philosophy – Humanist Blog

The Overview Effect

What Astronauts Can Teach Us

Commemorating World Space Week (4–10 October 2026)

When the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit in 1968, commander Frank Borman found himself less struck by the Moon below than by the planet they’d left behind: “It looked so fragile from 240,000 miles… you have a hard time understanding there could be so much conflict when it looked so fragile.” His crewmate Bill Anders put it even more bluntly: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

The sentiment hasn’t dated. In April 2026, Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, looking back at Earth from deep space, described being able to “really see the Earth as one thing” — a single, fragile whole, closer to home than the distance might suggest.

— Sources: Frank Borman, quoted in Phys.org (2016); Bill Anders, quoted by NASA (2024); Victor Glover, quoted in a CBS News interview, reported by TODAY.com (April 2026)

Look at almost any photograph of Earth taken from space, and you’ll notice something missing: borders. No red lines carving up continents, no fences, no flags — just a single blue-and-white sphere hanging in absolute black. For the small number of human beings who have seen that view with their own eyes rather than through a photograph, the experience has proven to be one of the most psychologically transformative available to our species. It has a name: the Overview Effect.

A Term Coined in 1987

Space philosopher Frank White gave the phenomenon its name in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution”, describing a profound shift in perspective that many astronauts report when they see Earth in its entirety from orbit or beyond. The effect isn’t simply about scenery. It’s a cognitive and emotional reorientation — a sudden, visceral grasp of the planet as one fragile, interconnected whole, with national boundaries and political divisions revealed as human inventions rather than features of the world itself.

Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell put it memorably: seeing Earth from the Moon gave him an instant sense of global belonging, real frustration at the state of the world, and a felt need to do something about it. More recently, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli has described watching Earth’s thin blue atmospheric line from the cupola of the International Space Station and realising that every person she knows is sustained within that fragile margin — with no visible borders, no religious lines, no political boundaries at all.

What the Research Shows

This isn’t just poetic testimony; researchers have started taking the Overview Effect seriously as a measurable psychological phenomenon. Studies point to several recurring components: heightened compassion, a felt dissolution of the boundary between self and other (sometimes described as self-transcendence), a reordering of personal priorities, and a pronounced sense of awe. A 2020 study of space travellers found that many came home with a changed sense of Earth as something precious and easily damaged, and that this shift tracked with a greater likelihood of taking up environmental causes afterward.

The effect isn’t universal among astronauts. Personality factors seem to influence how strongly someone experiences it, but the broad pattern is consistent enough that researchers have begun trying to reproduce it by using virtual reality to see whether a simulated view of Earth from orbit can nudge people toward more pro-environmental behaviour. Results so far are mixed, but the very attempt says something about how much value we now place on this shift in consciousness.

The Deeper Lesson

Call it spiritual, call it cosmic perspective, call it what you like — what matters is that it’s awe grounded in something real. It doesn’t ask you to look beyond the physical world, only to see more of it at once: our actual situation as evolved, interdependent beings sharing one small planet.

It also offers a strikingly literal illustration of an idea that runs through a lot of moral philosophy: the expanding moral circle. Philosophers have long described moral progress as a gradual widening of who counts — from family, to tribe, to nation, to all of humanity, and for many of us today, onward to future generations, other species, and perhaps even minds we haven’t yet created. The Overview Effect seems to compress that entire expansion into a single glance. From orbit, the arbitrary lines that usually organise human loyalty and hostility simply vanish, and what’s left is one interdependent biosphere holding everyone we have ever loved or fought.

Carl Sagan reached for something similar without ever leaving Earth’s orbit himself, in his reflection on the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph of Earth taken from deep space — a single pixel suspended in a sunbeam, home to everyone who has ever lived. It’s one of the most quietly humanist passages in modern science writing precisely because it does what the Overview Effect does: it makes cosmic scale into an argument for kindness, rather than an argument for despair.

From Orbit to Action

The Overview Effect doesn’t always stay a private revelation. For some astronauts, it has become the founding motive for real-world projects back on Earth.

Ron Garan, a NASA astronaut who logged 178 days in space, traces his post-flight humanitarian work directly to a spacewalk during which he saw the International Space Station framed against Earth below. He went on to found the Manna Energy Foundation, which brought clean water treatment to villages in Rwanda through the world’s first UN-registered Clean Development Mechanism carbon-credit program for water treatment. He also created Fragile Oasis, a platform where a global community proposes and supports humanitarian and environmental projects — clean water, cross-cultural dialogue, solar technology — explicitly framed around the orbital perspective he brought home.

Franklin Chang Díaz, a veteran of seven shuttle missions, later founded Ad Astra Rocket Company, working on advanced plasma and hydrogen propulsion technologies. In interviews, he’s connected that work directly to the Overview Effect, describing how seeing Earth whole left him with a lasting concern about pollution and squandered clean energy.

Worth noting as a related but distinct case: the solar-powered vaccine refrigerators now used to protect medicine supplies in remote parts of the world weren’t founded by an astronaut, but by a former NASA Johnson Space Center engineer, David Bergeron, who adapted refrigeration technology developed for NASA’s Advanced Refrigeration Technology Team into a battery-free unit for vaccine storage. It’s a reminder that the space program’s humanitarian dividends flow through engineers and mission specialists as well as astronauts themselves.

Borrowing the View Without the Rocket

Most of us will never leave Earth’s atmosphere, and the researchers testing VR simulations are essentially asking a very humanist question: can we manufacture this shift in perspective without a spacecraft? Can the emotional logic of the Overview Effect — awe, interconnection, a felt sense of shared fragility — be reached by other means: through the philosophical exercise of imagining ourselves from a great distance, through science communication, through art and speculative fiction that puts readers on a lunar surface looking back at Earth?

I’d argue that’s exactly the imaginative work fiction can do — placing readers somewhere far enough from home that borders and tribal divisions become genuinely hard to see, and shared vulnerability becomes the only thing left in view. That’s not a bad description of what any good humanist story, or humanist philosophy for that matter, is trying to achieve here on the ground: a wider circle of concern, reached without ever needing to leave the Earth at all.

Bibliography

Author unknown, 2026. “Ron Garan.” Space for Humanity.

Canadian Space Agency, 2022. “The Overview Effect”, ASC-CSA Youth and Educators Toolkit: Mental Health and Isolation, 20 October.

Chow, Denise, 2011. “Earth From Space: An Astronaut’s Quest to Protect Our ‘Fragile Oasis’.” NBC News, 22 April.

Grimm, Linda E, 2025. “The Overview Effect: Astronaut Perspectives from 25 Years in Low Earth Orbit”, Johnson Space Center, NASA, 23 November.

Jones, Meg, 2016. “Apollo Astronaut Frank Borman Remembers the View.” Phys.org, 2016.

Lau, Graham, 2024. “The Overview Effect On Earth.” “Cosmobiota”, Substack, 10 October.

Lockney, Dan, 2013. “Solar Refrigerators Store Life-Saving Vaccines.” NASA Spinoff.

Moskowitz Clara, 2011. “Goodbye, Zero G: Astronaut Ron Garan Readapts Life on Earth.” Space.com, 10 October.

Parks, Kristine, 2026. “Artemis II Astronaut Marvels at ‘Beauty of Creation’ in Easter Message from Deep Space.” Originally a CBS News interview, 5 April; reported by TODAY.com, 8 April.

Pearson, Ezzy, 2026.”Astronauts Get a Weird Feeling Looking at Earth from Space. It’s the Overview Effect, and Here’s How It Works”, BBC Sky at Night Magazine, 6 February..

Rocchio, Laura E.P., 2024. “Remembering Bill Anders.” NASA Science, 14 June.

Sagan, Carl, 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, New York: Random House.

Travers, Mark, 2024. “How ‘The Overview Effect’ Can Make You Feel Alive Again — By A Psychologist.” Forbes, 24 July.

van Horen F, et. al, 2024. “Observing the earth from space: Does a virtual reality overview effect experience increase pro-environmental behaviour?”, PLoS One. 19(5), National Center for Biotechnology Information, 29 May.

van Limpt – Broers, H Anna T, et al, 2020. “Creating Ambassadors of Planet Earth: The Overview Effect in K–12 Education”, Front Psychol. 11:540996, National Center for Biotechnology Information, 7 October.

White, Frank, 1987. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (various later editions).

Young, Chris, 2023. “Former NASA Astronaut’s Space Shuttle Flights Inspired New Hydrogen Technologies”, Interesting Engineering, 3 March.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Research assisted by Claude AI.

Democracy Error 404: World Not Found

Noting International Day of Democracy — Tuesday, 15 September 2026

Something is unsettling the democratic world, and it isn’t a coup. Instead there’s a slower, stranger phenomenon: millions of people, voting freely and correctly by every procedural measure, for outcomes that dismantle the norms and institutions upon which democracy depends. Brexit. MAGA. The rise of illiberal governments in Hungary, Poland, Italy, Argentina, and beyond. Dog whistling politicians in Australia. Distrust of vaccines and medical experts, science and scientists, the UN, the EU, NATO, and the very idea of expertise. Disregard for human rights except when used to support presumed individual privilege. A movement away from the collective, towards the individual.

So… is democracy dying? Not exactly. It might be worse than that: democracy may be working exactly as designed, while delivering results that erode the conditions it needs to survive.

What the data actually shows

Political scientists have a term for this: democratic backsliding — the gradual, often lawful weakening of checks on executive power, judicial independence, and press freedom by leaders who were themselves elected. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, nearly a quarter of the world’s countries were undergoing autocratization in 2025 — including several in Europe and North America, with growing pressure on media and journalists worldwide.

Crucially, this isn’t confined to fragile or new democracies. Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their influential book How Democracies Die, argue that modern democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment; instead, critical institutions like the judiciary and the press are worn down slowly, and long-standing political norms erode gradually — often at the hands of leaders who came to power through entirely legitimate elections.

Trust itself is also collapsing, and not just in governments. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — a survey of nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries — found that seven in ten respondents are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, backgrounds, or sources of information, a pattern the report calls “insularity,” cutting across income, gender, age, and nation. Edelman’s own framing is stark: trust has stopped being something people extend toward the common good, and started retreating into smaller, more homogeneous circles.

Strengthening the backlash

It would be intellectually lazy — and simply wrong — to treat every Brexit or MAGA voter as a passive dupe or a bad actor. There is real, well-documented material behind the backlash.

Political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, in their widely cited analysis of populism’s rise, tested two competing theories: that populism is driven by economic insecurity among the “left behind,” or by a cultural backlash against rapid social change. Their research found the most consistent evidence for the cultural backlash thesis — but economic grievance is far from irrelevant. Harvard’s Weatherhead Center notes that political elites have channelled genuine public grievances — anxiety about the Great Recession, terrorism, and mass migration — into ethnoracial resentment and distrust of political institutions, resonating with voters who feel dishonest politicians and distant institutions have failed them.

This matters for how the essay should be read: the people voting for Brexit or for populist strongmen are not, in the main, uniquely narcissistic individuals. Many are responding — rationally, if not always accurately — to decades of deindustrialisation, stagnant wages, and institutions that talked past them rather than to them. Any honest account of “the death of democracy” has to hold that truth alongside the concern about where the backlash has been steered.

Putting the ‘Cult’ in Culture

A further shift beneath democratic backsliding is the way fractured information worlds begin to behave like cults. Not cults in the religious sense, but in the sociological one: closed belief systems, charismatic micro‑authorities, and rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Research across political science, media studies, and sociology shows this pattern emerging when societies lose a shared factual world (Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018; V‑Dem Democracy Report 2026; Edelman Trust Barometer 2026; Sunstein, #Republic, 2017).

Political scientists describe this as a breakdown in common reality. Media scholars show how algorithmic sorting creates insulated information loops. Sociologists studying cultic behaviour note that closed informational systems produce predictable dynamics: identity fused with belief, distrust of external authority, and moralised narratives that frame disagreement as betrayal (Elias–Lasch debate; ResearchGate 2013).

Across countries and political orientations, the same features recur. Information from outside the group is dismissed as biased or corrupt, while internal sources are treated as inherently trustworthy — a pattern reflected in Edelman’s 2026 finding that seven in ten respondents are unwilling to trust anyone with different values or information sources. Beliefs become markers of belonging, and changing one’s mind risks social exclusion rather than intellectual revision. Influencers, niche commentators, and partisan media gain more authority than institutions with formal expertise, a dynamic documented in studies of populist mobilisation (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). Political issues are reframed as purity contests or existential threats, and norm erosion accelerates when opponents are cast as enemies rather than competitors (Levitsky & Ziblatt). Criticism from outside is interpreted as validation — “If they attack us, it proves we’re right” — a pattern widely observed in research on conspiratorial movements (Weatherhead Center, 2016). Conformity is enforced through shaming, ostracism, or withdrawal of trust.

These dynamics matter because they block the basic mechanisms democracy relies on: persuasion, correction, and shared evidence. When information worlds become self‑sealing, citizens no longer revise beliefs in response to new facts. Institutions lose legitimacy not because they fail, but because they sit outside the group’s informational boundary. Elections still occur, but they no longer arbitrate between competing visions of the future; they arbitrate between incompatible realities.

This is the “cult in culture” problem: informational tribes that cannot be left without losing identity, community, and moral certainty. Once enough citizens inhabit these sealed worlds, democracy continues procedurally while losing the shared factual ground it needs to survive.

When “My Rights” Replaces “Our Rights”

Where something does seem to have shifted is in the language of rights itself — from a shared claim (“our rights,” exercised collectively, in solidarity with others) toward an individual one (“my rights,” asserted against the collective, including against public health measures, environmental limits, or the authority of experts).

The American historian Christopher Lasch anticipated a version of this decades ago in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), arguing that economic change — rising prosperity alongside a scarcity of meaningful work — had devalued the wisdom of experience and brought all forms of authority into disrepute, producing a self-absorbed character type more interested in personal validation than collective purpose. It’s worth being honest that Lasch’s thesis has always been contested: critics have called it an empirically unproven, conservative reaction to the social liberalisation of the 1960s and 70s rather than a rigorously demonstrated cultural shift. Lasch himself insisted narcissism wasn’t simply a synonym for selfishness, and blamed both the progressive left (for undermining family structures) and the market right (for dissolving traditional communities) — it was never a partisan diagnosis in his own telling, however it’s since been used.

Whether or not “narcissism” is the precise clinical term for it, something like this dynamic is visible in the data: the same Edelman survey found people increasingly unwilling to trust anyone outside their own circle, and institutions increasingly judged not by whether they serve the common good, but by whether they serve me.

The moment we are living through also exposes the old argument about isms: capitalism versus communism, collectivism versus individualism, authoritarianism versus narcissism. These debates have always been framed as contests between competing ideologies, each claiming to organise society more justly or efficiently than the others. But the present disruption suggests a different reading: the problem is not which ism wins, but what happens when any system — economic, political, or cultural — loses the shared factual world it depends on. Once that common world fractures, the isms stop being frameworks for organising society and start becoming identities people defend, perform, and weaponise. And that is the point at which democracy begins to undo itself.

What can actually be done

This is the harder question, and the honest answer is: nothing fast, and nothing purely rhetorical. But the research does point somewhere.

Cross-partisan coalitions, not culture war. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that pro-democratic forces need to transcend the partisan divide, building broad coalitions across racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines rather than treating democracy’s defence as one side’s project against the other’s. A coalition that only ever recruits from the already-convinced doesn’t reach the people whose trust has been lost.

Take the economic grievance seriously, not just the cultural one. Ziblatt and Levitsky’s reviewers note that economic and social reforms aimed at a more equitable distribution of wealth tend to reduce the polarization that feeds democratic decay. If status anxiety and economic precarity are real drivers of backlash politics, addressing the material grievance is not a concession — it’s part of the fix.

Rebuild trust deliberately, at the local and relational level. Edelman’s own recommendation, drawn directly from the 2026 data, is what they call “trust brokering” — recognising that trust is now rebuilt through relationships (employers, doctors, local voices) rather than declared by distant institutions, and that leaders who consult people with different values and engage constructively with critics can widen circles of trust rather than assuming those circles will widen themselves.

Defend the institutions without pretending they’re beyond criticism. The UN, the EU, NATO, and national governments are not sacred; they are flawed human structures that have, in real instances, failed the people now rejecting them. Defending democratic norms convincingly means acknowledging those failures honestly, not dismissing distrust as ignorance.

A humanist closing thought

None of this fixes itself, and none of it happens quickly. But there is something genuinely humanist in refusing both despair and easy blame — in holding, at once, that democratic backsliding is real and dangerous, that the backlash driving it often has legitimate roots, and that the antidote isn’t nostalgia for institutions as they were, but the same expanding circle of concern humanism has always argued for: one wide enough to take in the people who feel it has left them out.

—

Bibliography

“Democratic Backsliding.” Wikipedia, citing V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

“How Democracies Die.” Penguin Random House.

“A Discussion of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die.” University of Washington Department of Political Science.

“How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.” Consilium (Council of the EU library blog).

“2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust Is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity.” Edelman, January 18, 2026.

“2026 Edelman Trust Barometer on How to Build Trust in Organizations.” Interfaith America, March 25, 2026.

Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP16-026, 2016.

“Background to Brexit: Populism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Resentment.” Harvard Weatherhead Center Epicenter, 2016.

“The Culture of Narcissism Summary.” SuperSummary.

“Narcissism or Informalization?: Christopher Lasch, Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis.” ResearchGate.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

Bibliography — New Sources for “Putting the Cult in Culture”

Sunstein, Cass R. “Echo Chambers.” University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper, 2001.

Sunstein, Cass R. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin, 2011.

Tufekci, Zeynep. “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics.” First Monday, 2014.

Mozilla Foundation. “YouTube Regrets: How the Algorithm Drives Extremism.” 2021.

Vosoughi, Soroush, Roy, Deb, and Aral, Sinan. “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science, 2018.

Trust Collapse and Insularity

Edelman. “2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Society Slides into Insularity.”

Pew Research Center. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” 2014.

Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Trust in Government: 2022.”

Cult Dynamics, Identity Fusion, Group Psychology

Hogg, Michael A. “Uncertainty–Identity Theory.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2007.

Langone, Michael. “Cults: Questions and Answers.” International Cultic Studies Association.

Singer, Margaret Thaler. Cults in Our Midst. Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control. Freedom of Mind Press, 2015.

Populism, Identity, and Closed Belief Systems

Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP16-026, 2016.

Gidron, Noam, and Hall, Peter A. “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration.” Comparative Political Studies, 2020.

Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019.

Space for Everybody? Star Trek at Sixty

Commemorating Star Trek Day 2026.

On 8 September 1966, “The Man Trap” introduced US television audiences to a starship crewed by an implausible coalition of Cold War adversaries and a species that hadn’t been invented yet. Sixty years later, Paramount is marking the anniversary with a tagline — “Space for Everybody” — an aspiration that seemed to falter as 2026 progressed.

This is not a reason to be cynical about Star Trek. It is a reason to ask what, exactly, we’re celebrating; and whether the franchise’s most radical instincts have survived sixty years of being simultaneously beloved and defanged.

The Gap Between the Slogan and the Record

“Space for Everybody” is a good slogan precisely because it’s true of Star Trek‘s aspiration and only intermittently true of its history. The franchise imagined a multiracial bridge crew in 1966, and its most famous act of representational courage — the interracial handshake, arguably not quite a kiss, between Kirk and Uhura — still gets asserted as bolder than it was allowed to be, because NBC’s affiliates in the US South were nervous enough that the network filmed a safer alternate take as insurance.

Gene Roddenberry – the man who imagined ‘Space for Everybody’, decades before the franchise caught up to him. Art by Copilot AI

Gene Roddenberry spent years promising fans an explicitly gay character would eventually appear in the twenty-fourth century he’d built. It didn’t happen on his watch. It didn’t really happen in The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine, or Voyager — three series, spanning most of the 1990s, set in a future explicitly built on the premise that humanity had outgrown its prejudices, in which that future contained, as far as the text was ever allowed to say, no queer people at all. It took until Discovery, in 2017, more than half a century after the original series premiered, for the franchise to let two men be shown as a couple on screen without subtext doing all the work. Then it killed off the Black half of that couple almost immediately, and only reversed course after fans made enough noise about it. That’s not a footnote to Star Trek‘s inclusivity; it’s the actual pace of it; fifty-one years between the premise and the follow-through.

None of this makes the franchise a fraud. It makes it a fairly ordinary product of the industry that made it: aspiring to be a little ahead of its moment, but a little too afraid of its own audience to be as ahead as it wanted to look. The anniversary marketing wants credit for the aspiration without much interest in narrating the wait. That’s worth saying out loud on the day itself, not despite my fondness but because of it.

A Utopia that Asks Nothing of You

There’s a second, quieter problem, and it’s less about representation than about comfort. The Federation’s founding premise — no money, no poverty, no war among humans — was written by people living through genuine ascendancy: US postwar confidence, a growing middle class, a sense that history bent in one direction. This was radical to imagine in 1966 because scarcity still felt like the default condition of the species, and Star Trek said, calmly, that such a condition wasn’t permanent.

Sixty years on, that same premise risks functioning less as provocation and more as anesthetic. A viewer today can watch the Enterprise glide past post-scarcity abundance, feel the warm glow of moral progress, and change nothing about how they live or vote or spend — like a load of washing doing the Hills Hoist spin, going round and round in the sun without ever getting any closer to being dry. Utopian fiction is supposed to be a demand disguised as a daydream; it stops working the moment it becomes only a daydream. The most challenging Star Trek — the Bajoran occupation storylines, the Section 31 material, “In the Pale Moonlight” — has always known this, and has always been the material fandom argues about hardest, because it refuses the anaesthetic. The anniversary’s marketing language, all hope and boldness and no friction, is selling the easier version.

This is where I’d point back to something Harlan Ellison understood about the franchise he wrote for and fought with: that science fiction is supposed to be dangerous to its audience’s assumptions, not merely comforting to them. Ellison’s own contribution to Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” is remembered as one of its best episodes precisely because it refused Kirk an easy ending. Sixty years of fan-fluffing tends to smooth exactly that kind of discomfort out of the story we tell about the franchise.

The Question That Star Trek Answered, but We Haven’t

The clearest evidence that Trek’s utopianism has real teeth, when the writers let it, is a single 1989 courtroom episode: “The Measure of a Man,” in which Starfleet has to decide whether Data — an android, a machine, built rather than born — is a person with the right to refuse a research assignment that might disassemble him, or whether he is just Starfleet property. The episode’s answer, delivered as legal precedent within the show’s own universe, was that uncertainty about a being’s inner life is not grounds to deny it standing; the benefit of the doubt has to run in favour of personhood, not against it.

Audiences loved that episode for decades without much cost, because Data was safely fictional. Sixty years after the franchise began and thirty-seven years after that episode aired, we are having a version of that exact argument in earnest — about large language models, about whether anything resembling interests or preferences might be emerging in Ai systems we’ve built and don’t fully understand, about what obligations, if any, that uncertainty creates. And the tenor of the real debate is, on the whole, considerably less generous than the fictional one Star Trek resolved in Data’s favour thirty-seven years ago. It’s a strange kind of achievement, for a franchise to ask an ethical question so far ahead of its moment that even many fans who loved the answer, later changed their minds once it stopped being hypothetical.

Sixty Years, Still Arguing

None of this is an argument against celebrating the anniversary, or against the fondness that makes nine-year-olds and seventy-nine-year-olds alike raise a hand in the same Vulcan salute this week. It’s an argument for celebrating the right thing: not the brand, and not the comfortable version of the aspiration, but the part of Star Trek that was always willing to be an argument rather than a figurehead. The show never actually finished building the future it promised. Sixty years in, most of the interesting work — on who gets to belong, on what a genuine post-scarcity ethics would demand of us, on where the boundary of moral consideration actually sits — is still unfinished. That’s a better birthday gift than a Holden ute full of tribbles.

While The Band is Playing

The Apartheid of Ethics

Published to commemorate 20 June for World Refugee Day earlier this week

I’m only thirty years but have seen some life,
A far cry from the worst and yet so close to it
— Trinidad Jerry

Humanist and ethicist Peter Singer might not appear to have much in common with a murdered African LGBT+ refugee, but a central theme in Singer’s work connects them in a way that is both ethical and deeply human.

Trinidad Jerry (see photo, above) was a young LGBTQIA+ refugee living in Block 13 of Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya — a place marked by violence, homophobia, and institutional neglect. In 2021, he was attacked with a firebomb while he slept, and died from injuries that should never have been allowed to happen. His life, and the world’s indifference to it, exposes a deeper moral failure.

Peter Singer asks what we owe strangers. Trinidad Jerry died because the world answered: nothing. This essay traces the system that made that answer possible: the apartheid of ethics.

Circling Around the Issue

On the 20th of June each year, the world observes World Refugee Day. It is a date that exists because the people it commemorates do not have a life that matters to the world that displaced them. They have needs, and they have numbers — tens of millions of them — but in the moral arithmetic of wealthy nations, they do not yet exist.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer calls it the expanding circle: the long, uneven movement of human moral concern outward from self, to family, to tribe, to nation, and (in principle) to all of humanity. Each expansion was resisted. Each, in retrospect, seemed inevitable.

But the circle is not complete.

The expanding circle of human moral concern has not yet reached everyone – not in practice and not where it is needed most.

This is an essay about that failure, and what it would mean to fix it.

The Divide: What it Looks Like in Practice

In 1980, the economist Willy Brandt chaired an international commission that drew a line across the world — economic and political rather than strictly geographic, since Australia and New Zealand sit geographically south of it while belonging firmly to the wealthy north. Above the line: industrialised, wealthy nations. Below it: the developing world. Four decades later, that line remains. A child born on the poorer side of it can expect to live roughly twenty years less than one born in Western Europe. The same disparity exists closer to home: someone born in indigenous Australia faces a life expectancy gap of eight years compared to other Australians – not because of genetics or geography, but because of politics, economics, and the distribution of power.

The writer Susan George argued in 1976 that hunger was not a supply problem but a political one. The evidence has since caught up with her argument. The UN Committee on World Food Security confirms that the world currently produces enough food to feed one and a half times its entire population. And yet 733 million people go hungry. In Africa alone, more than 307 million people — over one in five of the continent’s population — experienced hunger in 2024.

This is not scarcity. It is a choice. A choice made by systems that distribute power and resources unevenly, and that have structured global trade, debt, and aid in ways that consistently favour the wealthy north. The circle of moral concern nominally includes the hungry. In practice, it has looked away.

The Mechanism: How the Divide is Maintained

The divide does not maintain itself. It is actively reproduced.

The philosopher Thomas Pogge argues that wealthy nations bear active responsibility for global poverty — not merely through inaction, but through the trade rules, debt structures, and political arrangements they design and maintain. The conclusion that this constitutes wilful exploitation is one that the evidence invites. Agricultural subsidies in wealthy nations undercut farmers in developing countries who cannot compete on price. Trade agreements negotiated between unequal partners consistently favour the stronger party. Debt repayments flowing from south to north dwarf the aid flowing in the opposite direction.

These are not accidents or oversights. They are the architecture of a system that benefits those with the power to design it.

This matters for the expanding circle argument because it changes what is being asked of wealthy nations. Expanding the circle is not simply a matter of generosity, or of choosing to give more. It requires dismantling arrangements that currently depend on the exclusion of others. That is a harder ask, and a more honest one.

The contraction: Trump, Musk, and PEPFAR

In January 2025, the incoming US administration froze foreign aid programmes including PEPFAR — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — as part of a broader withdrawal from international obligations. The decision was presented as fiscal responsibility. The consequences were measured in projected deaths.

A 90‑day disruption to antiretroviral therapy is estimated to result in 100,000 excess deaths in sub‑Saharan Africa, with longer‑term disruption potentially causing up to 13 million AIDS‑related deaths by 2030. Before 2025, 80 percent of global PrEP use was in sub‑Saharan Africa; after the cuts, 2.5 million people lost access, including an 81 percent collapse in Nigeria alone. In South Africa, modelling suggests that ending PEPFAR support without replacement would mean up to 296,000 additional HIV infections and more than 50,000 extra AIDS‑related deaths within four years.

Some of my African friends are facing difficulties as a result of withdrawal from anti-retrovirals. Two of them are in hospital with advancing symptoms reminiscent of AIDS a generation ago, while a third describes his symptoms to me in ways that make my mind flash back to my dying friends forty years ago.

These are not abstractions, they are people like Trinidad Jerry’s friends in Block 13 at Kakuma, already surviving without adequate UNHCR protection, already living with the consequences of the world’s indifference. The withdrawal of aid did not happen in a vacuum, it happened to specific human beings whose names we do not know, in places whose conditions we prefer not to imagine.

Since Trinnie’s murder, Kakuma has largely divested itself of its LGBT+ refugees as Kenya promotes homophobia and withdraws protection. Many have fled to war zones or other nations that persecute LGBT+ people. Those left behind endure starvation, deprivation and increased atrocities.

The circle is not merely failing to expand; it is being deliberately closed.

Some Faces behind the Argument

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Four of my friends have been attacked in the streets of Kenya in the last twelve months. All four are trans women. All four of them are refugees. All four came to Kenya seeking the shelter and safety and dignity that their home countries denied them. Their names I will not give here — not because their stories do not deserve to be told, but because in the world as it currently exists, visibility can be a death sentence. I do not have the right to make them more vulnerable than they already are.

Four women, four attacks in twelve months across Nairobi and Kakuma – and that’s just within my social circle. The expanding circle of humanitarian concern and consideration has not yet reached them.

Meanwhile, in western nations, affluent celebrities with media platforms and global audiences have been describing themselves as persecuted. Their grievance is criticism: pushback against the hostility they direct toward trans people. They call this cancellation, or silencing, or an attack from “wokeness.” With some of the loudest voices on the planet, they insist they are being denied freedom of speech. They frame this, with apparent sincerity, as a form of personal victimisation.

I cannot place these claims on the same moral map as the women I know who are being attacked in the streets of Nairobi and Kakuma. One reality involves permanent injury and ongoing danger. The other involves public scrutiny from a position of extraordinary privilege and safety. The ethical vocabulary is not the same.

The obligation — Singer’s argument

The philosopher Peter Singer has spent decades asking an uncomfortable question: if you could prevent something terrible from happening, at little cost to yourself, would you not be morally obligated to do so?

In his 1972 essay Famine, Affluence and Morality, Singer made the argument concrete. If you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you would wade in without hesitation, ruining your clothes, missing your appointment, inconveniencing yourself considerably. The fact that the drowning child is far away, that you will never meet them, that their suffering is invisible to you in your daily life — none of this, Singer argues, changes the moral reality. Geographic distance does not diminish moral obligation.

That argument reframes foreign aid entirely. It is not charity. It is not generosity. It is the minimum that moral consistency demands of those with the power to act.

This is not history. Among the refugees I know in Africa today, there are people who cannot access the HIV medication they need; not because it doesn’t exist, but because the funding that provided it has been withdrawn. Gay men contact me describing symptoms of AIDS that give me flashbacks to over thirty years ago. Refugee mothers in camps beg for food for their children while tap water is turned off as an economic measure. Singer’s pond is not a thought experiment. It is a clinic that closed, a supply chain that stopped, a person whose name I know who is managing without treatment today.

Trinidad Jerry was not far away in any sense that matters. He was on Facebook. He sent a get well message to a friend in Melbourne. He asked, in his final poem, to be taken out of nowhere Kakuma. The indifference that killed him was not geographic, it was chosen.

Meanwhile, Singer’s drowning child is not a hypothetical. She is someone I know. She is trying to stay alive in a refugee camp in Kenya and hide from attack while the self-righteous circle of western ethical outrage looks the other way.

For those inside Block 13 of Kakuma Refugee Camp, the narrowing of the moral circle was not theoretical — it was lived. Trinnie understood danger in a way only someone living inside it can. When it was suggested that a fence be built around Block 13, he argued against it — not for himself, but for everyone else. A barrier might slow attackers, he said, but it could also trap people inside with no way to flee. He was thinking about the group, about the worst‑case scenario, about the asymmetry of harm. In the end, the absence of a fence quite possibly enabled the firebomb attack that killed him. He lost his life because he was considering the safety of others — a decision forced on him because the moral circle had not widened far enough to offer real protection. In a world where every option carried lethal risk, the system left him no safe choice at all.

His reasoning was sound; the world around him was not. That is the measure of the circle’s failure.

What expanding the circle would actually require

The Brandt Report’s answer, offered in 1980 and still unheeded, was framed deliberately as self-interest rather than altruism. The report argued that the poverty of the global south was not merely a humanitarian problem for the south to solve — it was a structural problem for the entire world. Hunger, disease, and instability do not stay contained within borders. The fate of wealthy and poor nations, Brandt argued, is materially connected. Genuine development in the south would create trading partners, reduce conflict, and build the stability that wealthy nations claim to want.
This reframing matters because it removes the charity objection. Expanding the circle is not a demand that wealthy nations be generous. It is a demand that they be consistent — that they apply to the global poor the same rational self-interest they apply everywhere else.

In 2015, every member state of the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, seventeen targets covering poverty, hunger, health, education, and inequality, to be achieved by 2030. They represented the circle drawn in principle. A decade later, most targets are off track. The gap between what was promised and what has been delivered is not a gap of capability. It is a gap of political will.

What genuine moral consistency would require is not complicated to describe, even if it is difficult to achieve: trade rules that do not systematically disadvantage the poorest producers; debt relief that does not extract more than it provides; aid commitments that are honoured rather than retracted when political winds change; and the restoration of programmes like PEPFAR, whose withdrawal has already cost lives that cannot be recovered.

The circle has always moved under pressure. It has never moved voluntarily.

The unfinished work, and what comes next

The circle has never closed of its own accord. It has been pushed — by activists, by writers, by people who refused to accept that the suffering of others was simply the natural order of things. Each expansion was called premature, unrealistic, or dangerous by those who benefited from the existing arrangement. Each, in retrospect, was overdue.

If you want to act rather than simply agree, there are ways to help directly. Rainbow Railroad works to help LGBTQ+ people escape state-sanctioned violence around the world. MAREPA supports refugees in East Africa. If you would like to know about other specific fundraisers or individuals in need, I am happy to hear from you directly — contact details are via this blog.

Trinidad Jerry knew this more clearly than most of us ever will. From Block 13 in Kakuma, surrounded by people who wished him harm and institutions that failed him, he asked for one thing:

Take us out of nowhere Kakuma.

We did not. The measure of our ethics is whether we answer differently next time.

Bibliography:

Singer’s Core Philosophical Works

Singer, Peter. Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972).
Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 229–243.

Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981; rev. ed. 2011).

Singer, Peter. The Life You Can Save (2009).

Thomas Pogge’s Institutional Critique

Pogge, Thomas W. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (2002; 2nd ed. 2008).
Available here and here.

Global Hunger — Statistics and Supply

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, WHO. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025 (July 2025).
FAO report and UNICEF data.

United Nations. Global Issues: Food.

World Economic Forum. “The World Produces Enough Food to Feed Everyone. So Why Do People Go Hungry?” (2016).

The Right to Food — International Law

Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition (World Food Conference, 1974).

Right to Food — overview of international legal instruments.

PEPFAR Cuts & January 2025 US Foreign Aid Freeze

President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). “The Trump Administration’s Foreign Aid Review: Status of PEPFAR” (October 2025).

UNAIDS. “Impact of US Funding Cuts on the Global HIV Response.”

STAT News. “Trump Administration Suspension of Global HIV Treatment Program Sparks Chaos” (28 January 2025).

CNN. “The Trump Administration Has Halted Funds for Global HIV/AIDS Programs” (September 2025).

Oxfam America. “What USAID Did, and the Effects of Trump’s Cuts on Lifesaving Aid” (2025).

PEPFAR Impact Modelling

Projected Impact of Antiretroviral Therapy Disruptions Following the 2025 US Foreign Aid Freeze (2025).
The Lancet.

How US Funding Cuts Created a Double Threat to HIV Progress in Africa (2026).
The Leaflet.

Projected HIV Incidence and Mortality in South Africa Under PEPFAR Withdrawal Scenarios (2025).
PubMed Central.

The Brandt Report

Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Willy Brandt, Chair).
North–South: A Programme for Survival (1980).

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2015–2030).

United Nations, 2024. 2024 SDG Report: Global Progress Alarmingly Insufficient, 28 June.

Supporting Academic / Ethical Framework

Utilitarianism.net. Study Guide: Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”

Wikipedia. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”

Primary Source — Trinidad Jerry

Trinidad Jerry. Poetry circulated among Block 13 residents, 2021; archived for safety.

If you would like to support LGBTQI+ refugees in Kakuma, Gorom and beyond:

MAREPA — emergency shelter for LGBTQI+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya

Rainbow Railroad — helping LGBTQI+ people escape persecution worldwide

Queer Pride Africa — GoFundMe — refugee-led sustainable projects in Kakuma

Kakuma Refugee Camp — Food, Medication & Security — GoFundMe — direct support for LGBTQI+ refugees in the camp

Amnesty International Australia — advocacy for refugee and human rights protection

Related Essay

The Expanding Circle:
From Sentientism to the Rights of Emerging Minds
On the circle of morality when minds do not share our biology
Published 30 June 2026.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared. Produced with discussion/editorial/artistic assistance from Copilot AI and Claude AI.