Category Archives: Equity

Related to the fairness of distribution of goods, opportunities, and processes.

Country X has no right to exist!

Feel free to insert any country’s name in the title according to your personal preferences or animosities. My initial instinct was to go for click-bait and title the article, “Israel has no right to exist”. This would be sure to inflame the passions of all the Israelis who condemn as antisemites anyone who asserts Israel’s lack of a right to exist. Then I thought about using “Taiwan”, “The United States of America”—too long—“China”, “Russia”, “France”…. It really doesn’t matter. Countries do not have a “right” to exist.

Countries either do exist or they don’t. Taiwan exists. Israel exists. Palestine lacks the functional sovereignty—control over borders, defence, foreign policy—that defines statehood. Should its people have the right to functional sovereignty? Absolutely.

My father once observed that there is nothing he found more frightening than a sudden proliferation of national flags. I heard the comedienne Sarah Silverman make the same observation. Flags connote nationalism, and nationalism distinguishes itself by being in opposition to a defined “other”—the quintessential thing that distinguishes us from you. It entitles us to have things and deny them to you, and take things from you without regard to your interests.

Nationalists do not look at other countries as having rights. They look at other countries as a wolf eyes a flock of sheep—an opportunity. Of course if the other country is a bear, they may need to be more circumspect, but even a bear can make a great rug.

Nationalism rest on mythic history to instrumentalise the population towards the leader’s ends, not the people’s interests. Now imagine a world in which, as the US seeks in its National Security Strategy 2025, all countries revive their mythic histories. No country will choose the history of the time when they were weakest, a vassal state or worse, completely absorbed. They will pick historical points of grandeur. Mongolia will claim vast swathes of Russia, China, and Central Asia—and rightly so! Turkey will recall it historical right to the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. Who amongst us would not acknowledge Italy’s historical claim on England, France, Spain, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Israel. Neither China nor Russia have need for further over-reach on their territorial claims, but they could. Russia tells the tale of a sovereign need for a Pan-Slavic State that gobbles up Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Egypt should certainly need to have it’s Pharaonic claim to the Levant recognised. Spain will eye its Western hemisphere territories with delight and return to discussions of the Holy Roman Empire. Morocco can start planning it’s revitalisation of Andalusia. Denmark will talk of the glory days when Schleswig-Holstein was not enough—when the North Sea Empire under Cnut the Great included England, Norway, and parts of Sweden. Sweden will promote a modern Baltic State reclaiming its rightful territories in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and parts of Germany. Will France want to revisit the Louisiana Purchase? I think it should. Ecuador, Bolivia or probably Peru can sound the drums for a revitalised Incan empire. Once Burma has dealt with its pesky insurgency it can turn its eye to former glory: Thailand, Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Indonesia’s Majapahit claim to Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, and the Philippines is entirely justified.

I would like to remind you all that when my ancestors stepped out of Africa, wherever their descendants placed their feet is mine to claim. And maybe this should be a new Pan-African myth of global capture.

Each of these claims rooted in a novelist’s fantasy of historical pride permits leaders to instrumentalise the young as warriors and breeders. And the foolish among us will swell our chests with the false pride of false histories.

For this story shall the good man teach his son;
And a national day shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
Our claim shall be remembered.

If you walk past a United Nations building you will see flags of every nation fluttering. The message is not of history but future shared endeavour.

The sole purpose of a country is to advance the welfare of the people circumscribed by its borders—citizens and non-citizens. When leaders start to instrumentalise the population—treat them asmeans to the leader’s personal ends and ambition—they fail.

Countries come and go. The people are constant: tilling, toiling, and typing. If they choose to come together in unity within a geographic area, that is their right. They may expand that boundary with the consent of those around, and contract it on a similar basis. It cannot be a whimsical destabilising thing that would instrumentalise the lives of others. It needs thoughtful deliberation that takes into account the rights and duties of all. The purpose is welfare—full stop. Not glory. Not destiny. Not at the expense of others.

With apologies to William Shakespeare for butchering the lines from Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3

Viewpoint Therapy—Getting Identity Right

It was a bland, beige waiting room. John approached the receptionist’s desk. He felt awkward and uncomfortable—the awkwardness of a teenager doing something embarrassing while knowing that people were watching and judging. The waiting room was empty except for the receptionist and John’s mother, who had nudged him towards the desk while she took a seat.

I’m here to see Dr Childs he mumbled, fingering the cuff of his shirt. Sure hon, the receptionist smiled. You have a seat and she’ll be with your shortly.

He sat down next to his mother and thumbed nervously through a brochure he’d taken from the coffee table in the middle of the room—“Viewpoint Therapy – Helping Teens Explore Their Authentic Identity”. The pictures were soothing images of sunrises and beaches. On the third page was a head shot of Child’s. She had a slight smile and warm eyes. John’s mind flitted briefly to what the rest of her body might look like. A brief paragraph described Child’s approach to the healing journey: holistic, integrative, trauma-informed, grounded in mind–body connection, and authentic relationship building. Therapy was about creating a safe space for exploration. It was about meeting clients where they are, and about empowering growth through curiosity and compassion.

At the bottom of the back page in 4-point Helvetica was the disclaimer. None of our professionals are medically qualified. We engage in free speech at the rates displayed in our offices.

No one reads the fine print. John was no one.

Whether it was the pre-existing knot in his stomach or the gummy he’d had earlier, what John did read, he had to read twice. As his father liked to say, better informed but none the wiser. John definitely felt none the wiser.

One of the five doors coming off the waiting room opened and the full body version of the head shot appeared. John? Child’s inquired. John felt a slight twitch in his groin. His mother gave his shoulder a quick rub and a delicate push in Child’s direction. She smiled at Child’s who returned an acknowledging nod.

John and Childs had been dancing around for about thirty minutes. John had been fingering the shirt cuff on his right hand for almost the whole time. His head hung with embarrassment. It was only with occasional furtive looks he would see Child’s through his mop of brown hair.

The last thirty minutes had revealed John’s guilt and the shame. His almost constant thoughts about sex. His glances at girls breasts, necklines, buttocks, …. The slight (sometimes not so slight) tumescence. Oh My GOD—even now as he talked about it. The disgust with which he heard the girls whisper about it. Did you see….? Raucous giggles.

He loathed school.

His dad had seen him flipping through porn on his phone. His face flushed with the memory and with the memory of an almost instant desire to vomit.

And now he found himself in Child’s office.

Child’s knew she was at a difficult point in the therapeutic relationship. Teenagers are volatile. A soup of emotions and feelings. Sharp morals and jagged thinking.

Feelings of shame and disgust were normal, she said. In some ways they were appropriate. Looking at girls in class like that wasn’t right. Understandable? Maybe. Not here to judge. Here to help.

Now seemed to be the appropriate moment.

Your mom mentioned that you wanted to be gay. You want to escape that sense of shame and disgust about yourself. But you think of yourself as straight—a cis, hetero-normative cliche. You just can’t help but find girls attractive. It’s like that attraction is just a part of who you are. Something innate. It is so “you” that you cannot begin to imagine it being otherwise—and the shame and guilt.

John nodded. But you can’t just be gay, he said. I like being around other guys, but I’m just not attracted to them.

I think I can help you with that, Child’s said.

Six months later John was back in the same beige waiting room. Jessica—he now knew the receptionists name—waved him to take a seat.

John had lost weight. His clothes hung baggily. He glanced down and spotted the edge of a thin red wound near his left cuff. He pulled the sleeve down a little further.

Child’s appeared, smiled encouragingly and waved him into her office.

She looked winsomely disappointed. I’ll have to let your parents know, she explained. John was giving up on therapy. Giving up on himself.

Obviously any details were confidential, she reassured his slightly panicked look. But they do need to know you’ve decided to discontinue your healing. John could feel the sub-text: you’ll return to shameful, furtive looks at girl’s necklines. They’d never really gone away, John admitted to himself.

The process had started so well she reflected. Your faith … leaning on God. We had prayed together, here and then you with you family. There was such strength and hope. We had talked strategy. Then Luke had shown real interest when you had approached him. I thought you were making a real break through, then you pulled back. I think you used the word, “revolted” or was it “nauseous”?

Part of you obviously wanted to be gay. I could see it. Literally. You had it written on your forearms in hairline cuts. You thought I hadn’t noticed? Of course I had. It’s common. It was you rejecting the self attracted to girls—you were punishing it. If only….

I’m sorry we couldn’t complete your healing together, John. When you’re ready, my door is always open. I know that with faith and love you can do it.

Oral argument in the case of Chiles v. Salazar was heard by the US Supreme Court on 7 October 2025. The case was about the constitutionality of a Colorado law that prevented a therapist engaging in talk-based sexual-identity conversion therapy. Essentially, the argument was that banning the therapist (Chiles, a medically unqualified therapist) from engaging in talk therapy to convert a child from gay to straight sexual infringed the First Amendment—a denial of Chiles’s right to free speech. The argument hinged on the idea that therapeutic speech remains speech and thus, protected.

It was only Associate Justice Elena Kagan who inquired briefly about the protection offered by the First Amendment if the therapist was converting a child from straight to gay.

The problem with the free speech argument is that it gives cover to significant harm. Let me quote from a statement by an independent expert group published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

Conversion therapy is a set of practices that aim to change or alter an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It is practiced in every region of the world by health professionals, religious practitioners, and community or family members often by or with the support of the state. Conversion therapy is performed despite evidence that it is ineffective and likely to cause individuals significant or severe physical and mental pain and suffering with long-term harmful effects.

That statement is about effectiveness, and the Supreme Court case is about the law.

The Court will rule in favour of Chiles. Talk-based therapy, they will say, is protected by the First Amendment. The court has often ruled that significant harm is protected by the law—see all the Second Amendment cases on the right to keep and bear arms. They would not, for a scintilla of a second, uphold Justice Kagan’s hypothetical. Conversion is only free speech in one direction and harm doesn’t matter.

The Holocaust Indulgence

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church sold indulgences—forgiveness of sin in exchange for money. The most famous indulgence-seller was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who promoted them with the catchy jingle: “As soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs”. And for the right price, Tetzel hinted, you could purchase forgiveness in advance—a moral insurance policy against judgement for tomorrow’s transgressions.

Tetzel’s theological snake oil was the ultimate fuel for the Protestant Reformation.

Today, we are all witnesses to a modern version of the indulgence, the Holocaust indulgence. No longer is money used to purchase forgiveness for future sin. Instead, the Holocaust indulgence trades on the deaths of six million Jews murdered by Germany between 1941 and 1945.

It is a moral license for genocide. Where Holocaust remembrance was once a shield against atrocity, a reminder of the constant need for vigilance against dehumanising hatred, it is now wielded as a sword to enable atrocities.

Not all Israelis are Jews; about a quarter of Israelis are not. And not all Jews are Israelis; just over half of the world’s Jews are not Israeli. Yet, Israel has worked carefully and decisively to conflate the two. It encourages the conversational mistake of saying Jews when what is meant is Israel or Israelis when what is meant is Jews. It is the keystone to the false claim that any attempt to hold Israel to account for its behaviour is a form of antisemitism, the false claim that to label Israel a racist state, an apartheid state, a colonial state, or a genocidal state is equivalent to calling for a pogrom against Jews. It is not.

European collective guilt for the centuries of antisemitism that culminated in the death of six million Jews is the grant of the Holocaust indulgence. They have allowed the State of Israel to trade on the death of six million people, many of whom would not have identified themselves as Jews until Germany did, many of whom would have abhorred the idea of genocide in their name.

Israel wields the Holocaust indulgence as a prophylactic absolution—a moral insurance policy that permits future transgressions in the name of “never again”. European governments grant it as a way of atonement for centuries of antisemitism. We have two different relationships to guilt, flowing in opposite temporal directions, yet both transactions use the same currency—the death of six million—to absolve modern atrocities.

The result is a closed, corrupted moral system where accountability becomes impossible. Israel can invoke the Holocaust to justify its actions, while Europe remembers its (justified) guilt to excuse its inaction or indirect support. Between them, they have created the perfect indulgence—one that absolves both past and future sin, leaving the present moment suspended in a moral vacuum where atrocity is not just permitted but sanctified.

Like Tetzel’s theological snake oil, the Holocaust indulgence has corrupted the very memory it claims to honour, transforming remembrance from a call to justice into a license for injustice.

The Hanging Garden of Human Rights

Human rights haven’t failed because they’re irrelevant. They’ve failed because they’re a hanging garden—detached from moral roots, stretched by competing claims, and hollowed out by politics. It’s time to reclaim the foundation.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, health and human rights was emerging. But the field carried intellectual divisions. On one side were the public health practitioners—many without legal training—who used the language of “rights” as a cry for decency. Rights, for them, became a sharper way of saying “ought” or “should”—signalling fairness and ethical urgency.

To the lawyers, this was infuriating. When they spoke of rights, they weren’t talking about moral gestures. They were talking about the law—about using legal instruments to empower action. What do treaties require of duty bearers? How do we hold them to account? General Comment 14 wasn’t a metaphor. It was a legal tool—an authoritative interpretation of the right to health under international law.

While the lawyers stayed with “human rights,” others drifted towards a more explicit discussion of equity, fairness, and (natural) justice. The split revealed a foundational problem. Human rights—the narrower legal and procedural endeavour—had become crucially detached from the ethical instincts that once animated the field.

The narrowing of human rights to law provided rigour, but lost moral reach. And as states learned to ignore legal obligations with impunity, what remained was often hollow. Public health had a moral language without teeth. Law had a legal language with contradictions and a weak ethical foundation.

Today, the international human rights framework is fraying—and in danger of complete collapse. It’s not a failure of aspiration. It’s a failure of structure.

We appeal to fairness, but we disagree on what fairness means. We invoke rights, but the legal instruments offer an incoherent and contradictory account of what grounds them. And when rights collide—speech versus protection, work versus life—we have no principled way to resolve the conflict.

Too often, the international human rights framework is treated as if it’s free-floating. The rights are asserted without grounding, and negotiated without foundation. We’ve built a symbolic garden of human dignity, but it hangs untethered—detached from root and soil.

What we need, I contend, is a moral structure beneath the legal scaffolding. Something that explains not just what rights exist, but why they matter—even when they’re inconvenient, unpopular, or costly.

A Different Kind of Foundation

The traditional approach to grounding human rights is to seek a foundation in reason, drawing on various traditions of moral philosophy. Yet each of these traditions—necessarily, though often implicitly—relies on a set of foundational assumptions that themselves demand justification. For example, John Rawls, working within the liberal contractarian tradition, assumes that morality can be derived from radical impartiality (the “veil of ignorance”). John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, as utilitarians, treat utility—happiness—as the basis of moral judgment. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian rooted in natural law, posits God not merely as a theological claim but as a rational necessity. Immanuel Kant, the deontologist and perhaps the most rigorously reason-driven of all, grounds morality in the capacity for rational self-governance—the idea that to be moral is to act only on principles one could will as universal law.

Unfortunately, reasoning our way to good behaviour does not seem to have worked.

An Axiomatic Approach

An alternative approach is to work backwards. Rather than deducing rights from reason, we ask: what must be true for rights to make sense at all?

Three axioms emerge:

Inherent Dignity

Every human being possesses inherent dignity. It’s not something to be earned, granted, or achieved—it’s a moral condition intrinsic to personhood. Dignity doesn’t fluctuate with ability, social contribution, or behaviour. It’s not comparative. It doesn’t admit degrees. It is equal and inviolable.

Individual Welfare

Dignity, while inviolable, is not self-executing. The social and legal order must promote the material, psychological, and social welfare of individuals—so they can live, develop, and participate meaningfully. Without these conditions, dignity is betrayed in practice, even if affirmed in theory.

Constraint on Expendability

No one is expendable. Lives cannot be sacrificed for the convenience or benefit of others—except under conditions of compelling and justified moral necessity, subject to strict and transparent constraint. Where institutions permit suffering for efficiency, or render individuals invisible in pursuit of “greater goods,” moral collapse has already occurred.

These aren’t ideals. They are constraints. They don’t define utopia. They define a moral floor beneath which no system can fall and still claim legitimacy.

Axioms to Rights and Duties

From these axioms, rights and duties follow:

From dignity comes the right to recognition, and the duty to respect others as full moral equals.
From welfare comes the right to the conditions for flourishing, and a duty to assist when the need is real and the cost is bearable.
From non-expendability comes the right not to be sacrificed, and a duty of restraint—to avoid complicity in systems that treat people as disposable.

These are not grounded in legal agreement. They are grounded in the foundational, moral necessity.

Once one begins to play with this axiomatic approach, what fast becomes clear is that the state, as a moral agent, has been miscast in international law. The state is not a de facto rights-holder, nor is it a source for the rights of others. The state is a duty bearer—nothing more.

The state exists to protect dignity, promote welfare, and prevent expendability. When it fails to do this—systematically, persistently—its legitimacy erodes. Its existence is not self-justifying; i.e., the purpose fo the state is not to perpetuate its own existence. Its existence is contingent.

This flows from the axioms, and reframes the conversation: human beings do not have moral standing because the state recognises them. The state has standing only to the extent that it honours the people within its reach. This is not anti-state. But it is deeply sceptical of the idea that the state’s authority is morally primary. It isn’t. People are.

When Systems Fail

The axiomatic approach is pluralistic, but it is not permissive. Some systems are structurally incompatible with these axioms. For example, autocracies treat rights as contingent on loyalty or usefulness. Dissent is punished not because it is wrong, but because it defies power. Theocracies, in contrast, base human worth on belief and compliance to doctine. The person becomes secondary to divine law—as interpreted, of course, by the state. In both autocratic and theocratic systems, rights are conditional. Recognition is revocable. Worth is earned.

The axioms say otherwise. Dignity is inherent. Welfare is required. No one may be discarded.

It would be wrong to claim that the axioms are an expression of “Western values.” The expression of these kinds of ideas can be found across tradition in Asia, Africa, and the pre-colonial America. They are put forth as minimum moral thresholds. The test isn’t, thus, one of cultural conformity to some putative “Western” ideal. The test is whether the system respects the moral worth of the people within it.

Against Relativism. And Democracy.

Some people will simply not agree with the axioms. They will argue that certain groups—racial, ethnic, religious—are less than, sub-human. That outsiders are un-deserving. That dissenters are worthless. Life is to be instrumentalised for some other end.

Relativism, when pushed far enough, accommodates this. It permits anything, so long as it is “culturally accepted.”

The axioms say: no. Some practices are beyond justification.

Nor do the axioms necessarily support democracy. Majority rule is not a moral guarantee. A vote to discard a minority is still a failure. Democratic decisions must be constrained by moral principles.

Power alone is not a justification, whether the source of that power is autocratic, theocratic, or democratic. Justification is determined by what power does. Too often, might is blight.

Holding the Line

The axioms emerged from a simple realisation. Many communities, political parties, and even nations now openly argue that the value of other people’s lives lies only in how useful they are to the ambitions of those with power. The human rights framework is under siege—not just from external enemies, but from those who claim to defend it. You can see this everyday in the statements and actions of leaders (and wanna-be leaders) around the world. Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central, South and East Asia, Oceania and the Americas—everywhere leaders seek to treat some group as “other”. “Those people”—outsiders, the un-deserving—are no longer means to allowed to be the means to their own ends, they are the means to ours.

States invoke rights while violating them. Institutions look stable but are morally hollow.

The axioms of dignity, welfare, and non-expendability do not resolve every conflict. But they clarify the ground. They give us a framework to test law, policy, ideology—and to know when a system has failed, even if it looks orderly.

You can read the full account, with examples and theoretical detail, in the preprint on SocArXiv:

But the core is simple:

People matter. Their lives must be livable. And they cannot be discarded.

I am shocked these ideas are up for debate.

This blog was first published on 24 May 2025 and further edited on 7 June 2025