subjugating the two most numerous and vulnerable categories of entities — future persons and nonhumans — is the key to overcoming that oppression. To confront these oppressors and challenge them to engage in Fair Start reforms, we only need to find would-be parents who are willing to fulfill their part of the intergenerational social contract by agreeing to participate in a cooperative family-planning system focused on the objective needs of future children. These would-be parents can – ex-ante – demand that the targeted concentrations of power fulfill their part of the contract. In that struggle, the model acts as a baseline to determine exactly how much those concentrations of power owe. And in that struggle, the would-be parents will be met with the violence those concentrations of power and the state will employ to defend their unjust position as they elevate property over people. That is the process of constituting.
We can promote freedom through better family planning models in a variety of ways, from lobbying public officials to incentivize collectively investing more in kids, to urging public figures to role-model sustainable families, to helping responsible parents speak out against poor family planning systems that threaten our and our kids’ futures.
Learn more at HavingKids.org and join us in the fight for true freedom.
The voices of animal-rights advocates have become more prominent in social justice circles, and The New Republic magazine recently pondered whether animal rights is the next frontier of the left. It’s inescapable, the argument goes, because animal rights overlap with other key elements of the progressive agenda, including environmental protection, social justice, the ravages of capitalism, and more. But loud voices are often misleading.
Over the past several decades, the extent to which humans are driving animals into extinction, consuming them through massive factory farms, and experimenting on them in research labs has only skyrocketed.
Why? Because poor family planning has driven an explosion in human population over the past several decades. In that time, billions more of our species has overrun, tortured, and destroyed other species. And while many animal protection organizations raise money through claims of success, we have all failed animals if we haven’t accounted for the overwhelming negative impact of humankind’s poor family planning policies.
What can we do to change course and create real success?
The first step entails reenvisioning animal rights and liberation in terms of the most aspirational versions of those concepts. Animals have a right to live and develop autonomously in the nonhuman world, truly liberated from human oppression. To ensure that requires universal family planning reforms that promote smaller and more equitable families for all of us. These reforms will leave room on our planet for nonhumans and will ensure the high levels of empathy in future generations that nonhumans need us to have in order to live and develop. That constitutes true animal rights and veganism. Veganism is not just another way to be a consumer. It’s the natural evolution of a truly inclusive form of social justice that marries animal, environmental, and human rights by moving from archaic and divisive approaches that involve welfare and aesthetics to a unifying approach that focuses on the simple limitation and decentralization of human power.
One of the best parts? These policies are a win-win for humans as well. They ensure greater investment in each child, finally achieving the human-rights ideal of fair starts in life for all, smaller and truly democratic communities where each voice matters more, and the highest standard of environmental protection possible. Now that’s effective altruism. Had early animal-rights advocates insisted we protect nonhuman autonomy and treat the environment more as a nonhuman habitat than as a human resource, we could have avoided the climate crisis.
Want to help animals? Go beyond being a consumer in a humanized world. Focus on the people with whom nonhumans will interact. Lock arms with other social justice movements that protect future children, equity, and the restoration of nature. And bend the qualitative arc of our species’ growth trajectory to liberate humans and nonhumans at the same time. Envision a better future — and focus on family planning reform to build it.
Take action: If you support an animal protection organization, ensure that it signs this simple letter to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urging him to adopt Fair Start family planning reforms as essential to the international bill of human rights. If the organizations you support do not publicly take a position on family planning reform, ask them why not and urge them to. There is no legitimate form of animal protection that would allow our species to overrun all others.
