What would it look life if governments everywhere made it a top priority to prevent the intense suffering of all sentient beings?
The OPIS team is currently (as of spring 2024) working on an ambitious project to research and write a guide to compassionate governance and systemic change, which we plan to publish and widely circulate in early 2025. The guide will tap into the findings from a range of disciplines and extract some of the key principles and ideas needed to shift towards a more cooperative, needs-based global system that values the wellbeing of all sentient beings. It will contain some core ethical principles and a vision for the future, propose concrete, evidence-based approaches to better organising ourselves globally, and make a series of policy prescriptions aligned with compassionate governance.
We also plan to draft a manifesto containing some of the guide’s key recommendations, solicit a large number of signatures and promote the manifesto widely. This project will include creative campaigns and PR events to spread the ideas and facilitate uptake.
This 3-page concept note provides the background thinking behind this project.