Known, documented and ignored: Confronting the international politics of inaction
As the world focuses on the immense civilian toll in the Middle East, other crises continue to unfold with far less attention.
They are often described as “forgotten crises”, but that label is misleading. Conflicts across Africa are well documented and analysed, and they affect countless lives. What they lack is sustained action to address them — and the strategic interest needed to drive that action.
Across the African continent, wars and humanitarian crises are killing civilians, displacing millions and eroding already fragile institutions. At Human Rights Watch, we work in more than two dozen African countries documenting abuses and pressing for accountability. Over time, a clear pattern emerges. Whether in active war zones, entrenched authoritarian systems or geopolitically sensitive states, the outcome is often the same: immobilisation.
In active conflict settings such as the Sahel, Ethiopia and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the barriers are rooted in security narratives and shifting alliances. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are gripped by violence involving Islamist armed groups, government forces, local militias and foreign mercenaries. They routinely target, displace and kill civilians. In Burkina Faso, all parties are committing abuses that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet authorities dismiss criticism as a threat to national security, while international partners often prioritise counterterrorism and resource-driven cooperation over the protection of civilians.
In Ethiopia, hostilities persist between federal forces and armed groups in Amhara and parts of Oromia. Meanwhile, in Tigray, tensions escalate again in communities that are still reeling from the devastating 2020–2022 conflict and a resulting humanitarian crisis. In eastern Congo, Rwanda’s significant logistical and military support to the M23 armed group and the Congolese army’s funding and material assistance to the abusive Wazalendo militias intersects with entrenched regional and ethnic tensions. This layered complexity is often invoked as a convenient justification for inaction.
Then there are more consolidated authoritarian contexts, such as Burundi. Since a 2015 political crisis, the government has dismantled civic space and restricted free expression, political opposition and independent media. Elections continue, but without genuine competition. A similar pattern is emerging in Ethiopia, which is bracing for national elections in June, and in Rwanda, where journalists and opponents face detention, enforced disappearance or death. The challenge here is not the fog of war, but the normalisation of repression.
International actors often default to quiet diplomacy or disengagement, particularly when these situations no longer dominate headlines or for fear of alienating governments that could turn elsewhere for support.
Other under-scrutinised countries, such as Chad, reflect a similar trajectory, where last year’s politically motivated arrest of the former prime minister sounded the death knell of a meaningful democratic transition and was largely ignored.
Meanwhile, in Sudan and South Sudan, the scale of human suffering is staggering. Along with Congo, these crises account for at least 20 million internally displaced people. Yet global attention remains intermittent, where “atrocity fatigue” fails to sustain the will to respond. Immobilisation does not preserve the status quo; it deepens suffering. It allows abuses to persist and escalate, while emboldening perpetrators to refine their methods — from blockades of humanitarian aid in South Sudan to ethnic cleansing in Burkina Faso, northern Ethiopia and Sudan’s Darfur.
Despite their differences, these contexts converge on a single outcome: paralysis among those with the power to act. Governments deflect, allies equivocate and international institutions struggle to sustain pressure. For organisations like Human Rights Watch, the challenge is not only to document abuses, but to disrupt this inertia. Part of that inaction is a calculated choice.
Governments are often unwilling to incur political risk when it comes to Africa, aligning their strategic interests with those in power rather than human rights — leaving civilians to bear the cost. This requires adapting both research and advocacy strategies to the context. Evidence alone is rarely sufficient to spur action. Pairing documentation with the lived experiences of victims and witnesses helps cut through the indifference and reframe what is at stake.
Advocacy must also be tailored to political realities. In conflict settings, this may involve pressing international partners to condition military support on compliance with the laws of war. In authoritarian contexts, it may mean supporting targeted sanctions or amplifying the voices of local civil society. In geopolitically sensitive environments, change tends to be incremental — and persistence is essential.
Local organisations, journalists, regional bodies and international partners all play critical roles. Collaboration and humility are indispensable. Local individuals often bear the greatest risks and possess the deepest insights; their work should be supported and amplified.
Advocacy needs to evolve to counter shifting narratives. Claims of sovereignty or “Pan-Africanism” in order to dismiss criticism as external interference should not go unchallenged. Protecting human rights is not foreign to African priorities; it is central to them. Reclaiming that narrative is essential to counter efforts to delegitimise scrutiny.
These crises must also be understood within broader global dynamics. Rising authoritarianism, protracted conflicts and structural inequalities are interconnected and drive issues that command far greater international attention, from migration to regional instability. Drawing these connections can help re-engage policymakers who might otherwise look away. The forces that sustain inaction — strategic interests, political caution and fatigue — are deeply entrenched, but they are not immutable. Sustained, credible advocacy has shifted policies before, and it can do so again.
These are not “forgotten crises”. They are crises the world has repeatedly chosen not to act on. Changing that choice is the real challenge.
BY Carine Kaneza Nantulya
Carine Kaneza Nantulya is Africa deputy director and strategic planning adviser at Human Rights Watch.
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Behind the veil: When are we entitled to unmask the anonymous?
Anonymity can help people speak truth to power or remain safely out of the limelight. But it can also be used to avoid accountability. When should we have a right to know who someone really is?
Do you know the true identity of the elusive street artist, Banksy? What about the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto? Do you know the name of the person (or people) behind the notorious “Q” drops that drove the QAnon conspiracy movement?
If you are curious, the good news is that reporters have worked hard to unmask these hidden figures: a recent Reuters article claims to have definitively revealed the identity of Banksy; an exhaustive New York Times investigation purports to have pinpointed the man behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym; and a 2021 HBO documentary delves into the colourful characters that appear to have posted as Q.
But should we read these articles or watch this documentary? Are we entitled to know who they are? Or do the subjects deserve to remain anonymous?
There are some very good reasons why someone might want to remain anonymous. Anonymity can protect those who speak truth to power or express views that go against the dominant narrative. It’s a protective feature that allows journalists to uncover facts in the public interest without putting sources at risk. It enables people to voice opinions that can be judged on their merit without listeners being distracted by the messenger. It can also help people avoid the invasive limelight that inevitably surrounds anyone who draws the attention of the public eye.
However, the same shield of anonymity can also help people escape accountability for their actions.
Who says what
In a liberal society, each of us has a basic right to privacy. That means we have a right to restrict the distribution of personal information about us. That extends to a right to remain anonymous in spaces where our true identity isn’t required. But these are not inviolable rights; there will be circumstances where necessity or other factors override our right to remain anonymous.
One of those factors is that, sometimes, people need to know who is saying something in order to know whether it’s legitimate or not. There’s a big difference between some random person on the street declaring you “guilty” and a judge in a courtroom doing the same thing. Similarly, it’s important to know that the person giving you advice on drug dosage is a certified medical professional rather than someone’s unqualified uncle (a point that is often overlooked in online discourse).
This is why it was arguably justified to unmask Q, who purported to be an operative within the United States government. Their very name implied they had Q clearance, which gives access to highly classified information. If they were not who they said they were, people would likely have seen their posts in a very different light.
Had Q been making statements that were in the public interest, such as leaking evidence of serious wrongdoing by the government, then it might justify maintaining anonymity to protect their safety. However, many of Q’s posts gave demonstrably false information and fuelled destructive conspiracy theories, so there was good reason to override anonymity and seek to reveal their identity.
Public interest is a key test when deciding whether it’s justified to override someone’s wish to remain anonymous. However, public interest doesn’t just mean whatever the public is interested in, it means information that is of benefit to the public.
In the case of Satoshi Nakamoto, one of the journalists responsible for seeking his true identity stated that it was in the public interest to do so:
“One of the most significant inventors of the past century was unknown. That didn’t seem right to me. Eighteen months ago, I decided enough was enough. I needed to know who this person was, and I felt strongly that the public should too.”
But was it really necessary to know the name of the individual who invented Bitcoin? Unlike Q, it was the message that Nakamoto had that was important, not the messenger. The Bitcoin architecture could have been written by anyone and it would have still had the same impact. Just because people are intensely curious about who the inventor was doesn’t necessarily justify overriding their desire for anonymity.
Held to account
However, sometimes it’s important to know who someone is because they need to be held accountable for the influence they have. If Nakamoto were the CEO of a major technology company, we would want to have a way to question him about his intentions or to criticise bad decisions. However, once the Bitcoin paper was published, its operation is entirely out of Nakamoto’s hands. That doesn’t mean the individual behind the pseudonym might not be involved in Bitcoin businesses today. But in that case, we just hold them accountable for their actions in their current role.
There is one dimension that one could argue is in the public interest: some estimates say Nakamoto has over a million Bitcoin to his name, worth upwards of US$80 billion. Were he able to sell it all at the current market rate, that would make him one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
That power makes it more important to understand Nakamoto and his intentions when it comes to generating personal wealth and the future of Bitcoin. Although, to date, Nakamoto has not sold a single Bitcoin. Even if Nakamoto did start selling his stash of Bitcoins – which, in itself, might lead to revealing his identity – that doesn’t necessarily justify unmasking him. Any holder of great wealth is entitled to dispose of it as they please, within the bounds of the law.
On the other hand, Nakamoto’s tremendous potential wealth places a target on his back should his identity be revealed. Malicious actors could seek to extort or intimidate them into handing over some of their wealth. That gives us a good reason to be very cautious when deciding whether to reveal his true identity.
Outside the law
Public interest was also cited as a reason to unmask the street artist, Banksy. The Reuters journalists claim that “the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse”. However, as stated above, just because the public wants to know something doesn’t mean it has a right to know.
But Reuters also appealed to accountability.
“The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency.”
One of the central tenets of ethics is that individuals ought to be held accountable for their actions (with qualifiers, of course). And one of the reasons some people might seek anonymity is to avoid accountability.
But would the power of Banksy’s art to “shape social and political discourse” change if his name was known (we already know he’s an English man of middle age from previous works)? Perhaps one could level claims of cynicism or hypocrisy if his message was at odds with his lifestyle. But that might be one reason Banksy wishes to remain anonymous: so that the message isn’t distracted by the messenger.
Another factor is that Banksy’s art is – in most jurisdictions – illegal. That appears to be one of the justifications that Banksy had for concealing his identity early in his career.
Although, these days, it seems most authorities are inclined to welcome a Banksy work in a public space, due to the attention it draws and value it creates, rather than wanting to lock him up. So, it appears that even those who could hold Banksy legally accountable are already choosing not to do so, making his unmasking less justified in this regard.
Banksy has also made it clear that he is mistrustful of authority and many mainstream institutions, and anonymity is necessary for him to be able to speak truth to power. Indeed, should his identity be confirmed, then it would be significantly more difficult for him to travel and do his work in public spaces, or to avoid being arrested.
What these cases all show is that we need to carefully weigh an individual’s right to privacy and desire for anonymity against other concerns to ensure we have good reason to unmask them. If anonymity enables deception or prevents people being held to account for harming others, then there might be good reason to reveal their true identity.
But we must remember that, in the absence of good reasons to unmask someone, we ought to respect their desire for anonymity. Sometimes revealing someone’s true identity might put them at serious risk. So, just because we’re intensely curious about someone is, that doesn’t necessarily justify revealing their true identity.
Image: Dominic Robinson, Flickr
BY Tim Dean
Dr Tim Dean is a public philosopher, speaker and writer. He is Philosopher in Residence and Manos Chair in Ethics at The Ethics Centre.
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Illegal animal ownership and the coming ethical shift
In 2020, the world became briefly obsessed with Tiger King, a lurid portrait of exotic animal owners in the United States. Viewers were entertained by the spectacle, but beneath the chaos lay a far deeper question: why do we tolerate the private ownership of wild creatures at all?
For decades, the keeping of exotic pets, tigers, monkeys, snakes, and even endangered species has been accepted, sometimes celebrated, and often trivialised.
Today, exotic animal ownership is framed through the language of fascination and freedom. An individual posting a photo with a capuchin monkey or a tiger cub is seen as eccentric, perhaps indulgent, but rarely immoral. Social media has reinforced this perception: animals become props in displays of uniqueness, wealth, or adventure. Beneath this lies a familiar assumption, that humans may own and confine animals so long as “care” is provided. After all, dogs, cats, and horses are kept under this same logic; exotic pets are simply imagined as an extension of that tradition.
This is the widely held ethical stance of our time: ownership is permissible, provided the owner is attentive, and the animal survives. It is sometimes argued that exotic pets can be kept ethically if an owner is conscientious. Yet responsibility cannot undo captivity’s intrinsic harms. To confine a leopard to a cage, however large, is to deny it the roaming it evolved to do. The deprivation is structural, not accidental.
Still, harm is thought to arise only when neglect or cruelty is obvious.
This collapses under scrutiny. To provide food, shelter, and medical care is not to provide a life worth living. A monkey raised in isolation, or a tiger confined to a cage, cannot express the instincts and social behaviours that define their species – a phenomenon well-documented in studies of animal deprivation, such as Harry Harlow’s experiments on social isolation in rhesus monkeys.
What is portrayed as “care” often amounts to prolonged deprivation.
Beyond individual suffering, the practice generates wider consequences. The demand for exotic pets drives illegal trafficking, stripping wild populations of already vulnerable species. Animals smuggled in appalling conditions frequently die before reaching their buyers; a hidden toll rarely acknowledged. Where they survive, ecological disruption follows: Florida’s Everglades, overrun by invasive pythons once kept as pets, as reported by the National Geographic, is a cautionary tale. Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons now threaten native wildlife after being released into the wild. The exotic pet trade has also been implicated in the spread of zoonotic diseases, some with pandemic potential.
Taken together, these realities show that ownership is not an isolated act of personal freedom but an ethical entanglement with ecosystems, species survival, and human wellbeing.
A history of widening ethical concern
The idea that today’s tolerance of exotic pets will endure is contradicted by history. Societal ethics evolve, and practices once normalised are later judged harshly. Only a generation ago, elephants performing tricks in circuses were symbols of joy; today, such displays are condemned as cruelty. Dolphins in marine parks, once crowd-pleasers, are increasingly seen as victims of confinement. Whaling was defended as tradition until it was widely recognised as barbaric.
In each case, the ethical lens widened: human enjoyment and cultural prestige could no longer justify animal suffering. Exotic pet ownership is on the same trajectory. What seems acceptable today will soon be viewed as exploitative and anachronistic.
As scientific knowledge of animal sentience deepens, the ethical case against exotic pet ownership will sharpen. It is not merely a matter of legality but legitimacy. Future generations are unlikely to accept the claim that affection can justify possession. The very idea of “owning” a wild creature will be seen as incompatible with respect for its autonomy and wellbeing.
Instead, we are moving toward an ethic of stewardship. Rather than treating animals as curiosities to be acquired, there will be growing recognition of the responsibility to preserve habitats, support sanctuaries, and protect species in the wild. A monkey belongs not in a suburban home but to the forests that shape its instincts. A tiger does not need a private enclosure but a functioning ecosystem. Within this ethical framework, claim ownership of such beings will appear arrogant, an outdated relic of human entitlement.
The appeal to personal freedom carries weight, but freedoms that cause serious harm are never absolute. We regulate weapons, smoking, and pollution because individual liberty cannot override collective well-being. The same reasoning applies here: the harm to animals, ecosystems, and public health outweighs personal preference.
This ethical shift is not only about animals; it reflects how humanity conceives its place in the natural world.
The ownership of exotic animals continues with a pattern of domination: we collect, confine, and display living beings as extensions of ourselves. To reject this is to embrace humility, acknowledging that not everything can be possessed; that respect sometimes requires distance.
There is also a broader trend in the gradual expansion of who and what is deemed worthy of ethical concern. Once, children, women, and marginalised groups were excluded from full recognition. Over time, the circle widened. Now, it extends beyond humanity itself. Exotic animal ownership will be one of the practices left behind as this circle continues to grow.
In the next twenty years, the widespread view will collapse under evidence of animal suffering, ecological damage, and disease risk. More importantly, it will fall because it no longer fits with the kind of ethical society we aspire to be. Future generations will look back at our era with disbelief, asking how we ever imagined that affection could excuse possession. The shift will mark not only a victory for animals but a step towards a more responsible, less arrogant humanity, one that values stewardship above ownership, and respect above curiosity.
Illegal animal ownership and the coming ethical shift by Rhiannon Gee is one of the Highly Commended essays in our Young Writers’ 2025 Competition. Find out more about the competition here.
BY Rhiannon Gee
Rhiannon Gee is a passionate animal lover and advocate for the ethical treatment of wildlife. She writes about the evolving relationship between humans and animals, exploring how compassion and responsibility can shape a more humane future.
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Ethics Explainer: Critical thinking
In a world awash with spin, misinformation and AI slop, critical thinking has become an indispensable survival skill.
While scrolling through social media, you spot a post shared by a good friend. It’s from a popular (and attractive) influencer, who is claiming that sunscreen is toxic. The post resonates with you, especially since the last time you bought a new sunscreen, you broke out in a rash.
But how do you know if what they say is true? On the surface, their argument seems persuasive, but does it stack up? And what are the stakes if you get it wrong? If it turns out sunscreen isn’t toxic, then you could end up with nasty burns, or worse.
The modern world is an informational minefield. Every day we slog through hundreds of claims that purport to be true, but any one of them could end up being false or misleading. Influencers have been known to peddle misinformation. Activists, advertisers and politicians all put their spin on the facts to promote their interests. Artificial intelligence is further muddying the waters with hallucinations, deepfakes and so-called “AI slop”.
The cost of falling for falsehoods can be profound, both to us and to society as a whole. We need to be equipped to handle this epistemically hostile environment. This is where critical thinking becomes a key survival skill for the 21st century.
Not uncritical
One way to define critical thinking is to consider its opposite. An uncritical thinker will accept everything on face value. They will be prone to biases, like stereotyping or being swayed by someone’s appearance rather than the strength of their argument.
They will mistake subjective statements, such as “I don’t like pineapple on pizza” for objective statements, like “pineapple on pizza is bad”. They will overgeneralise from a few anecdotes or examples, like viewing a minority with suspicion because of one unpleasant encounter.
They will employ motivated reasoning, such as seeking out information that makes them feel (or look) good, rather than what is true. And they will latch on to the first explanation for some phenomenon, whether it’s the correct one or not.
A critical thinker, on the other hand, will be mindful of how biases and other irrational forces can sway their views, and will endeavour to avoid those and settle on beliefs rationally by drawing on good reasons and evidence.
They won’t just accept things at face value, but will ask questions, like: is the source reliable? Is the argument sound? Is the supporting evidence strong? After weighing up all these factors, they will hold their beliefs with a strength proportional to the reasons and evidence they can muster in their favour.
Misconceptions
Critical thinking is more than just being critical. The latter is about finding fault in someone or something. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is more about thinking carefully about what we hear.
It’s also not the same things as philosophical scepticism, which is the thesis that we cannot know what is and is not true. This kind of scepticism sets an impossibly high bar for knowledge. But critical thinking doesn’t go as far. Instead, it sets the bar at what we can demonstrate to be true by appealing to reason and evidence.
Critical thinking is also different from cynicism, which is just assuming the worst about what we see and hear. If you immediately assume that a politician is lying, or that a corporation’s environmental efforts are greenwashing, without looking at the evidence, then you’re being cynical. If you decide they are lying or greenwashing after you’ve carefully looked at the reasons and evidence supporting those beliefs, then you’re exercising critical thinking.
Finally, critical thinking is not the same as critical theory. The latter is a philosophical and social science project that seeks to improve society by revealing sources of oppression, and is associated with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas.
Critical mass
So what about that social media post about sunscreen that seemed so appealing? A critical thinker would start by reflecting on any biases they might have when watching it. It was shared by a friend, and they know that they’re prone to weigh things more heavily when their friends endorse them. That’s a good reason to pause and ensure they’re not being overly credulous.
They would also know that they are more likely to assume an attractive or high-status speaker will be trustworthy – which is why coffee companies like to have handsome actors in their ads. So a critical thinker w0uld try to detach the message from the messenger, and scrutinise the former on its merits.
A critical thinker would also be mindful of the sources that the influencer cites. Are they reliable experts? Do they have any vested interests, like working for a company that sells a sunscreen alternative? Is their evidence high quality, such as the product of a double-blind clinical trial?
They would also be wary of allowing their subjective experience to flavour how they interpret the post. Just because they got a rash from the last sunscreen they bought doesn’t mean that all sunscreen is toxic. It’s possible that they just had an allergy, or something unrelated caused the rash, and it happened to coincide with them applying the sunscreen.
And they would be on the lookout for logical and argumentative fallacies, like an appeal to authority or popularity, or begging the question, which might undermine the soundness of the argument.
A critical thinker would weigh all these things, and come to a conclusion about the claims about sunscreen, acknowledging that they could always be wrong – so not allowing themselves to arrive at a point of unwarranted certainty.
Employing critical thinking takes some time and effort. However, if you care about not being duped by misinformation or falling for spin, then it’s an indispensable skill to cultivate.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
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Making the tough calls: Decisions in the boardroom
The scenario is familiar to us all. Company X is in crisis. A series of poor management decisions set in motion a sequence of events that lead to an avalanche of bad headlines and public outcry.
When things go wrong for an organisation – so wrong that the carelessness or misdeeds revealed could be considered ethical failure – responsibility is shouldered by those who are the final decision makers. They are and should be held accountable.
Boards of organisations, and the individual directors that comprise them, collectively make decisions about strategy, governance and corporate performance. Decisions that involve the interests of shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers and the wider community. They will also involve competing values, compromises and tradeoffs, information gaps and grey areas.
Research from The Governance Institute of Australia in 2021, surveyed a pool of directors, executives and high-level working groups to consider the most valued attributes for future board directors. Strategic and critical thinking were once ranked the highest, closely followed by the values of ethics and culture as the two most important areas that boards need to focus on to prevent corporate failure. A culture of accountability, transparency, trust and respect were viewed as a top factor determining a healthy dynamic between boards and management.
Ethics plays a central role in the decisions that face Boards and directors, such as:
- What constitutes a conflict of interest and how should it be managed?
- How aggressive should tax strategies be?
- What incentive structures and sales techniques will create a healthy and ethical organisational culture?
- What about investments in organisations that profit from arms and weaponry?
- How should organisations manage the effects technology has on their workforce?
- What obligation do organisations have to protect the environment and human rights?
Together, The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and The Ethics Centre have developed a decision making guide for directors.
Ethics in the Boardroom (2nd edition) provides directors with a simple decision-making framework which they can use to navigate the ethical dimensions of any decision. This guide is a vital resource for directors as a general reference, and should be utilised by boards to strengthen their capacity in ethics, and by individual directors and boards alike to inform conversations about the complex issues they encounter in their roles. Updated from the 2019 first edition, this second edition also reflects a changing landscape and responds to new questions emerging from the adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Through the insights of directors, academics and subject matter experts, the guide also provides four lenses to frame board conversations. These lenses give directors the best chance of viewing decisions from different perspectives. Rather than talking past each other, they will help directors pinpoint and resolve disagreement.
- Lens 1: General influences – Organisations are participants in society through the products and services they offer and their statuses as employers and influencers. The guide invites directors to seek out the broadest possible range of perspectives to enhance their choices and decisions. It also suggests that organisations should strive for leadership. What do you think about companies that take a stance on matters like climate change and same sex marriage?
- Lens 2: The board’s collective culture and character – In ethical decision making, directors are bound to apply the values and principles of their organisation. As custodians, they must ensure that culture and values are aligned. The guide invites directors to be aware that ethical decision-making in the boardroom must be tempered. Decision making shouldn’t be driven by: form over substance, passion over reason, collegiality over concurrence, the need to be right, or legacy. Just because a particular course of action is legal, does that make it right? Just because a company has always done it that way, should they continue?
- Lens 3: Interpersonal relationships and reasoning – Boards are collections of individuals who bring their own individual decision-making ‘style’ to the board table. Power dynamics exist in any group, with each person influencing and being influenced by others. Making room for diversity and constructive disagreement is vital. How can chairs and other directors empower every director to stand up for what is right? How do boards ensure that the person sitting quietly, with deep insights into ethical risk, has the courage to speak?
- Lens 4: The individual director – Directors bring their own wisdom and values to decision making. But they also might bring their own motivations that biases. The guide invites directors to self-reflect and bring the best of themselves to the board table. How can we all be more reflective in our own decision making?
This guide is a must-read for anyone who has an interest in the conduct of any board-led organisation. That includes schools, sports clubs, charities and family businesses as well as large corporations.
Behind each brand and each company, there are people making decisions that affect you as a consumer, employee and citizen. Wouldn’t you rather that those at the top had ethics at the front of their mind in the decisions that they make?
Click here to view or download a copy of the guide.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The price of playtime
Before they learn to read, some children have already built an entire online audience. Their lives – from birthday parties to emotional breakdowns – are shared, sponsored, and monetised.
In a digital world driven by content and clicks, the world of kidfluencing forces us to confront a difficult question: what do we owe the children growing up on camera?
Kidfluencing refers to the practice of featuring children prominently in monetised social media content, often on platforms like Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok. Typically, these accounts are run by parents or guardians, but the child’s personality, appearance and daily life are the main attraction.
It’s a phenomenon that raises serious ethical questions, not only about labour laws and consent, but also the commodification of identity in a digital economy. There’s a difference between recording your child’s first steps as a cherished family memory and uploading them to a platform that pays per view. Kidfluencing transforms ordinary family life into entertainment, monetised through brand deals and advertising.
One of the most well-known examples is Ryan’s World, a YouTube channel that began when Ryan Kaji was just three years old, after videos of him enthusiastically unboxing and reviewing toys went viral. Filmed largely at home with his parents behind the camera, the channel quickly expanded into skits, branded merchandise and licensing deals, amassing millions of subscribers worldwide. According to Forbes, Ryan Kaji (and by extension, his family) earned over $29 million in 2020 alone, making him one of the highest-paid Youtubers in the world.
On Instagram and TikTok, children model clothes, promote products and star in sponsored content – sometimes before they can even spell their name. At face value it seems like a bit of harmless fun, or for some, a win-win. The child gets toys, fame, maybe a financial head start in life. The parents maintain control over the content, often managing accounts and brand deals behind the scenes, with household finances often tied to its success. The audience is entertained. However, things are rarely as simple as they appear.
No child can fully grasp the implications of being filmed, the permanence of their digital footprint, or consent to a video that may follow them into adulthood. With growing reports of exploitation, the risks become harder to ignore.
Unlike traditional child actors, who are protected by specific labour laws and compensated through trust accounts (e.g. the Coogan law in the US), kidfluencers operate in a largely unregulated space. In 2020, France became one of the first countries to mandate that earnings from children in monetised content be placed in secure funds. By contrast, Australia remains in a legal grey zone, leaving young content creators vulnerable not just to online predators but, more troublingly, to exploitation within their own homes.
In many kidfluencing households, the line between parent and producer is blurred. The parents become managers, marketers and editors. Their home becomes a set, and their childhood becomes content. High profile cases such as YouTube star Piper Rockelle – who rose to fame in early adolescence as part of a ‘squad’ channel, illustrates the risk of this dynamic, with lawsuits from former collaborators alleging emotional abuse, coercive filming practices and adult control over earnings recently surfacing. It’s easy to say that the parents only want the best for their children, but what happens when the child’s image pays the mortgage? How easy is it then to switch off the camera, to reject a lucrative brand deal, when another viral moment could be seconds away?
There’s a creeping danger when parenting becomes performative, when the child’s real-life experiences are filtered through purely what is most ‘engaging’ in the online world.
As philosopher Jean Baudrillard warned, we live in an era of simulacra, where the representations of reality become reality. For kidfluencers, this means the curated online persona, that is optimised for algorithms and audience approval can overtake the authentic self, encouraging children to perform an identity shaped by what attracts views rather than who they are offline.
A child’s right to privacy, to make decisions and mistakes and to grow without millions watching, should not be a luxury. It is essential to healthy development. Yet, in the rush to publicly document every cute moment in pursuit of greater engagement and revenue, we are building a digital archive that a child never agreed to create and cannot erase. Philosopher John Stuart Mill once argued that “the worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.” Denying children meaningful control over their own identities undermines that worth from the very beginning.
What happens when children are denied the right to meaningfully choose how they participate in the state of their own lives? Imagine turning 16 and discovering a decade of your most vulnerable and embarrassing moments permanently online, shared not by bullies, but by your own parents. In a society that rightly criticises government surveillance and defends the right to be forgotten, how it be justified denying children of those same rights within their homes?
So where does that leave us? Should children be banned from appearing online altogether? Not necessarily. However, allowing kidfluencing to continue ethically requires a far more robust framework than currently exists. Such a framework would need to recognise children as rights-bearing individuals, not extensions of a family brand. This could include clear limits on filming hours, mandatory protection of earnings in independent trust accounts and regular review of a child’s participation as they grow older and gain the capacity to meaningfully consent or withdraw consent altogether.
Just as importantly, ethical boundaries must be drawn between parenting and employment. Children should not be pressured to perform or disciplined for not consenting or be valued primarily for their commercial output. Oversight mechanisms, whether legal or platform-based, are necessary to ensure parents are not acting simultaneously as guardians and employers without accountability. Above all, this requires a cultural shift, one that values the unseen, unrecorded moment of childhood as deeply as the ones we post.
In today’s digital age, parents act as the curators of their children’s identities, shaping how they are seen long before children can define themselves. When moments of play, emotion and vulnerability are repeatedly framed for public consumption, a child’s sense of self risks becoming entangled with performance and audience approval. The danger is not only exploitation for profit, but the gradual erosion of a child’s ability to grow, change and experiment with identity away from public scrutiny. A childhood lived under observation can narrow who a child feels allowed to be.
We owe it to children to protect their right to develop an identity that is not permanently fixed, searchable or shaped by the expectations of strangers. Let them just be kids.
The price of playtime by Dana Carr is one of the Highly Commended essays in our Young Writers’ 2025 Competition. Find out more about the competition here.
BY Dana Carr
Dana is a 16-year-old student with a passion for STEM and the entailing ethical issues of rapidly emerging technologies. Often running, making music, or baking - where she likes to find time to reflect, now more than ever, her interest in how the digital world shapes young people.
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There’s more to conspiracy theories than meets the eye
We know conspiracy theories can be harmful, but we also know conspiracies do happen. In an age of mistrust, the real challenge isn’t simply rejecting conspiracy theories, but knowing how to react to them.
Note: this article contains spoilers for the film, Bugonia.
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2025 film Bugonia, a pharmaceutical company CEO, Michelle (played by Emma Stone) is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy and Don are convinced Michelle is an extraterrestrial, part of a race of ‘Andromedans’ that Teddy believes are responsible for the gradual disappearance of the world’s honey bees.
The film seems timely in many ways – bee colonies really have been collapsing – not least in depicting a conspiracy theorist as something far more dangerous than a mere harmless crank. That choice seems very much of the moment.
But in Bugonia, the conspiracy theorists turn out to be right. Andromedans really are running the world, and Michelle really is one of their leaders.
I don’t know if Lanthimos spends his spare time poring over academic philosophy journals. Yet his movie echoes a debate that’s been raging among philosophers for the last decade or more: should we be fighting back against conspiracy beliefs, and their increasing role in public life? Or does treating conspiracy theory – and theorists – as a problem to be solved cause more harm than good?
Harms of conspiracy
It’s easy to think of conspiracy theories as a sort of harmless game (after all, some are just that), yet conspiracy theories can be harmful in a number of ways. At the extreme, some conspiracy theorists – just like Bugonia’s Teddy – have been motivated to carry out acts of harassment or violence. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch burst into the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in Washington DC armed with a semi-automatic rifle, intending to expose a cabal of elite paedophiles. Six years later, a trio of conspiracy theorists in rural Queensland murdered two police officers and a neighbour before being killed themselves.
Conspiracy harms exist on a larger scale too. Consider the role of conspiracy thinking in the return of vaccine-preventable disease, or the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to HIV denialism on the part of Thabo Mbeki’s government in South Africa. Conspiracy theories invite distrust of governments, institutional science, and other institutions critical to healthy civil society.
There’s also a general moral cost to conspiracy theorising, just insofar as it’s a practice built on suspicion. You can’t have a conspiracy without conspirators, and that means every conspiracy theory is also an accusation – and levelling an accusation is not a morally neutral act.
Some philosophers of conspiracy theory, known as ‘generalists’, appeal to such harms (among other arguments) to claim that conspiracy theories are always suspect. To generalists, conspiracy belief is both a result of sloppy reasoning and a source of social and political harm, and we’d be better off if we could stop them from spreading.
But if conspiracy theories can be harmful, the ways in which we respond to them are also fraught with danger.
Loaded terms
‘Conspiracy theory’, at least as used in the media and in political discourse, isn’t a neutral term. To say “that’s a conspiracy theory” is to rule that theory out of contention straight away. Likewise, “you’re a conspiracy theorist” is a way of saying “we don’t have to take what you’re saying seriously”.
That can be a problem for two reasons. First, this loaded use of terms can give cover to bad actors: if a politician can dismiss an allegation against them as a ‘conspiracy theory’, they can avoid proper scrutiny too easily.
Secondly, there’s a risk of violating what Miranda Fricker has famously called epistemic justice.
In dismissing someone as a conspiracy theorist we risk failing to treat them with the dignity due to them as a fellow rational agent.
This danger is made worse by the fact that conspiracy belief can be more common amongst marginalised groups. It’s easier to believe powerful groups are secretly trying to manipulate or exploit you when they’ve done it before.
After all, as other philosophers of conspiracy theory point out, conspiring with others is something that humans sometimes do. If that weren’t the case, much of history would be unintelligible to us. Unless we want to deny that a conspiracy of Nixon staffers led to the Watergate scandal, or that al Qaeda terrorists conspired to attack targets with hijacked planes, we can’t simply dismiss any given conspiracy theory purely because it’s a conspiracy theory.
Threading the needle
So we find ourselves in a quandary. Conspiracy theories erode social trust, encourage suspicion, and can lead to harmful behaviours. (They also suffer from a lack of falsifiability, and a poor track record for turning out to be true). Yet in a democratic society, a standing suspicion of power is also vital, and epistemic justice demands we not simply write people off as stupid or crazy. So how do we balance these things?
One option is to accept that people – including very powerful ones – do sometimes conspire with each other, but set the bar for entertaining a conspiracy theory drastically higher than for non-conspiracy explanations. We have good epistemic and moral reasons to refuse to engage in conspiracy thinking unless the evidence becomes overwhelming. Conspiracy thinking is somewhere we should not want to go, unless and until we have no other rationally available choice.
That comes with a danger of being duped. We might fail to spot the next Watergate, or worse. In Bugonia, Teddy uncovers a genuine alien conspiracy. As it happens, his doing so doesn’t help anyone: Michelle escapes, tells her fellow Andromedans their experiment on Earth has failed, and instantly wipes out the entire human race.
Even so, Teddy got lucky. The rest of us would still have been justified in trying to foil his kidnap attempt – even though he was, improbably, right all along. In the real world, we just have to take the risk that the Teddys of this world are probably wrong.
Probably.
BY Pat Stokes
Dr Patrick Stokes is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. Follow him on Twitter – @patstokes.
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AI can slowly shift an organisation’s core principles. Here's how to spot ‘value drift’ early
The steady embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public and private sectors in Australia and New Zealand has come with broad guidance about using the new technology safely and transparently, with good governance and human oversight.
So far, so sensible. Aligning AI use with existing organisational values makes perfect sense.
But here’s the catch. Most references to “responsible AI” assume values are like a set of house rules you can write down once, translate into checklists and enforce forever.
But generative AI (GenAI) does not simply follow the rules of the house. It changes the house. GenAI’s distinctive power is not that it automates calculations, but that it automates plausible language.
It writes the summary, the rationale, the email, the policy draft and the performance feedback. In other words, it produces the texts organisations use to explain themselves.
When a system can generate confident, professional-sounding reasons instantly, it can quietly change what counts as a “good reason” to do something.
This is where “value drift” begins – a gradual shift in what feels normal, reasonable or acceptable as people adapt their work to what the technology makes easy and convincing.
Invisible ethical shifts
In the workplace, for example, a manager might use GenAI to draft performance feedback to avoid a hard conversation. The tone is smoother, but the judgement is harder to locate, as is the accountability. Or a policy team uses GenAI to produce a balanced justification for a contested decision. The prose is polished, but the real trade-offs are less visible. For small businesses, the appeal of GenAI lies in speed and efficiency. A sole trader can use it to respond to customers, write marketing copy or draft policies in seconds.
But over time, responsiveness may come to mean instant, AI-generated replies rather than careful, human judgement. The meaning of good service quietly shifts.
None of this requires an ethical breach. The drift happens precisely because the new practice feels helpful.
The biggest ethical effects of GenAI don’t often show up as a single shocking scandal. They are slower and quieter. A thousand small decisions get made a little differently.
Explanations get a little smoother. Accountability becomes a little harder to point to. And before long, we are living with a new normal we did not consciously choose.
If responsible AI use is about more than good intentions and tidy documentation, we need to stop treating values as fixed targets. We need to pay attention to how values shift once AI becomes part of everyday work.
Hidden assumptions
Much of today’s responsible-AI guidance follows a straightforward model: identify the values you care about, embed them in GenAI systems and processes, then check compliance.
This is necessary but also incomplete. Values are not “fixed” once written down in strategy documents or policy templates. They are lived out in practice.
They show up in how people talk, what they notice, what they prioritise and how they justify trade-offs. When technologies change those routines, values get reshaped.
An emerging line of research on technology and ethics shows that values are not simply applied to technologies from the outside. They are shaped from within everyday use, as people adapt their practices to what technologies make easy, visible or persuasive.
In other words, values and technologies shape each other over time, each influencing how the other develops and is understood.
We have seen this before. Social media did not just test our existing ideas about privacy. It gradually changed them. What once felt intrusive or inappropriate now feels normal to many younger users.
The value of privacy did not disappear, but its meaning shifted as everyday practices changed. Generative AI is likely to have similar effects on values such as fairness, accountability and care.
In our research on leadership development, we are exploring how we teach emerging leaders to recognise and reflect on these shifts.
The challenge is not only whether leaders apply the right values to AI, but whether they are equipped to notice how working with these systems may gradually reshape what those values mean in practice.
Constant vigilance
The emphasis in New Zealand and Australia on responsible AI guidance is sensible and pragmatic. It covers governance, privacy, transparency, skills and accountability.
But it still tends to assume that once the right principles and processes are in place, responsibility has been secured.
If values move as AI reshapes practice, though, responsible AI needs a practical upgrade. Principles still matter, but they should be paired with routines that keep ethical judgement visible over time.
Organisations should periodically review AI-mediated decisions in high-stakes areas such as hiring, performance management or customer communication.
They should pay attention not just to technical risks, but to how the meaning of fairness, accountability or care may be changing in practice. And they should make it clear who owns the reasoning behind AI-shaped decisions.
Responsible AI is not about freezing values in place. It is about staying responsible as values shift.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
BY Guy Bate
Guy is Thematic Lead for Artificial Intelligence, Director of the Master of Business Development (MBusDev) programme, and Professional Teaching Fellow in Strategy and Technology Commercialisation at the University of Auckland Business School.
BY Rhiannon Lloyd
Dr Rhiannon Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership in the Management and International Business department at the University of Auckland Business School, and the Director of the Kupe Leadership Scholarship at the University of Auckland. She is also a member of the Aotearoa Centre for Leadership and Governance, UABS. Her research takes a critical look at the theory and practice of responsible and environmental leadership.
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The personal vs the political: Resistance in One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, widely considered to be the frontrunner in the Oscars race for Best Picture, shouldn’t really work.
It’s set in the future (kind of), and its characters rail against a government that the film doesn’t really try to draw or explain. Its tone freewheels about the place from black comedy to action film. Some of the performances, like Teyana Taylor’s turn as a revolutionary and reluctant mother, are tender and human; others, like Sean Penn’s vicious army officer, border on caricature.
But despite such a vast mish mash of ideas and styles, at its core the film explores the dangers of a perceived disconnect between the personal and the political – more broadly, how we choose to respond to disenfranchisement through our personal morality and interpersonal relationships.
Macro and micro
Films about politics tend to fall into one of two camps. They either pick the broadest possible canvas, looking at societal issues from a top-down view – take Oliver Stone’s JFK, or more recently, Adam McKay’s Vice. Or, they go micro, and fixate on the lives of individuals caught up in times of political unrest – Costa-Gavras’ Missing, or the spate of “serious men looking through files” films, with All The President’s Men being the clearest example. The focus of the former type of film is history itself; the focus of the second type of film is the people who are shaped by history.
Anderson’s film, however, sidesteps this binary entirely, by casting the personal as inherently political. In his film, politics isn’t something that happens outside the characters’ houses, out in the “real world”. Instead, every single personal relationship is fraught with societal implications, and its characters are constantly juggling what is good “for the cause”, and what is good for their own lives.
Take the strained relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio’s frazzled revolutionary, Bob, and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Bob, once a firm believer in violent insurrection, has become addled by alcohol and pot, adrift in a world that he doesn’t understand. Willa, by contrast, is fully versed in that world; her group of friends freely explore their gender, much to Bob’s confused chagrin. Father and daughter squabble constantly, each subtly casting the other as ill-equipped to deal with the world and its horrors. Bob thinks that Willa is inherently vulnerable and naive; Willa thinks that Bob is a dusty relic of the past.
Such personal clashes are stand-ins for a much broader clash concerning different approaches to revolution. Their ideologies aren’t snipped off from their day-to-day lives. Politics is something that they both embody, so it influences their every interaction; their every word. As a result, their beliefs cause constant friction in their home – and as their views stagnate, so too does their relationship.
Violence versus humanism
It’s not just Willa and Bob who struggle in this way, either. One of the film’s key plot strands is a relationship of sorts, conducted between Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor) and Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn). Ideologically, the two are as opposed as could be imagined; she’s a revolutionary, he’s a racist fascist. But interpersonally, they are constantly drawn together, an attraction that sits at cross-purposes to their views.
They’re not entirely different, however. Lockjaw has sacrificed any closeness with his fellow human beings – Perfidia included – in the pursuit of a sad, violent fascist wet-dream. His political ideology has led to a complete disconnection from those around him, sending him on a hateful rampage that culminates in him violently threatening his own daughter. And in Perfidia’s case, a belief that the political must come above and beyond the personal leads her to abandon her own family, and sell out her friends.
One Battle After Another makes it clear that Lockjaw’s warped understanding of the world is far more harmful than Perfidia’s – it doesn’t completely equate the two. But nonetheless, Anderson does consistently make a light mockery of those who abandon those closest to them in favour of “the cause”, whatever that might be.
There’s no victory in becoming a “perfect revolutionary” who doesn’t know how to interact with friends, parents, or lovers.
Moreover, he doesn’t seem to believe such a thing is even possible. When we meet Bob, for instance, his politics are good – he has not stopped stoking the fires of resistance and revolution – but his home life is a mess. As a result, he’s a figure of sad comedy; constantly befuddled, clad in his dressing gown, unable to meaningfully engage with a world that is filled with other human beings, not just revolutionary cries.
And in this way, we understand “politics” as just a way of describing the organisation of human lives – and so any political ideology that forgets about the value of a single human connection is inherently flawed. One Battle After Another advocates for a type of revolution that tackles the personal and the political, by acknowledging that they are one and the same thing.
Freedom is found at the film’s conclusion, not just because Willa is now a fully-fledged revolutionary, using a pirate radio to find new battles to fight. It’s found because she and Bob have now come to a place of true peace and understanding with one another. By contrast, Perfidia and Lockjaw fail to find such healing – Perfidia disappears from the film entirely, and Lockjaw ends up gassed to death by the very individuals that he considered his compatriots. Their ends are lonely, in a very literal sense.
In this way, Anderson reminds us that the macro is made up of the micro. As the old saying by activist Mariame Kaba goes, hope is a discipline that requires practice in every interaction, and in every sphere, whether we’re dealing with the broader world, or those closest to us. What changes tyranny? Not just the big battles. But the little ones too: one after another.
BY Joseph Earp
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
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Why I had a vasectomy at 30
At the end of a recent family visit, while trying to wrangle my crying niece and nephew out the door, my cousin’s husband joked, “Daniel’s gonna go home and get the snip after this!” All I could do was laugh and say, “Actually, I am.”
I’ve known for as long as I can remember that I don’t want to have children. Obviously, as a teenager, this kind of sentiment is barely acknowledged, let alone taken seriously. On the rare occasions that it came up, I was told over and over again that I’d feel differently when I was older, that I didn’t understand the magical feeling that ostensibly had most adults in a chokehold. I simply couldn’t understand the gravity of making such a claim, but I’d surely come round to it when I grew up.
However, those years came and went, and my feelings and the resulting comments remained. Even now, at 30, people still seem to think that if I just grow up a little bit more, I might feel different.
And they’re right – I might have a life-altering experience that changes my perspective at some point. I might also decide tomorrow that I should dress like a clown for the rest of my life. I might even get out of bed next week and walk in front of a car, rendering all my previous choices meaningless.
My point here is that I’m not in the habit of basing life choices on increasingly improbable outcomes that have little to no bearing on my previous experiences or motivations.
That is why I decided to have a vasectomy.
Surgical intervention
A vasectomy is a minor surgical procedure where the tubes that carry sperm are cut, preventing sperm from reaching the semen. It’s currently the only available long-term male contraceptive – the only other being short-term, in the form of condoms.
The decision to undergo surgery hasn’t been a light one. I’ve been contemplating a vasectomy for the better half of a decade, but to me it seems entirely reasonable. At some point, a more permanent and effective kind of contraception was always going to be the logical and preferred next step.
Women consistently take on the risk, expense and discomfort in the name of contraception. Comparatively, men rarely need to consider it, and equivalent male contraceptives have been “just a few years away” for decades – constantly shut down over side effects that pale in comparison to those of female contraception. I can advocate for male contraception research as much as I like, but that isn’t going to change the options I have in the next 10 years.
So, for now, we’re left with vasectomies, which are less expensive (around $500 out-of-pocket), permanent, more effective (99.95%), and have no common side effects. So, if I can relieve even just one of my future romantic and sexual partners of the burden of unwanted pregnancy or abortion, while also alleviating some of my own psychological stress about those things, why would I not?
The answer is, of course, “because you might change your mind!”
The social paternalism of parenthood
The worry that I’m unsure about my decision, or that I’m sure now but could change my mind in a few more years, seems kind on the surface. I do think, for example, that my mum is genuinely concerned about my wellbeing and that her anxiety is warranted (to a degree) as someone who has cared for me my whole life.
However, in many cases (sorry, mum, this includes you), I think this concern belies paternalism and a double standard between those with and without children.
It’s been common over the last few years, especially by well-meaning middle-aged people, for me to be met with a look of horror, disappointment, confusion or disbelief at the mention of my intentions.
Even after multiple conversations over long periods of time, many people seem unable to accept that it’s possible for a vasectomy to be a rational decision for anyone other than a 50-year-old with three kids.
This response seems mostly due to social conditioning. Children, pregnancy and parenting are, in general, viewed as positive, life-affirming, and mostly inevitable. To stray from this norm is to invite interrogation, disdain, pity, and sometimes, I suspect, envy. So, while parenthood remains a mostly unquestioned certainty, the childfree choice is a spectacle.
Let me demonstrate with a scenario: A friend has just confided in you and a few others that they’re aiming to have a child in the next year or two. There are some gasps and some squeals, some smiles and excited nods, and then someone says, “Woah. Are you sure? What if you regret it? Kids are a lot of work… They’ll flip your life upside down – you won’t know sleep for the next decade. My friend had a kid and she regretted it. Why don’t you just get a dog?”
This would undoubtedly cause a lot of discomfort for everyone present. You would probably, and rightly, be pulled up for being so blunt and rude. But that courtesy is often completely overlooked when you are childfree – variations of each of these questions are a common response to anyone deciding to remain without children, especially when more permanent things like vasectomy are mentioned.
But there are plenty of valid reasons a person may choose against bringing a child into the world – and the very simple justification of ‘I don’t want to’ should be enough. Though for me, there was more to it.
A definitive list of why I don’t want kids
1. I just don’t!
I am, first and foremost, a consequentialist. I care about doing things within my psychological and physical ability to reduce suffering. Pretty much all my thinking stems from this general framework.
The first of these is that I simply don’t want to change my life in the ways it needs to change to have children. Parenting is difficult. I’ve known this for a long time, and having friends and family with children has only cemented this knowledge. I have no desire to revolve my life around another person and their needs, deal with years of excruciatingly little sleep, or sacrifice my admittedly few resources, motivations and plans.
I am a firm believer that if you aren’t aching to have a child, you probably shouldn’t. You might be overcome with a love that completely overpowers everything if you do. But you might not! And to me, gambling with ambivalence or apathy when it concerns the life of another being is not ethical. You need much more than that to raise someone in a loving, supportive home.
The caveat to this is that, of course, some parents do provide loving homes while regretting their decision. This still seems to me to be a net negative outcome, as the child would not have suffered for never having been born, while the parent/s have suffered potentially decades of otherwise avoidable harm.
And I truly do mean harm. Even the most loving, kind, supportive, enthusiastic parents I know have struggled through pregnancy and early childhood. And I respect them for it, but it’s not for me.
2. Vasectomies are reversible – children are not
When it comes to regretting decisions, things that affect others will always be worse.
I don’t deny that I might change my mind about the vasectomy in 5 years – that is technically a possibility. But even at that point, I will still have options. Vasectomies have a very high reversal success rate, and in the scenario where the procedure doesn’t work, I can try IVF instead. While both these procedures are expensive, I would argue that if I cannot afford them, then I also cannot comfortably afford to raise a child.
The statistics also don’t bear out the disproportionate amount of concern about vasectomy regret. Even in studies that isolate men without children, less than 7% experienced regret five years post-surgery, with 3-6% opting to reverse the procedure. The rates are higher for under-30s, but so are the safeguards (mandatory evaluations prior to surgery, with most clinics refusing people under 25).
Comparatively, parents have consistently similar or higher rates of regret. In the UK, approximately 8% of parents regret having children – this increases to 13% if you isolate for 25–34-year-old parents. In the US, about 7% of parents said they’d have none if they could do it all over again. A Polish study showed up to 13% regret, and in Germany, a large 2016 survey showed as high as 20%. Yet having a child in your late 20s is still a highly encouraged, celebrated and common practice.
I see this as a much more serious concern. As the Polish study put it:
“Among the difficulties that can be experienced by a person who has decided to have a child, one of the most serious is to arrive at the conclusion that it was a bad decision because one cannot withdraw from parenthood at one’s own request, and because regretting parenthood can lead to mental problems and negative attitudes towards children.”
If you have a child, and come to regret your choice, there is little that can be done to change your situation. You cannot wish away a human being, and the decision will impact you for your entire life. Even in cases where children are put into the foster system or adopted by extended family, the fallout is still painful for everyone involved.
On the other hand, sterilised people have options available if they change their mind.
3. I would rather foster existing children
One of the options that sterilised people have is to foster children who require out-of-home care. This is one of the major principled stances I have that informed my decision to get a permanent contraception solution. Especially now, as the number of available out-of-home care facilities are decreasing significantly. My logic is as follows:
- There are many, many children in Australia who cannot live with their birth parents for various reasons and need care into adulthood.
- It is prima facie more ethical to provide care for someone currently suffering than to create a new person to provide care for.
- Especially for white, upper-middle class people, having biological children is mostly a selfish choice, as this demographic has the least social and financial barriers to fostering children.
- If I were to eventually form the desire to support and raise another person, I feel compelled to make the most difference I can.
- Having biological children would preclude me improving the lives of children who I could otherwise foster.
Therefore, I am ethically motivated to foster children instead of having biological children. There are plenty of reasons why fostering is inaccessible or improbable for lots of prospective parents. But if you reasonably can, then I think you should.
3. (b) I also don’t find the common arguments to have children morally compelling
To be clear, having a selfish motivation doesn’t inherently make someone a bad person. This is not necessarily a value judgement – but selfish motivations cannot be their only or main motivations, and yet they seem to be the first things people reach for when questioning vasectomy, or indeed anyone’s choice not to have children.
“Who will look after you when you’re old?”
“How else will you find purpose in life?”
“But they’ll make you so happy!”
“Don’t you want a little mini-me?”.
All of these reasons put an inordinate amount of pressure on children to fulfil something in their parents’ lives that they never signed up for and may not be in their best interests. If you have a child, they should not ever feel like they owe you something simply for existing. The main priority, the foundation of all of these wishes, should simply be to provide them with emotional and financial resources to live happily and healthily. If those are not underlying priorities, then we have an ethical problem.
4. It’s tough out there
Living involves suffering – especially in the current political and future literal climate. One of my guiding principles in life is to reduce suffering. Therefore, if I do ever want to raise a child, I’d try to help someone who is already suffering, rather than bring someone new into the world.
This could mean fostering, but it could also look like community. One huge consequence of not raising children is having the time and resources to be present with and support friends and family who do have children. This can be an enriching experience for everyone involved, meaning more freedom for parents, deeper friendships, and broader socialisation and bonding for kids.
Hopefully by this point it’s clear that I’m not a complete hater. Children are a headache – they can be loud, annoying, dirty and stupid; they can ruin a flight or a friendship; put strain on a marriage or make you rethink your life at 2am. But I also think they deserve the best. They deserve every ounce of support, love, friendship and encouragement that their parents and guardians are capable of giving them.
This article was originally published by Cheek Media Co.
BY Daniel Finlay
Daniel is a philosopher, writer and editor. He works at The Ethics Centre as Youth Engagement Coordinator, supporting and developing the futures of young Australians through exposure to ethics.
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