Sentientism | "The right to a fair start in life" - Carter Dillard of Fair Start Movement - Ep:99 @Sentientism | Uploaded March 2022 | Updated October 2024, 29 minutes ago.
Carter Dillard (linkedin.com/in/carter-dillard-a65bb376/) is Policy Director and Board Member of the Fair Start Movement (twitter.com/FairStartOrg & fairstartmovement.org/), an organisation dedicated to giving every child a fair start in life.
He is the author of the book "Justice as a Fair Start in Life". Carter began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as in peer-reviewed pieces.. He has served on the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford. He has taught at several law schools in the U.S., served as a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, and most recently managed an animal protection strategic impact litigation program.
In Sentientist Conversations we 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: apple.co/391khQO & pod.link/1540408008.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:21 Carter's Intro
- Fair Start Movement: Shifting family planning from prioritising the desires of parents to prioritising the needs of future children
- Achieving the SDGs
- A future of 4-6 billion humans vs. 12-14 billion
- Economic growth & inequity & ecosystem factors
- The right to a fair start in life
03:54 What's Real?
- Naturalistically based civil rights
- Rejecting the flawed "science" used to justify discrimination
- Truth & justice
- "Scientific justifications for the denigrations of non-humans also fell apart under scrutiny"
- Reading Peter Singer. Applying civil rights lessons to animal rights
- Exploring the human population issue
- Suffering, flourishing & relative autonomy
- Climate/environment limitations on autonomy & flourishing
- "Science had become god" & a naturalistic family
- "What we've learned about non-human cognition really should embarrass decades & decades of human living as completely unethical"
- "It's our children, grandchildren &great-grandchildren that will suffer the most because we've failed to respect the non-human world"
- Nagel's "View from nowhere"... "we all mutually agree to avoid that pain... that doesn't require supernatural grounding"
- Systemic failures in law & early education
14:25 What Matters?
- Naturalistic ethics
- Social contract ethics
- "Would you consent to that?"
- Child-centric family planning & the conditions of early childhood
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Descriptive & normative ethics
- Suffering & flourishing vs. autonomy & freedom
- Defining target populations defined qualitatively, not quantitatively, by maximising relative self-determination
- As groups grow, self-determination reduces & subdivision is required
- "Being able to look someone else in the eye as an equal" requires welfare, equity, participatory democracy, ecological health
- Is the individual best placed to assess their wellbeing & decide what to do about that? Hence the importance of freedom
- Fair Start is a reaction to a mistake "Viewing the act of... having children as an act of self-determination for the parents" vs. considering the child
- Anti-vaxx & anti-mask ideas that "freedom means doing whatever I want"
- Instead, freedom is a capacity to act in a "town-hall setting"
28:54 Who Matters?
- Human civil rights
- Reading PETA literature, Singer, utilitarianism, reducing suffering
- Restoring the non-human world
- Skepticism re: social norms & untruths & power structures
- A lightbulb moment
- Veganism & Sentientism
- "The precautionary principle requires scientists show that they're not harming a sentient entity"
- Reverse the anthropocene & our over-run
- Social utility "Meth is valuable on the open market but it doesn't mean meth is actually valuable"
- Children & non-humans as "uniquely vulnerable populations"
- Joel Feinberg
- We fail to anticipate the participation of future children in our "functional town hall"
42:52 How Can We Make a Better World?
- Making children empathetic & small, functional democracies
- Negative views of humanity. Ecofascism. Antinatalism
- Trust & fairness enable more compassionate, naturalistic norms
...And much more - see Sentientism.info for full show notes.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
Thanks Graham! twitter.com/cgbessellieu
Carter Dillard (linkedin.com/in/carter-dillard-a65bb376/) is Policy Director and Board Member of the Fair Start Movement (twitter.com/FairStartOrg & fairstartmovement.org/), an organisation dedicated to giving every child a fair start in life.
He is the author of the book "Justice as a Fair Start in Life". Carter began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as in peer-reviewed pieces.. He has served on the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project and was a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford. He has taught at several law schools in the U.S., served as a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, and most recently managed an animal protection strategic impact litigation program.
In Sentientist Conversations we 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: apple.co/391khQO & pod.link/1540408008.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:21 Carter's Intro
- Fair Start Movement: Shifting family planning from prioritising the desires of parents to prioritising the needs of future children
- Achieving the SDGs
- A future of 4-6 billion humans vs. 12-14 billion
- Economic growth & inequity & ecosystem factors
- The right to a fair start in life
03:54 What's Real?
- Naturalistically based civil rights
- Rejecting the flawed "science" used to justify discrimination
- Truth & justice
- "Scientific justifications for the denigrations of non-humans also fell apart under scrutiny"
- Reading Peter Singer. Applying civil rights lessons to animal rights
- Exploring the human population issue
- Suffering, flourishing & relative autonomy
- Climate/environment limitations on autonomy & flourishing
- "Science had become god" & a naturalistic family
- "What we've learned about non-human cognition really should embarrass decades & decades of human living as completely unethical"
- "It's our children, grandchildren &great-grandchildren that will suffer the most because we've failed to respect the non-human world"
- Nagel's "View from nowhere"... "we all mutually agree to avoid that pain... that doesn't require supernatural grounding"
- Systemic failures in law & early education
14:25 What Matters?
- Naturalistic ethics
- Social contract ethics
- "Would you consent to that?"
- Child-centric family planning & the conditions of early childhood
- Naturalistic fallacy
- Descriptive & normative ethics
- Suffering & flourishing vs. autonomy & freedom
- Defining target populations defined qualitatively, not quantitatively, by maximising relative self-determination
- As groups grow, self-determination reduces & subdivision is required
- "Being able to look someone else in the eye as an equal" requires welfare, equity, participatory democracy, ecological health
- Is the individual best placed to assess their wellbeing & decide what to do about that? Hence the importance of freedom
- Fair Start is a reaction to a mistake "Viewing the act of... having children as an act of self-determination for the parents" vs. considering the child
- Anti-vaxx & anti-mask ideas that "freedom means doing whatever I want"
- Instead, freedom is a capacity to act in a "town-hall setting"
28:54 Who Matters?
- Human civil rights
- Reading PETA literature, Singer, utilitarianism, reducing suffering
- Restoring the non-human world
- Skepticism re: social norms & untruths & power structures
- A lightbulb moment
- Veganism & Sentientism
- "The precautionary principle requires scientists show that they're not harming a sentient entity"
- Reverse the anthropocene & our over-run
- Social utility "Meth is valuable on the open market but it doesn't mean meth is actually valuable"
- Children & non-humans as "uniquely vulnerable populations"
- Joel Feinberg
- We fail to anticipate the participation of future children in our "functional town hall"
42:52 How Can We Make a Better World?
- Making children empathetic & small, functional democracies
- Negative views of humanity. Ecofascism. Antinatalism
- Trust & fairness enable more compassionate, naturalistic norms
...And much more - see Sentientism.info for full show notes.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall sentientism.info/wall/.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g: facebook.com/groups/sentientism.
Thanks Graham! twitter.com/cgbessellieu
