Principles, Ethics, Imperatives

Three core values inform everything I believe:

• fairness
• empathy
• an absolute intolerance for abuse

These shape my thinking on every corner of life, and they’re non-negotiable.

1. Individual Rights & Human Autonomy

Each person has a series of basic freedoms—of mind, body, expression, and self-direction—that cannot be bargained away for convenience, ideology, or political gain.

Civil & Personal Liberties (Intangible Rights)

• Bodily autonomy is absolute and non-negotiable.
• Freedom of expression includes the right to challenge, provoke, or discomfort, but stops at language that dehumanizes, incites violence, or targets individuals for harm.
• Every person has the right to digital access as a basic necessity—reliable, affordable, high-quality connectivity and communication tools sufficient for full participation in modern life.
• Every person has the right to privacy: freedom from surveillance, data exploitation, and intrusive policing.
• Every person has the right to equal access to opportunity, without discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, disability, age, nationality, language, family status, or economic background.

Material Conditions of Autonomy (Tangible Rights)

• Every person has the right to economic security—predictable income, fair wages, and protection from destitution.
• Every person has the right to adequate housing: safe, stable shelter with access to sanitation, clean water, and basic utilities.
• Every person has the right to food security: consistent access to nutritious, affordable food without dependence on exploitative systems.
• Every person has the right to healthcare: preventive, emergency, and long-term care without financial coercion.
• Fundamental human needs, like food, shelter, healthcare, and education, must never be subordinated to corporate or institutional profit motives.

2. Social Justice

A just society ensures that all people can truly exercise their rights by building the legal, economic, and social structures that make equality of opportunity real rather than theoretical. Inequality is tolerable only when it genuinely benefits those with the least power.

• Compassion, empathy, and reason must guide social action and public policy.
• Justice is more important than institutions that obstruct it; organizations are legitimate only when they serve the public interest.
• (Public interest refers to the collective well-being of people and communities, defined by equity, democratic participation, and shared prosperity. It prioritizes human needs like health, safety, education, environmental protection, and economic security over private profit, concentrated power, or market goals.)
• Structures that criminalize poverty, economic systems built on exploitation, and cultural norms that enforce hierarchy must be dismantled and replaced with institutions grounded in justice, accountability, and shared prosperity.
• Conflicts should be resolved peacefully whenever possible, but the pursuit of justice is always more important than “order.”
• Every person has the right to public space—movement, rest, and access—without harassment or exclusion.
• Every person has the right to participate politically: voting, assembly, representation, and due process.
• Every person has the right to fair treatment in housing, free from discrimination, exclusion, predatory practices, or policies that criminalize poverty or homelessness. Housing status must never determine access to rights, services, or public space.

3. Reason, Evidence, and Self-Correction

Morality must be accountable to facts and remain open to challenge, revision, and growth.

• Decisions should be grounded in evidence and research, not superstition or ideological preconception.
• Church and state must remain separate—not symbolically, but absolutely.
• Fairness demands testing one’s own beliefs with impartial reasoning.
• When harm is caused or mistakes are made, repair is mandatory: acknowledge, apologize, atone.
• When principles collide, compassion and justice take precedence over rigidity.

4. Education & Knowledge as Public Goods

A just society must guarantee universal access to education as a foundation of autonomy, opportunity, and democratic participation.

• Every person has the right to free, accessible education, from early childhood through advanced study, without discrimination or financial coercion.
• Public education must be fully funded, equitably resourced, and shielded from partisan manipulation.
• Teachers, scholars, and researchers must be treated as professionals with fair compensation, strong protections, and meaningful autonomy.
• Learning must cultivate critical thought, curiosity, empathy, and civic competence rather than obedience or economic sorting.
• Academic freedom is essential; research and teaching require full independence from partisan pressure, censorship, commercial interference, or any form of religious influence or control.
• Public institutions must uphold transparent governance, rigorous academic standards, and robust protections against discrimination and harassment, ensuring that curricula, funding, and decision-making remain secular, professionally grounded, and accountable to the public.
• Every community has the right to culturally responsive education that respects identity, language, and history.
• Research produced with public support must serve the public good; knowledge essential to civic life must not be locked behind paywalls or proprietary barriers.
• Lifelong learning must be accessible to all through public libraries, community programs, vocational retraining, and continuing-education pathways.
• Educational opportunities and outcomes must not be determined by wealth, geography, race, disability, or family background; governments have a duty to eliminate structural inequities.

5. Ecological Responsibility & Collective Survival

A just society must operate within the planet’s ecological boundaries and protect the integrity of the natural world.

• Environmental stability is a human right, and ecological limits define the boundaries within which all political and economic systems must operate.
• Every generation owes the next a planet capable of sustaining life, not a damaged inheritance they did not choose; each generation should drive to leave the world better than they found it.
• Environmental policy must be grounded in scientific evidence, not ideology, profit pressure, or political convenience.
• Communities have the right to clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and protection from toxic exposure.
• Technological development must reduce harm, preserve biodiversity, and support long-term planetary stability.
• Resource use must follow ecological ethics of reciprocity, restraint, regeneration, and interdependence, drawing from indigenous stewardship principles while adapting them to contemporary realities.

6. Democratic Institutions & Public Accountability

Institutions derive legitimacy only from serving the public good. Systems that obstruct justice or concentrate power must be redesigned.

• Democratic participation must be universal, accessible, and protected from manipulation or suppression.
• Political power must be transparent: open records, public audits, independent oversight, and meaningful checks on authority.
• Courts must defend rights, not shield elites from accountability.
• Constitutional and electoral systems must be reformed when they entrench minority rule or economic dominance.
• Public institutions must operate with procedural fairness, due process, and accountability to the communities they affect.

7. Corporate Power & Economic Democracy

Corporate actors wield immense influence over labor, resources, technology, and political decision-making. A just society must constrain this power.

• No corporation should control the basic conditions of life—housing, healthcare, water, energy, information, or medicine.
• Workers must have real power in the institutions they sustain.
• Essential industries must be democratically governed or publicly owned when private control threatens public welfare.
• Corporate purpose must extend beyond shareholder value, including enforceable public-benefit obligations.
• Wealth concentration is destabilizing; progressive taxation and anti-monopoly enforcement are necessary.
• Extreme wealth concentration undermines democratic equality; no individual should control more than a minute fraction of collective resources. Wealth exceeding a defined cap—whether a fixed share of total national wealth or a multiple of the lowest decile’s holdings—should be redistributed for public benefit.
• Inheritance must not reproduce structural domination. No individual should be permitted to inherit wealth on a scale that entrenches class power; inheritances should be capped at a democratically defined threshold.
• Executive compensation must be constrained relative to worker pay.

8. Media & Information Integrity

A healthy society requires truth, transparency, and independent journalism capable of holding power accountable.

• The press must function as a public good, not a corporate commodity or political instrument.
• Every person has the right to reliable, independently verifiable information, protected from state, corporate, algorithmic, or partisan manipulation—and the press has a duty to uphold that standard.
• Journalism must prioritize accuracy, context, and harm reduction.
• No media entity should ever attain broad control over the information ecosystem; structural safeguards must prevent concentration or dominance.
• Information systems must support democratic understanding and public reason, not manipulation or distortion.

9. Community Safety & Nonviolence

Public safety means freedom from harm—not punishment, fear, or domination—and must protect rights, reduce violence, and strengthen community well-being.

• The mission of public safety is harm reduction: preventing violence, resolving conflict, and protecting the dignity and rights of every person.
• Enforcement culture must shift from “warrior” to “guardian”: policing is a service, not a battlefield; militarization has no place in an enlightened society.
• Authority must be narrowly defined and responsibly deployed; police should not be primary responders to crises better handled by mental-health professionals, social workers, medical teams, or community-based services.
• Recruitment must reflect the gravity of the role: departments should select for judgment, emotional maturity, restraint, and community commitment, not aggression or unconditional obedience.
• Training must prioritize de-escalation, mediation, psychological skill, and recognition of bias; force is an absolute last resort.
• Public safety must be governed by independent, community-led oversight bodies with investigative authority, subpoena power, transparent findings, and binding decision-making; no agency may police itself.
• Equal protection is mandatory: policing must not reproduce racial hierarchy, economic discrimination, political repression, or differential treatment based on identity or class.
• A legitimate public-safety system strengthens communities rather than destabilizing them: its purpose is to reduce harm, uphold rights, and protect the conditions under which people can live freely, safely, and without fear.

10. Culture & Collective Well-Being

Culture shapes how societies treat vulnerability, dignity, and one another; ethical cultures make ethical systems possible.

• Cultural norms must reject dehumanization, cruelty, and exploitation as entertainment.
• Every community deserves access to public spaces, libraries, museums, and environments that encourage human flourishing.
• Cultural diversity is a collective strength; no tradition or identity should be suppressed or commodified.

11. Technology, Privacy & Digital Autonomy

Technology must expand human dignity, not erode it. Tools should empower people, not monitor, monetize, or manipulate them.

• Individuals own their data; consent must be explicit, revocable, and meaningful.
• Surveillance capitalism is incompatible with autonomy and must be dismantled.
• AI and automation must be transparent, accountable, and aligned with human rights and social needs.
• Algorithms shaping discourse must be transparent and auditable.
• Technological development must reduce suffering, preserve autonomy, and strengthen the public good.

12. Global Responsibility & Interdependence

Ethics cannot end at national borders; justice requires acknowledging global interdependence and shared responsibility.

• All nations share a duty to protect the planet’s ecological systems, reduce global environmental harm, and cooperate to preserve the conditions necessary for human and nonhuman life.
• Wealthy nations must address the harms they have caused—colonial, economic, and ecological—through restitution and support.
• Migration is a human right; people must be free to move for safety, opportunity, and climate survival.
• Global cooperation must prioritize planetary stability, human rights, and equitable development.
• Militarism and imperial domination are incompatible with a just global order.