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Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens?
I never agreed to any obligations and I will recognize none.
Just to be clear, you think that American citizenship is meaningless?
What justifies state-imposed limits on the human rights to movement and free association?
The necessity of the existence of the state itself, which, without such limts, would be dissolved altogether and unable to protect any rights at all, much less the vacuous notions of a planet-wide "rights rights to movement and free association".
So here are a couple of big ones.
Q. According to two Pew surveys in Mexico, what percentage of the 109 million Mexicans would move to the U.S. if it were legal?
A. Over 40% in both surveys.
Q. How many people live in countries where the average GDP per capita in purchasing power parity terms is lower than in Mexico?
A. 5,043,000,000 as of 2006, according to the CIA World Factbook.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
I suggest that Will should start a movement to pass a Constitutional Amendment deleting the worlds "to ourselves and our Posterity" from the Preamble, and see how far he gets.
"I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this."
1) Do the institutions we are judging have to make people better off than they would be if those institutions did not exist or must they make non-citizens as well off as is within our power?
2) Once we decide which of the standards mentioned in (1) to use, we must determine what institutions require justification. For instance, should we ask ourselves whether particular immigration policies make those outside of our country better off or whether the institutions that produce those policies (our republican system of government) make those outside of the country better off.
As for (1) it seems too strict to demand that our institutions make everyone as well off as is within our power, so let’s suppose for a moment that we are asking whether or not a given institution makes people better off than they would be otherwise. If we adopt that standard of justification and then move to question (2) we must decide what institution we are going to judge. Liberal representative government has facilitated technological development that has left much (probably most) of the world better off. Judging the legitimacy of immigration controls by the legitimacy of the liberal representative institutions that produce them might not seem right to you. Maybe each policy, and not just the institutions that produce it, must be justified by making all non-citizens better off. If this is the standard then I agree with you on the legitimacy of immigration controls. Unrestricted immigration would obviously make many immigrants better off even if it ended up making current citizens significantly worse off. That being said, does evaluating every single policy in this way leave any room for citizens to govern themselves and decide what sort of country they want to live in? This is getting too long for a comment, but I am interested in how you would deal with (1) and (2).
If we restricted the vote to people who were literate, had good credit rating, and own significant property, it would not be a problem. If we did that, we could, and should, open our borders. Universal sufferage, however, creates a problem.
Well, Steve said that Wilkinson "seldom" includes any numbers in his discussions of immigration. He was actually being quite charitable: substituing "never" would have increased the sentence's accuracy (as a quick skim of the post will verify).
Didn't you find the appending of those two final sentences incongruous with the piece at large? A call for concrete, empirical investigation of an issue the rest of the piece had treated at the loftiest level of philosophical abstraction? Quite aesthetically displeasing, no...
Mr. Donald,
As someone in another thread noted, just because they wouldn't have the franchise wouldn't mean they couldn't kick up a fuss. Countries with notably high rates of immigration usually manage it through authoritarian policing and Draconian punishment(Dubai, Singapore).
Oddly enough, I do not recognize _any_ pre-existing obligations, so the question of whether or not our success weakens them is moot.
By referring to our success I was positing a limit case. Obligations to non-citizens do not exist a priori, so we must ask ourselves whether they might emerge with circumstance. Obviously, the limiting circumstance is one in which we are rich and they are poor -- a situation where the claims flow strongly in one direction, and in the greatest number.
I'm not sure how you imagine these obligations to arise. The categorical imperative? Surely you have in mind something less...intuitive.
These obligations you speak of, do they pre-exist human beings? Were they products of the Big Bang, settling into the fabric of spacetime during the Era of Decoupling?
I am not trying to be unlikeable, here. I just want to know how you ground your claims in reality. And if they are not so grounded, wherefore the strident certitude with which you present them?
I may be precluding a future political career here, but this is a polite -- though useful -- fiction.
You write, "So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not."
Think of the earth as a big commons, and imagine selectively-permeable membranes as fences. Can we justify the system of cellular exclusivity and its transport controls in the same way? Evidently not.
There is no hard-break in the physical world between cells and the superorganism we call society, though we're not disposed to see it.
The great disillusionments of human history all had one thing in common: the discovery that Man was not the center of the universe. Moral Truth as the last illusion is more ensconced, since morality itself is an instinct of human nature. But like the Ptolemaic system of cosmology, it too will be replaced by fact, and none too soon.
Certain constraints on behavior, when generally observed, tend to make most in the relevant social system better off over time. Insofar as people have an interest in their welfare, they ought to heed these constraints. Let's call them rights.
The relevant social system, it turns out, does not stop at borders. Cooperation is already globalized. The gains from cooperation increase as the scope of cooperation increases. Nationalist arguments are arguments for ensuring these gains are not realized.
If it's useful, how is it a fiction? In my book, rights are justified by the likely effects of respecting them. The argument JUST IS that respecting certain side-constraints on action is useful. The flipside is that failing to respect them is harmful.
I can assure that you're not going to out-naturalize me. Maybe we have a different idea about what it means to be fully "disillusioned". There are empirical facts about the conditions for human flourishing. There are sets of norms, rules, conventions, institutions etc. that lead people acting within them to live wealthier, healthier, more satisfying, longer lives. That's what I'm after. It's pretty damn far from magical.
Surely a distinction must be made between useful and true. Especially given the vulnerability of our neo-cortical world-modeling to conceptual placebos.
There is no inherent contradiction in the idea that a false belief might result in benefits -- to the person, the society, or both -- if, via its subjective force, it leads to the types of "behavioral constraints" you mention. In fact, this must be the case more often than not, since so many ancient and mutually exclusive belief systems abound on this planet. Did they not have some utility, personal or collective, they probably would not still be extant. Of course, given the sheer number of them, it's also possible that human beings, via their more natural virtues, inhabit a state of ecological release.
But the point remains: there is no inherent tension between having utility and being false.
Now, you make a good amount of sense when you talk about the benefits of behavioral constraints. Were everyone to follow their impulses, complex civilization and its attendant benefits would be impossible: the systemic consequence of each person obeying nothing but appetite is maximum entropy. As Omar says, "A man's got to have a code." And as Jesus said, "Depart from me, ye who are lawless." Without the centripetal force of a common ethic, the resulting existential randomization would keep mankind in a very bad way indeed.
But you cannot get from there to the idea of a priori moral obligation. You can speak in terms of ethics; if you define a destination point you can speak in terms of strategy. But morality itself is an illusion; it is an evolutionarily-evolved, subterranean constant of human nature, it operates via intuition and emotion and only belatedly (and tenuously) accords with reason, and as a tool for survival it is unwieldy and highly imprecise.
Instantiations of "moral judgment" are largely inscrutable, heteroglot and discordant, as you would expect from a blunt, evolutionarily derived faculty like the moral instinct. Thus, while it is true that the concept of "justice" is universal in human beings -- not exactly a precise statement but enough for our purposes -- its conceptions can be and often are diametrically opposed to one another. This is no mystery, but a natural result of each man judging his world from the inside looking out, using the same repertoire of mental metrics.
Thus, an argument based on moral rights and obligations is inherently problematic unless you first destroy the distinction between the in-group and out-group, and even then it is less isomorphic to reality than it should be. Much better to find an external standard that is measurable, like, ah, Kolmogorov complexity or something (for society), rather than use the slippery concepts of moral truth.
And believe me when I say I have no intention of out-naturalizing you. My goal was to find common ground that was, ah, actual ground, rather than conduct the conversation on different levels of air. Each of the latter has, over the past few hundred years, been disassembled and reduced to rubble, while the former remains immutable as ever.
Another way of saying this: fundamental conflict in moral judgment is precisely the result you get when you think of each man as a prepared, complex, and adaptable algorithmic singularity.
"But the point remains: there is no inherent tension between having utility and being false."
I am, of course, speaking about propositions -- "true that" rather than "true how". E.g., it is true that if you are a good boy Santa will bring you presents -- useful, beneficial, but false.
One would be hard pressed to argue that a false technique has more than nominal utility (e.g. showing how not to do it).
Could you provide some support for that statement?
Could you provide some support for that statement?
Argument from absurdity: if all moral assertions are equally reasonable, then it's as reasonable to assert that it's immoral to do that which I've agreed to do as it is to assert that it's moral -- which is absurd. Hence, not all moral assertions are equally reasonable. QED.
You are confusing legal rights with moral rights, a mistake the preamble to the Declaration of Independence was written to correct:
Or, as Roderick Long more recently put it,
1. Rights require an enforcement mechanism to be viable.
2. States are one such enforcement mechanism.
3. ???
4. Therefore, states are the only such enforcement mechanism, and thus all rights come from the government, in which case nothing the government does can ever be said to violate rights. I am above the law!
5. Profit!
[Two South Park references in one post!)
Putting on my logical positivist hat for a minute, might it be the case that all moral assertions are equally reasonable given that all moral assertions are equally unreasonable>/i>, if we reject the possibility of cognitively meaningful moral assertions altogether?
"I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this."
C'mon, be honest with yourself. You have no interest in "serious, empirically-minded arguments." You don't like numbers and you don't like reality. You like metaphysics.
No, I'm simply talking about what the Constitution, as you point out, refers to as secured rights, or, as I said, viable rights.
But then Larry goes on to say that “there are no states without defensible borders, and definable citizens,” thereby implicitly assuming that a state is the only enforcement mechanism of rights.
I didn't actually say that a state was the only enforcement mechanism for rights, but I probably should have stated explicitly that it's the only just -- i.e., morally reasonable -- mechanism, since alternatives either involve attempts at private enforcement (see Nozick) or are reducible to a state in any case.
... might it be the case that all moral assertions are equally reasonable given that all moral assertions are equally unreasonable, if we reject the possibility of cognitively meaningful moral assertions altogether?
In which case it hardly makes sense to speak of "rights" at all, whether as discussed by the Constitution or by Roderick Long.
True, it wouldn't make sense to speak of rights if we adopted the logical positivist position. I don't, in fact, adopt that position, but I thought I'd put it out there as a possible disproof of your claim that "not all moral assertions are equally reasonable."
Isn't that a fallacy or something?
if all moral assertions are equally reasonable, then it’s as reasonable to assert that it’s immoral to do that which I’ve agreed to do as it is to assert that it’s moral
Yes, there is no reason at all for any of it.
Micha, what rights-enforcement mechanism is capable of protecting me from the state? Because all the competitors seem to have gotten their asses thoroughly kicked everywhere but the high seas and Antarctic.
"Just to be clear, you think Americans ought to get a better shake in life just because they’re Americans?"
First of all, it's not impossible that Americans mostly deserve what they have. Secondly, even if it's just a better shake Americans ought to be able to pass it on, at the national level, to whom they choose.
Micha, what rights-enforcement mechanism is capable of protecting me from the state?
"Rights"? What "rights"? "Any of it" would have to include "rights" too I'm afraid.
Maybe the problem here is that you think the argument from absurdity (reductio ad absurdum) is a fallacy.
Micha was the one who brought up rights-enforcing mechanisms. Just because I don't believe in rights doesn't mean I can't also disbelieve in a mechanism that can stand up to the state.
You can, of course, believe or disbelieve in anything you like. But what you can't do, if rights, like morality, are meaningless absurdities, is make any claim. You're on your own, TG.
You gave two hypothetical claims and said if morality/rights are meaningless they are equally valid, which is to say not valid at all. Where is the contradiction?
That's not what I said. What I did say was that if all moral/rights assertions are thought to be equally reasonable, that leads to a contradiction -- but of course that's only true if you think that any moral/rights assertions are reasonable at all. In your case, then, you can at least escape the contradiction. Whether you can escape harm from the state or anything/one else, being unable to claim protection or help, is another matter.
I don't recall ever claiming I knew of such a mechanism. The lack of such a mechanism, of course, isn't incompatible with my statement that a state is not the only enforcement mechanism of rights.
What are some other ones and why do they matter if the State can just drive them out of business?