Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.
Carter Dillard began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice, eventually practicing national security law with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security where he developed a human-rights approach to family planning published by Yale Law School that would have significantly mitigated the climate crisis. At NYU he wrote his thesis, on that approach, under Jeremy Waldron.
Carter has also served as a peer-reviewer for the journal Bioethics, as part of the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project, and as Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.
In 2023, Carter became a whistleblower in a Newsweek op-ed showing wrongdoing, around measuring climate reparations, in U.S. climate litigation.
Carter is author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life (Eliva Press, 2021), which explores what is the called the "constitutive fallacy"—basing one's obligation to follow the law on top-down instruments like written constitutions rather than bottom-up family reforms that actually empower people in a measurable way, and enable them to physically constitute - under the Children's Convention - legitimate societies. His book reveals what's called the #FamScam.
What is the #FamScam?
Civil society organizations have been knowingly undoing claimed progress with outdated family policies that disempowered most people in order to—per one Nobel Laureate - grow economies that benefitted a few. That undoing of democracy fundamentally created the climate and inequity crises we face today. Take action and urge any group you support to tell the #wholetruth about the impact of family policies on their progress, and to adopt internal employment policies that start to change this.While the pro-choice lobby and legal maneuvering meant to protect the right to terminate a pregnancy has focused on women’s bodily autonomy, there are actually at least three interests at stake in that decision: 1) Women’s bodily autonomy, 2) the interests of the future child (not the fetus, but the child that would have otherwise existed), and 3) the interests of society more generally. As a safe rule of thumb if a mother does not want to have a child, interests two and three are not going to go very well.
And while women’s bodily autonomy is crucial, interests two and three actually precede it because that autonomy occurs after and within the formation of society—which is the thing two and three account for.
Animals do not benefit from human population growth. Why do their advocates promote it?
Animal rights, as a social movement, has largely failed. During a time when advocates promoted flashy “wins” like ballot initiatives, animal use skyrocketed based on pro-growth policies that most animal advocates did nothing to oppose, even as those policies were being ramped up and crucial funding that could have blunted the climate crisis was being redirected to ineffective uses.
Climate activists around the world have spent years urging the courts to force governments and companies to do more to mitigate the climate crisis, often invoking fundamental human rights as a way to override the political processes that are failing to act. Many of those cases center on the idea that there is a constitutional right to a healthy environment, which courts should be protecting. Often the heart of this approach – embodied in litigation brought by groups like Our Children's Trust (OCT) - is defined by what would be good for humans, an anthropocentric approach, rather than what would be good for the vast and disparate number of more fragile nonhuman species with whom we share the world.
The trolley problem is a story philosophers often use to get people thinking about ethics and their obligations to others. Traditionally, the problem has us imagine we are an onlooker standing next to a trolley track. There are five people tied to the track ahead of a moving trolley. We have the choice to save the five by pulling a lever and diverting the trolley to another track. But there is someone tied to that other track. If we pull the lever, we save the five, but the trolley will certainly kill the one person.
What's the right thing to do?
Many nonprofits raised billions of dollars over the last several decades claiming to have protected various ecosystems, saved animals from factory farms, hauled children out of dangerous conditions, or improved human rights and democracy.
Media ran thousands of stories containing stealth advertising, claiming reductions in climate emissions from things like dietary change, or energy conversions, while simultaneously pushing women to have more kids in order to grow the unsustainable economies relied upon by their advertisers and parent companies.
Businesses sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising their green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and other claims.
“Heidegger wants us to recapture the sense of people as unique and valuable, and this seems like the central argument of Dillard’s book.”
How did we ever come to believe in the myth of intentional, just and legitimate systems of social organization—like states, corporations, and families—without actually accounting for the fair creation, development and consensual inclusion of future generations—the majority of persons—into those systems? How is consent, or self-determination, possible without that account? What norm could possibly precede that account?
These articles—several peer-reviewed and originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other universities—will argue that, abstraction aside, there is no real justice without ensuring all children a fair start in life, both socially and ecologically.
We first move towards justice by reforming the moral and legal right to have children, and the family planning systems the right creates, around zero baseline —or Fair Start—modeling that through collective child-centric planning enables consent to power and thus relative self-determination against the true baseline of nonpolity. Without it, we never orient our actions from a just, or inclusive and reflective, position.
In "Sentientist Conversations" Jamie Woodhouse and Carter Dillard talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings."
The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://pod.link/1540408008.
Jack Humphrey: Give us a synopsis of your piece in Newsweek.
Carter Dillard: So there are really at least two ways to approach environmentalism and protecting our environment. There's the anthropocentric approach, which treats nature as a human resource and resources to be conserved. And there's an ecocentric approach which treats nature or the non-human world as a living system that deserves its own rights and obligations to it because there are creatures that live there that have their own autonomous worlds, their own desires and their own lives, and inevitably anthropocentrism—or using the non-human world or nature as a human resource—is what created the climate crisis. It we thought we could control that system of use, we are unable to control it.
RIP SDG? Are the UN Sustainable Development Goals Enough to Save Us? (Scientists Warning Europe)
Tue, 15 November 2022, 18:00 – 20:00 GMT
Join Scientists Warning Europe for the third event in our Road to COP27 series.
This session includes a 45-minute panel discussion, followed by a 30-minute Q&A session where attendees are invited to share ideas and explore topics further.
Panelists include:
• Ed Gemmell - Managing Director of Scientists Warning Europe, Climate Politician • Naomi Sheehan - Sustainable Development Scientist & Climate Advisor • Carter Dillard - Fair Start Movement Policy Advisor • Victoria Harvey - PhD researcher, Climate Change at University East Anglia • Steve Pipe - Author and former UK Entrepreneur of The Year
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U.S. prosecutors have charged more penalties for activists revealing blatant animal mistreatment than they have charged factory farms with committing it. This trend is a glaring miscarriage of justice, and it must be reversed.