Like philosophers, scientists chased Truth, but their theories were understood to be provisional—tools for resolving problems as they appeared, models valuable only to the extent that they explained and predicted what showed in experiments. A Newtonian model of motion had worked beautifully for a long time, but then people noticed bits of unaccountable data, and relativity emerged as a stronger theory. Couldn’t disciplines like philosophy work that way, too?
It's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since.
This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.
I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me:
First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:
In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.
To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.
There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).
Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
Her idea of equality as the ability to function equally as human beings resonated with me too.
Many years ago, what started my shift from a capitalist to what I am today, was the following question: "If people had to earn and pay for breathable air (a basic) the same way they had to earn and pay for food, education and medical care (also basics), would the world be a better place or a worse place?"
The world I imagined was one of such desperation that hardly anyone had time to think about anything but themselves, a world that barely advanced because hardly anyone had the luxury of time to think of greater things.
I am now completely sold on the idea of taking the basics out of the competitive equation (nutrition, education and health). Desperation is the enemy of civilization.
I believe the fundamental difference between paying for air versus food, education, medical care is that air is abundantly free. Someone could try to charge you for it, but you could just open your lungs and consume all of the air which they haven't bottled.
Food requires land, plants, and animals. It requires labor. It requires you to either produce it yourself or interact with someone who does. Air does not.
Read _The_Air_Trust_, a sci-fi novel about a century old. Then consider that human intelligence declines when CO2 reaches levels that might occur within the next century or two. If levels of inequality do not decline, we can reasonably expect that the wealthy will be polluting the planet with even more CO2 in their efforts to protect the brains of the dominant class.
This is already starting to happen in China. The upper class are able to utilize air cleaning technologies to eliminate any external pollution within their living spaces, while the lower and middle classes can't afford such luxuries.
Is the decline in intelligence with respect to CO2 correlation or causation? Obviously, we should make real efforts to protect our air quality, as we all benefit from this. And we should make efforts to prevent people from polluting the air to their benefit (creating capital or profit from some action which pollutes the air -- an action which otherwise would be unprofitable if we were to make it illegal).
Because nutrition, education, and healthcare require resources and effort, one cannot guarantee their availability for all without forcing labor, thereby impinging on the freedoms of others. Thus they cannot be basic human rights without forcing some degree of inequality.
One should have every right to pursue such goals, but defining these as unalienable rights is incompatible with egalitarianism.
This used to be my thought as well when I was a capitalist. But then I realized that this is a form of insurance. What we pay to maintain the welfare system in an insurance premium in case we need it one day. It is also a sort of social utility fee -- it reduces crime and makes society more livable. I'd gladly pay for these benefits...
> We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
Of course, in practice, private government goes hand-in-hand with growth in the usual sort of government - this is what today's "institutional reality" looks like. A truly free institutional reality would have people constantly voting with their feet, shopping around for the best "private government" service. It's only because of pervasive interference that this is not allowed to happen today.
But there is no way out of "pervasive interference". For instance quite obviously the normal state of a network company as was Standard Oil, AT&T and nowadays Google and Facebook is a monopoly. How do you "vote with your feet" then?
The fundamental error is the erroneous belief that markets will magically find equilibrium states, and optimal ones with that. Both premises are false: market tend to equilibrium only in undesirable situations such as oligopoly, monopoly or monopsony; else they're simply chaotic and fail to converge to anything stable and go anarchically from boom to bust.
> "Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences."
I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society.
I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused moral philosophy.
I'll just mention that having a moral philosophy that implies that the ideal society doesn't have something analogous to our country borders does not necessarily require open borders in a society that is not otherwise ideal.
>I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society.
One could rationally want the best for their country/society, but not for everybody outside of it (e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it, because of the population increase, different backgrounds that would need to overcome, different religious and political preferences that a mass of outsiders could impose, etc).
> One could rationally want the best for their country/society, but not for everybody outside of it
Her moral philosophy seems predicated on the idea that everyone is deserving of certain rights. If we're going to deny these rights to some people on the basis of birth-location, why not deny the same rights on the basis of other criteria such as race, gender, intelligence, physical health, etc
> e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it
I agree completely with the above, but that's because the above is a utilitarian argument and I believe in utilitarianism. If you were to ask Anderson though, she would likely reject utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
Was that something she actually said or just something you inferred?
It seems pretty clear that she thinks that each society has an obligation towards its members but I didn't her mention anything about obligations societies have towards non-members.
I very much doubt that she's against, say, the right of asylum, but there's nothing there that I can see that implies that she believes France has an equal responsibility to provide for Chinese citizens as it does towards its own.
Her argument is based on the fact that all humans are equal. A person from outside your country is equal to you and needs help, then. She doesn't say that all US citizens are equal.
It absolutely was based on people being equal, yes, but all humans being equal does NOT imply an obligation on the Czech Republic to care for citizens in China's society.
It implies that both China and the Czech Republic are obligated to level out arbitrarily enforced class divisions in their own societies.
Maybe that's the difference between our opinions. While there are obvious differences between Chinese and Czech people, I see humanity as it is today as a single society - since we're sharing this world and influence each other greatly. That of course wasn't always the case and might not be the case in the future (e.g. with people living in other star systems), but right now I see it like this.
It makes perfect sense. There's no logical requirement at all that she should want France to be obligated to provide for China's citizens just because she wants China to be obligated to provide for China's citizens.
>If we're going to deny these rights to some people on the basis of birth-location, why not deny the same rights on the basis of other criteria such as race, gender, intelligence, physical health, etc
We don't have to deny them to anybody. Just to ask that those other countries it give them to their citizens, not having us give them to them.
Not to mention, those in those other countries might even value other things.
> We don't have to deny them to anybody. Just to ask that those other countries it give them to their citizens, not having us give them to them.
Well clearly the girl in Congo is born into a country that is not able/willing to grant her all the freedoms that Anderson is championing. We can blame Congo for her predicament all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that she's being deprived of the freedoms that we have the ability to grant. So why should we not grant her those freedoms?
The whole point of foundational moral philosophies is that they should be applied universally. I'm very suspicious of moral philosophies that are applicable only to your in-group, and not your out-group. If the philosophy is so sound, why shouldn't it be applied towards everyone?
At which point you find yourself inventing a whole other moral philosophy, in order to explain why XYZ people should be in your in-group and ABC people should not. And yet another moral philosophy which determines what is right/wrong when interacting with those in your out-group. And then another moral philosophy which explains why you need 3 different disparate moral philosophies, instead of just applying one of them universally.
I haven't heard her stance before, but it seems interesting and I agree with what I've read so far.
With that in mind, I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you? A closed border denies freedom of movement under arbitrary restrictions of "productivity" (or random lottery, which is just as arbitrary), aka you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish? Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse. And lets be clear, most western nations aren't shooting people trying to cross the border on sight, and usually have some sort of asylum process (that may take years and years, however). But the limitation of movement itself is also a human rights abuse, in my mind. German families were cut off from each other, unable to see relatives trapped on the other side of the wall. The Stasi secret police were able to apprehend and torture people unable to escape because of the wall -- a closed border makes authoritarian regimes more powerful. The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path? Don't we supposedly value freedom above all else? Didn't Franklin say "He who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety deserves neither"? How is a closed border compatible with that sentiment?
Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage (see: every item in the British Museum that they refuse to return), and then we turn around and say hey you can't come here without our permission? How hypocritical is that?
And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out -- people who want to commit crimes generally don't care about following immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls, pilot submarines full of cocaine past the Coast Guard (this really happens), and extort desperate people trying to escape violence and crushing poverty.
So yes, I do think a closed border is immoral. If it means more strain on welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here, well, if we can afford trillions to bomb the middle east into the stone age, we can probably afford that.
None of your arguments support the thesis that a closed border is immoral. And yet they are all misguided, even to the extent that they argue something or other.
For example, the Berlin wall divided a city that was otherwise ethnically, culturally, geographically, historically a single unit. This is not comparable to a national border in any sense. So why make the comparison?
Past injustices like colonialism, whether good, bad, or evil, justified or otherwise, have no bearing on present policies except perhaps as an illustration of the dangers of cultural disunity. In any case, if they make an policy argument, it is for more greatly closed borders. Much more. With machine guns.
Likewise, the effectiveness of a physical border is technical problem--not a moral or rhetorical point of any sort. You can't say, "ladders defeat walls, therefore walls are immoral." Silly argument.
I guess my point is--if you want open borders for X reason, just say 'X'. For instance, open borders might be economically advantageous to you or people of the group you identify with. That's rational.
Could that be viewed as a distinction without a difference? If I cannot move to another developed nation then is that different than not being able to leave my current nation?
While I agree that in terms of your choices there is no real difference, I think you should read about what happened when you wanted to go to a vacation as a (for example) Czechoslovakian citizen in the 1970's and what happened if you wanted out (hint: you would most likely die).
Because the influx of people will be huge and will only stop if the incentive to move disappears, i.e. if the quality of life in your country is approximately equal to the quality of life in the worst country on the planet. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that this is a net positive if you take a consequentialist view, because your plan will probably vastly reduce scientific and technological progress by turning the countries with the highest output into failed states.
If you truly believe in equality you could give almost all of your income away. Taking a moral stance while collectivising the downside is easy, particularly when you know that it won't happen anyway. It's freeloading on the people who are willing to take a non-virtuous stance.
I don’t think evidence supports that. Most people don’t move. Even in the US people mostly stick to poor areas with few options over moving into the unknown.
On top of that the US is already a poor place to live if you lack education, wealth, and connections. Our vast homeless population and minimal safty net shows just how difficult it would be to show up in the US with little more than the clothes on your back. Which is probably why on net ~1.5 million illegal immigrants left the US over the last decade.
PS: Counties don’t exist on a single universally agreed upon yardstick and a clear best one.
Which is probably why on net ~1.5 million illegal immigrants left the US over the last decade
This is false. Pew made a similar claim, but it turns out their "inbound" tally counted only Mexican adults who were known to be illegal while the "outbound" number counted all foreign nationals of all ages that repatriated.
You will find that your "wide range of sources" is simply Pew and/or their underlying cherry-picked sources. You have to look at where the numbers come from and the differing criteria for counting outflow vs. inflow.
How certain are you that open borders won't result in tremendous downsides? Let's say it doesn't work out and society actually gets much worse as a result - how do you fix the problem? Virtually any bad policy can be "fixed" (either retroactively or going forward) via voting, updating laws, etc. You can't fix "150 million people moved to the US and ruined it", if that is what happens.
There's only that much pent up demand to live in the US because our immigration policies have bottled up decades of immigrants. the borders would have to gradually transition to fully open, sure, but after that transition the borders could be fully open.
i find the idea that 150 million people would "ruin" the us to be laughable. when has immigration ever made the us worse? why do you think immigrants are worse citizens than people born here? if anything, people who want to move here are motivated people who truly believe in the promise of america -- the exact kind of people we do want.
> the borders would have to gradually transition to fully open, sure, but after that transition the borders could be fully open.
Why is a transition period needed? If you believe that, then fundamentally we agree, we just differ on the rate at which immigrants should be let in. Why not just let literally anyone who wants to live here move here right now?
I don't necessarily think they will ruin the US, but I certainly don't know it with the degree of certainty required for such an irreversible decision.
just because the US infrastructure can't handle that number of people all at once. i think the rate should increase exponentially year over year to completely open borders.
how does our stance differ? i want tk borders to transition to completely open and you don't... i think it's obvious
I agree with you that immigration has generally been a good thing and that the vast majority of immigrants would not pose any problem. However, I'm not sure that it's fair to just ignore the fact that open borders could have serious complications that would need to be addressed.
If a large number of impoverished, unhealthy, or uneducated people moved to a country it could overwhelm the resources available to help them.
Increased population could overwhelm the availability of things like good jobs and housing.
Open borders may not be reciprocated.
Many people could move to the country for economic reasons but be uninterested in or unwilling to become part of the country's culture.
Many people could move to the country that do not value norms such as democracy, freedom, equality, etc.
There is a limit to how quickly society can adapt to cultural change. If too many people with a dramatically different culture moved to a country, it could cause unrest.
I've upvoted you because your heart is in the right place and you're making very good arguments which people should stop to consider.
In an ideal world, people should not be discriminated against because of their birth-location. The fact that we do, is indeed a great injustice.
However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.
I think that successful countries have a moral obligation to absorb as many immigrants as they can assimilate - no more and no less.
Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between factions. (Examples: USA, China, the current European ethnically-self-determined nations) Is that utilitarian?
what happened to native americans was a genocide, yes. smallpox blankets, the trail of tears, forced adoptions, resedential schools -- it literally ticks every box of the genocide definition and then some. arguing not is willful ignorance of history.
cool pointless pedantry, irrelevant to their main point. native americans were seen asa homogenous group by white colonizers, despitr the fact that they weren't actually. quibbling about technicalities doesn't change the fact that america was built on genocide of a group of people seen as different and inferior.
Uncool pointless yelling, because I never said it wasn't.
I just wanted gowld to clarify what, exactly, his/her point was, because it seemed to be rather incoherent. Was gowld talking about Native Americans? I honestly can't tell.
I think it's pretty obvious that they were talking about the "manifest destiny" genocide of native people, considering that "freeing up" that land was considered pivotal to "completing america's destiny". though i guess they could have been talking about the genocide of african enslaved people through forced labor. or the genocide of people in the Philippines during the Spanish American war, which birthed the American empire. lots of genocide to choose from, actually, so i guess your confusion is understandable.
I'm trying to understand gowld's opinion. Is the USA reference to the treatment of Native Americans? If so, why call them a "faction"? That's kind of weird.
Is the Europe reference to Germany? I could kind of see that (genocide, yes, and also a "faction"), but tarring all of Europe with it is rather a stretch. The claim seems to be that European nations achieved ethnic unity via genocide, which seems to me to be rather a stretch historically.
gowld seems to be taking behavior that has occurred at times, to the shame of both the US and Europe, and making it the defining element of their history. But I'm trying not to accuse gowld of selectively reading history before I'm sure that's what he/she is trying to say. I'm trying to find out what that opaque little paragraph actually was supposed to say, so that I then can accurately criticize it, if it needs criticism.
why is calling native americans a faction weird? a faction is a group that is in some form contrasted (not necessarily opposing) to another group.
native americans were certainly a different group of people than european settlers. i think that is clear enough.
but i am not a native english speaker, so maybe my understanding of faction is different from yours, and you define faction in a way that is incompatible with its application here.
however for the sake of discussion i'd like to ask if that is important? isn't the definition that should be applied into the context of this discussion rather clear?
i mean, go back to the original statement and replace faction with something else:
Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between groups.
it doesn't seem to me that that would change anything in that statement. we still don't know exactly which groups are actually referred to.
faction, group, party, nation, ethnicity, opponents, whatever it seems you got hung up on that word when you really want to know more specifically which examples are being referred to.
What happened to the Native Americans was genocide, but I wouldn't call them either a faction or a group. To me, either "faction" or "group" means "a set of persons in your society". You don't use "faction" for those outside your society.
And, to me, the Native Americans were not part of US society. US society was a European society carved out of land that had previously belonged to Native Americans.
In the same way, when the US fought the Germans in World War II, you wouldn't say that the Germans were a faction. They were a foreign entity.
You might also note that the US negotiated treaties with the Native Americans. You do treaties with foreign entities, not with factions within your own society.
> However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.
I have to steelman this position with something now:
If you have a country which accepts broad civil rights for sexual minorities, and you have a large influx of people coming into your country who prefer few or no civil rights for sexual minorities, what happens when you have enough immigrants to force a vote on rights for sexual minorities? Don't tell me that can't happen; ultimately, there's always a threshold beyond which the government loses legitimacy if it refuses to put certain things to a ballot, and by "government" I mean "ruling party or coalition" if you're lucky.
If I were a sexual minority, I'd see border restrictions as being an existential issue.
I'm trans. Please dont use us as a cover for your arguments, thanks.
People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.
> People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis [snip]
so whats your point? yes people going back 10 generations can be intolerant fucks, meaning there is no difference between the people who've been here for a long time vs people who just came here, proving my point. the segment of people who are intolerant, in my experience, is much more people who have been here for a very long time and not immigrants.
The idea that one's "birth location" is some sort of free-floating, independent quality is itself a very western, specifically American-centric idea. In countries that have hundreds or even thousands of years of history, there is a very real difference between "native" and "recent arrival."
I don't really have a strong opinion on the topic of immigration in general, but I don't think it's very fair to look at a country or culture that has spent centuries fighting for its survival and say, "Well, your historical connection to this place and country is now meaningless in the face of global capitalism."
The people who did the fighting are completely different from the children and teenagers who were recently born. Do you think that certain people should get special legal privileges because of what their family has done in the past? That the aristocrats and nobility are entitled to more privileges than the common serfs, because of the accomplishments of their ancestors? That is the logical conclusion of what you're suggesting.
To some degree yes, because otherwise there will be very little societal incentive to struggle in the present in order to have a better life in the future.
Consider the case of Poland. The country has a pretty brutal recent history: dozens of wars, uprisings, border changes, and other chaos over the last 250-300 years. Many, if not most, of the people fighting against the oppression were doing so with the expectation that they’d be building a future free country for themselves and their family. More broadly, for their culture.
If suddenly Poland were composed of X group of people that had zero relationship with the country and zero interest in learning the language or promoting the culture, would all this struggle then not be in vain? More importantly, would Poles have instigated numerous revolutions, uprisings and protests if they weren’t trying to preserve their culture? Would the Soviet Union even have been overthrown?
I think one can make a very strong argument that a culture with no future has no present, either. Inherited wealth between individuals and families may be a problem, for sure, but inherited “cultural capital” seems absolutely necessary if you want your civilization to continue existing.
I agree with everything you've said. That's a very strong utilitarian argument. If you're going to make utilitarian arguments, you might as well embrace utilitarianism and reject competing moral philosophies. That's exactly my critique of Anderson's proposal.
> I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you?
> A closed border denies freedom of movement
First of all, where does this "freedom of movement" come from? Freedoms are things that human societies carve out of harsh reality by legal convention and physical enforcement. "Freedom of speech", for example, is really better thought of as saying "within this area wherein this government has a monopoly on force and physical enforcement of policy, it is permitted to say anything, and legal consequences will be brought upon those who try to prevent others from exercising this permission". It's not some fundamental, pre-existing condition that you have by some god-given set of rights (encoded where? defended how?)
Freedom of movement is not some guaranteed thing, nor is it a state of normalcy. Throughout human history, we have defended our territories from outsiders who would exploit us for their own gain; it's a very sound evolutionary strategy, and virtually every group that has survived the last ten thousand years has this as their default state, modulo legal immigration and trade and visas and such.
In other words, "freedom of movement" is not denied - it's simply not granted by default. When a society matures to a certain level in cooperation with other nearby mature societies, e.g. the situation in continental Europe, it's possible to relax some of the restrictions; but it's important to keep in mind that this only comes from the expectation of shared enforcement of similar or identical laws that just push the border out from the immediate ones surrounding one nation, to a group of nations. The need to enforce who is and who is not permitted in society remains under the purview of government, for reasons that really ought to be obvious.
> you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish?
This "freedom to move" should be replaced with "right to immigrate into some other country" - very few places try to prevent you from leaving! - and you need to look at things realistically from the perspective of the new country. You're asking them to take on a new citizen you yourself say is not productive - if they have a healthcare system, this translates directly to a new financial burden. Why should they do this? In what sense do they owe you care simply because of your desire to live on their collective property?
> Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
It's not just the "circumstance of their birth". We're not blank slates, and even if we were, we certainly aren't by the age of voluntary personal emigration. Some number of people from the Congo do emigrate, of course; but it remains completely the right of their new host nation to be as selective as they like about determining which individuals to accept and deny. Surely it makes sense to do this on some objective merit basis, and not randomly or just all-permissively?
> I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse.
I'm pretty sure the Berlin Wall was built by the USSR to keep East Germans in, not West Germans out. Who would want to go behind the iron curtain to wait in a bread line?
> The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path?
It's not even remotely a reasonable comparison. The border wall between the US and Mexico is intended to keep illegal immigrants out - legal immigrants from south of the border will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands per year. The idea is that these will be people selected peacefully and legally for being able to contribute to society in a positive way, rather than the selection process of "whoever can pay people-smugglers and surv...
I believe in freedom of movement as an ideal, just as I believe in freedom of speech as an ideal. The UN declaration of human rights also includes freedom of movement as an ideal. No freedom is a state of normalcy, we spent thousands of years killing each other for saying things we didn't like, or moving into our space, or being gay, and many other things that would shock modern conscience. I think we should try to rise above that and be better, and part of that is not acting like territorial animals.
Immigrants are a) not a financial burden long term, people might need assistance at first but will generally get established and then pay into social programs and b) the US is incredibly wealthy. We can spend trillions on the military, we can afford welfare.
The point about east germnay was that it inhibited freedom of movement. I see no practical difference between preventing someone from leaving and preventing someone from entering. Both deny the person their freedom to live where they choose.
The point about colonialism is that colonialism is the reason much of the global south is in cycles of war and poverty (eg, european powers dividing up africa ignoring tribal boundaries). so it's pretty rich to extract wealth from a place to build your indsutrial economy, and then tell people trying to escape that war and poverty that they aren't allowed the fruits of that wealth extraction. and why are you pretending this is ancient history? the french were comitting war crimes in algeria against the independence movement in the 60's!!
automation is coming. expanded welfare will be necessary regardless -- we cannot have a world of 10 billion programmers and service workers. the top strata owns the vast majority of the world's wealth. if we returned to 50s era tax rates these people could still live extremely opulently and we would have morw than enough resources for all americans and immigrants.
You clearly want to allow everybody to come here, and you clearly don't approve of killing people for being gay. How do you resolve the issue of immigrants coming from places where the people have voted for killing those who are gay? Are these immigrants also to be welcomed, despite the fact that they will vote to enact similar policies here?
there's no evidence that immigrants are more intolerant than the general public. most domestic terrorism against minorities is committed by people who are not (recent, obv if you go back far enough white people are immigrants too...) immigrants. and in my anecdotal experience as a trans person, i have never been harassed by someone who immigrated here, just by white-bread WASPy nazi types. I'm sure it happens, but so does tripping into the garbage disposal and losing a finger, it's really not common. And when it does happen, conservatives hype it up in their anti-immigration rhetoric even as they use their actual structural power to strip away my and other queer people's rights! Like Trump talking a big game about how much he wants to "protect LGBTs" from immigrants (implying immigrants can't be queer...) while under his administration documentation changes for trans people are getting harder to get, LGBT people were removed from the 2020 census... don't get me started.
>By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society.
Where did she say that society should treat its obligations towards non-members as equal to the ones it has towards members? I can't find it.
>I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality.
I don't see how her philosophy of morality does either. This seems somewhat strawmannish.
A border is a community saying "we believe certain things and within this physical territory, our beliefs prevail, by force if necessary". And if someone says "I believe those things too, can I come in?" that's OK. But if someone doesn't believe those things it's neither clear why they would want to come in, nor why that community would want them to, since whatever reason clearly isn't for the benefit of existing community members.
The beliefs are written down as the law but they aren’t set in stone - a candidate who ran for office on a manifesto of an open border and won sufficient votes could rewrite the law. I’m not sure if there is an electorate anywhere in the world that would go for it.
Yes there are multiple hierarchy. But all hierarchy are not equal. Some are inherently more difficult to get on top, some are more beneficial to society, some are less likeable to get into, and in each case you can command a higher share of wealth for being on top compared being on top of another hierarchy.
The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.
Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
It's part of their style guide. The diaresis in this case indicates that the second vowel is part of another syllable. The New Yorker similarly uses similar spellings such as naïve.
It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their style guide.
I don’t believe that equality is a sensible word to apply to people, nor do I think that dramatically unequal distributions of wealth should be remedied because of reasons of fairness.
I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law and in relations between each other is important— and I think that distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of have-nots.
A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" - 2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of quotes:
"Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which capitalism advanced freedom and equality."
"The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract."
The New Yorker article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the original works. New Yorker articles aren't a substitute for the real thing. For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the New Yorker article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.
92 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadIt's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since.
This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.
The scholarship is just bad. The whole argument is full of mis-statements of critiqued positions.
Anyone interested in the article is better served to start reading Plato, Locke, Hume, Smith . . . .
The pompous middlebrow dismissal strikes again. In this moment I am euphoric.
First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:
In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.
To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.
There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).
Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
Many years ago, what started my shift from a capitalist to what I am today, was the following question: "If people had to earn and pay for breathable air (a basic) the same way they had to earn and pay for food, education and medical care (also basics), would the world be a better place or a worse place?"
The world I imagined was one of such desperation that hardly anyone had time to think about anything but themselves, a world that barely advanced because hardly anyone had the luxury of time to think of greater things.
I am now completely sold on the idea of taking the basics out of the competitive equation (nutrition, education and health). Desperation is the enemy of civilization.
Food requires land, plants, and animals. It requires labor. It requires you to either produce it yourself or interact with someone who does. Air does not.
One should have every right to pursue such goals, but defining these as unalienable rights is incompatible with egalitarianism.
Of course, in practice, private government goes hand-in-hand with growth in the usual sort of government - this is what today's "institutional reality" looks like. A truly free institutional reality would have people constantly voting with their feet, shopping around for the best "private government" service. It's only because of pervasive interference that this is not allowed to happen today.
The fundamental error is the erroneous belief that markets will magically find equilibrium states, and optimal ones with that. Both premises are false: market tend to equilibrium only in undesirable situations such as oligopoly, monopoly or monopsony; else they're simply chaotic and fail to converge to anything stable and go anarchically from boom to bust.
I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society.
I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused moral philosophy.
One could rationally want the best for their country/society, but not for everybody outside of it (e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it, because of the population increase, different backgrounds that would need to overcome, different religious and political preferences that a mass of outsiders could impose, etc).
Her moral philosophy seems predicated on the idea that everyone is deserving of certain rights. If we're going to deny these rights to some people on the basis of birth-location, why not deny the same rights on the basis of other criteria such as race, gender, intelligence, physical health, etc
> e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it
I agree completely with the above, but that's because the above is a utilitarian argument and I believe in utilitarianism. If you were to ask Anderson though, she would likely reject utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
Was that something she actually said or just something you inferred?
It seems pretty clear that she thinks that each society has an obligation towards its members but I didn't her mention anything about obligations societies have towards non-members.
I very much doubt that she's against, say, the right of asylum, but there's nothing there that I can see that implies that she believes France has an equal responsibility to provide for Chinese citizens as it does towards its own.
It's perfectly rational to say:
a) I want the best for my country and fellow citizens
b) I think the best outcome for (a) comes if all citizens in my country are given X rigts etc.
There's no need to "mean everybody" for this to be a perfectly rational philosophy.
If anything, your extra requirement that she has to "mean everybody" seems to come from a moralistic or christian source, rather than rationality.
Like her, I think China should do something about its wealth inequality. Like her, I don't the Czech republic really needs to get involved.
It is, as you say, an "important distinction".
It implies that both China and the Czech Republic are obligated to level out arbitrarily enforced class divisions in their own societies.
She used the word "society" a lot, not "world".
So no, the requirement definitely is not there.
Everyone in a society. Does she feel that way about people not in a society?
Is denying rights and denying entry the same? I find that belief self-centered - is <your country> the only one able to confer rights?
We don't have to deny them to anybody. Just to ask that those other countries it give them to their citizens, not having us give them to them.
Not to mention, those in those other countries might even value other things.
Well clearly the girl in Congo is born into a country that is not able/willing to grant her all the freedoms that Anderson is championing. We can blame Congo for her predicament all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that she's being deprived of the freedoms that we have the ability to grant. So why should we not grant her those freedoms?
The whole point of foundational moral philosophies is that they should be applied universally. I'm very suspicious of moral philosophies that are applicable only to your in-group, and not your out-group. If the philosophy is so sound, why shouldn't it be applied towards everyone?
At which point you find yourself inventing a whole other moral philosophy, in order to explain why XYZ people should be in your in-group and ABC people should not. And yet another moral philosophy which determines what is right/wrong when interacting with those in your out-group. And then another moral philosophy which explains why you need 3 different disparate moral philosophies, instead of just applying one of them universally.
With that in mind, I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you? A closed border denies freedom of movement under arbitrary restrictions of "productivity" (or random lottery, which is just as arbitrary), aka you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish? Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse. And lets be clear, most western nations aren't shooting people trying to cross the border on sight, and usually have some sort of asylum process (that may take years and years, however). But the limitation of movement itself is also a human rights abuse, in my mind. German families were cut off from each other, unable to see relatives trapped on the other side of the wall. The Stasi secret police were able to apprehend and torture people unable to escape because of the wall -- a closed border makes authoritarian regimes more powerful. The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path? Don't we supposedly value freedom above all else? Didn't Franklin say "He who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety deserves neither"? How is a closed border compatible with that sentiment?
Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage (see: every item in the British Museum that they refuse to return), and then we turn around and say hey you can't come here without our permission? How hypocritical is that?
And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out -- people who want to commit crimes generally don't care about following immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls, pilot submarines full of cocaine past the Coast Guard (this really happens), and extort desperate people trying to escape violence and crushing poverty.
So yes, I do think a closed border is immoral. If it means more strain on welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here, well, if we can afford trillions to bomb the middle east into the stone age, we can probably afford that.
For example, the Berlin wall divided a city that was otherwise ethnically, culturally, geographically, historically a single unit. This is not comparable to a national border in any sense. So why make the comparison?
Past injustices like colonialism, whether good, bad, or evil, justified or otherwise, have no bearing on present policies except perhaps as an illustration of the dangers of cultural disunity. In any case, if they make an policy argument, it is for more greatly closed borders. Much more. With machine guns.
Likewise, the effectiveness of a physical border is technical problem--not a moral or rhetorical point of any sort. You can't say, "ladders defeat walls, therefore walls are immoral." Silly argument.
I guess my point is--if you want open borders for X reason, just say 'X'. For instance, open borders might be economically advantageous to you or people of the group you identify with. That's rational.
Because the influx of people will be huge and will only stop if the incentive to move disappears, i.e. if the quality of life in your country is approximately equal to the quality of life in the worst country on the planet. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that this is a net positive if you take a consequentialist view, because your plan will probably vastly reduce scientific and technological progress by turning the countries with the highest output into failed states.
If you truly believe in equality you could give almost all of your income away. Taking a moral stance while collectivising the downside is easy, particularly when you know that it won't happen anyway. It's freeloading on the people who are willing to take a non-virtuous stance.
On top of that the US is already a poor place to live if you lack education, wealth, and connections. Our vast homeless population and minimal safty net shows just how difficult it would be to show up in the US with little more than the clothes on your back. Which is probably why on net ~1.5 million illegal immigrants left the US over the last decade.
PS: Counties don’t exist on a single universally agreed upon yardstick and a clear best one.
Maybe that's because of the current restrictive immigration policies?
You will find that your "wide range of sources" is simply Pew and/or their underlying cherry-picked sources. You have to look at where the numbers come from and the differing criteria for counting outflow vs. inflow.
mind you, we may need to rethink how to best do that without being imposing, but that is something we can workout.
poverty levels have reduced worldwide according to statistics, so it is possible. it will just take some more effort to get there.
How certain are you that open borders won't result in tremendous downsides? Let's say it doesn't work out and society actually gets much worse as a result - how do you fix the problem? Virtually any bad policy can be "fixed" (either retroactively or going forward) via voting, updating laws, etc. You can't fix "150 million people moved to the US and ruined it", if that is what happens.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153992/150-million-adults-world...
i find the idea that 150 million people would "ruin" the us to be laughable. when has immigration ever made the us worse? why do you think immigrants are worse citizens than people born here? if anything, people who want to move here are motivated people who truly believe in the promise of america -- the exact kind of people we do want.
Why is a transition period needed? If you believe that, then fundamentally we agree, we just differ on the rate at which immigrants should be let in. Why not just let literally anyone who wants to live here move here right now?
I don't necessarily think they will ruin the US, but I certainly don't know it with the degree of certainty required for such an irreversible decision.
how does our stance differ? i want tk borders to transition to completely open and you don't... i think it's obvious
If a large number of impoverished, unhealthy, or uneducated people moved to a country it could overwhelm the resources available to help them.
Increased population could overwhelm the availability of things like good jobs and housing.
Open borders may not be reciprocated.
Many people could move to the country for economic reasons but be uninterested in or unwilling to become part of the country's culture.
Many people could move to the country that do not value norms such as democracy, freedom, equality, etc.
There is a limit to how quickly society can adapt to cultural change. If too many people with a dramatically different culture moved to a country, it could cause unrest.
In an ideal world, people should not be discriminated against because of their birth-location. The fact that we do, is indeed a great injustice.
However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.
I think that successful countries have a moral obligation to absorb as many immigrants as they can assimilate - no more and no less.
Are you counting Native Americans as a "faction"? That seems like an odd definition of the word "faction".
Are you referring to the Civil War? That seems like an odd definition of the word "genocide".
Are you referring to the current state of politics? Also not a genocide and, please God, it will continue to remain not a genocide.
What exactly did you have in mind in your statement?
I just wanted gowld to clarify what, exactly, his/her point was, because it seemed to be rather incoherent. Was gowld talking about Native Americans? I honestly can't tell.
I think it's pretty obvious that they were talking about the "manifest destiny" genocide of native people, considering that "freeing up" that land was considered pivotal to "completing america's destiny". though i guess they could have been talking about the genocide of african enslaved people through forced labor. or the genocide of people in the Philippines during the Spanish American war, which birthed the American empire. lots of genocide to choose from, actually, so i guess your confusion is understandable.
i have no opinion in this argument, i am just trying to understand yours
Is the Europe reference to Germany? I could kind of see that (genocide, yes, and also a "faction"), but tarring all of Europe with it is rather a stretch. The claim seems to be that European nations achieved ethnic unity via genocide, which seems to me to be rather a stretch historically.
gowld seems to be taking behavior that has occurred at times, to the shame of both the US and Europe, and making it the defining element of their history. But I'm trying not to accuse gowld of selectively reading history before I'm sure that's what he/she is trying to say. I'm trying to find out what that opaque little paragraph actually was supposed to say, so that I then can accurately criticize it, if it needs criticism.
native americans were certainly a different group of people than european settlers. i think that is clear enough.
but i am not a native english speaker, so maybe my understanding of faction is different from yours, and you define faction in a way that is incompatible with its application here.
however for the sake of discussion i'd like to ask if that is important? isn't the definition that should be applied into the context of this discussion rather clear?
i mean, go back to the original statement and replace faction with something else:
Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between groups.
it doesn't seem to me that that would change anything in that statement. we still don't know exactly which groups are actually referred to.
faction, group, party, nation, ethnicity, opponents, whatever it seems you got hung up on that word when you really want to know more specifically which examples are being referred to.
And, to me, the Native Americans were not part of US society. US society was a European society carved out of land that had previously belonged to Native Americans.
In the same way, when the US fought the Germans in World War II, you wouldn't say that the Germans were a faction. They were a foreign entity.
You might also note that the US negotiated treaties with the Native Americans. You do treaties with foreign entities, not with factions within your own society.
I have to steelman this position with something now:
If you have a country which accepts broad civil rights for sexual minorities, and you have a large influx of people coming into your country who prefer few or no civil rights for sexual minorities, what happens when you have enough immigrants to force a vote on rights for sexual minorities? Don't tell me that can't happen; ultimately, there's always a threshold beyond which the government loses legitimacy if it refuses to put certain things to a ballot, and by "government" I mean "ruling party or coalition" if you're lucky.
If I were a sexual minority, I'd see border restrictions as being an existential issue.
People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.
You aren't making your own case very well.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the topic of immigration in general, but I don't think it's very fair to look at a country or culture that has spent centuries fighting for its survival and say, "Well, your historical connection to this place and country is now meaningless in the face of global capitalism."
Consider the case of Poland. The country has a pretty brutal recent history: dozens of wars, uprisings, border changes, and other chaos over the last 250-300 years. Many, if not most, of the people fighting against the oppression were doing so with the expectation that they’d be building a future free country for themselves and their family. More broadly, for their culture.
If suddenly Poland were composed of X group of people that had zero relationship with the country and zero interest in learning the language or promoting the culture, would all this struggle then not be in vain? More importantly, would Poles have instigated numerous revolutions, uprisings and protests if they weren’t trying to preserve their culture? Would the Soviet Union even have been overthrown?
I think one can make a very strong argument that a culture with no future has no present, either. Inherited wealth between individuals and families may be a problem, for sure, but inherited “cultural capital” seems absolutely necessary if you want your civilization to continue existing.
First of all, where does this "freedom of movement" come from? Freedoms are things that human societies carve out of harsh reality by legal convention and physical enforcement. "Freedom of speech", for example, is really better thought of as saying "within this area wherein this government has a monopoly on force and physical enforcement of policy, it is permitted to say anything, and legal consequences will be brought upon those who try to prevent others from exercising this permission". It's not some fundamental, pre-existing condition that you have by some god-given set of rights (encoded where? defended how?)
Freedom of movement is not some guaranteed thing, nor is it a state of normalcy. Throughout human history, we have defended our territories from outsiders who would exploit us for their own gain; it's a very sound evolutionary strategy, and virtually every group that has survived the last ten thousand years has this as their default state, modulo legal immigration and trade and visas and such.
In other words, "freedom of movement" is not denied - it's simply not granted by default. When a society matures to a certain level in cooperation with other nearby mature societies, e.g. the situation in continental Europe, it's possible to relax some of the restrictions; but it's important to keep in mind that this only comes from the expectation of shared enforcement of similar or identical laws that just push the border out from the immediate ones surrounding one nation, to a group of nations. The need to enforce who is and who is not permitted in society remains under the purview of government, for reasons that really ought to be obvious.
> you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish?
This "freedom to move" should be replaced with "right to immigrate into some other country" - very few places try to prevent you from leaving! - and you need to look at things realistically from the perspective of the new country. You're asking them to take on a new citizen you yourself say is not productive - if they have a healthcare system, this translates directly to a new financial burden. Why should they do this? In what sense do they owe you care simply because of your desire to live on their collective property?
> Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
It's not just the "circumstance of their birth". We're not blank slates, and even if we were, we certainly aren't by the age of voluntary personal emigration. Some number of people from the Congo do emigrate, of course; but it remains completely the right of their new host nation to be as selective as they like about determining which individuals to accept and deny. Surely it makes sense to do this on some objective merit basis, and not randomly or just all-permissively?
> I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse.
I'm pretty sure the Berlin Wall was built by the USSR to keep East Germans in, not West Germans out. Who would want to go behind the iron curtain to wait in a bread line?
> The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path?
It's not even remotely a reasonable comparison. The border wall between the US and Mexico is intended to keep illegal immigrants out - legal immigrants from south of the border will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands per year. The idea is that these will be people selected peacefully and legally for being able to contribute to society in a positive way, rather than the selection process of "whoever can pay people-smugglers and surv...
Immigrants are a) not a financial burden long term, people might need assistance at first but will generally get established and then pay into social programs and b) the US is incredibly wealthy. We can spend trillions on the military, we can afford welfare.
The point about east germnay was that it inhibited freedom of movement. I see no practical difference between preventing someone from leaving and preventing someone from entering. Both deny the person their freedom to live where they choose.
The point about colonialism is that colonialism is the reason much of the global south is in cycles of war and poverty (eg, european powers dividing up africa ignoring tribal boundaries). so it's pretty rich to extract wealth from a place to build your indsutrial economy, and then tell people trying to escape that war and poverty that they aren't allowed the fruits of that wealth extraction. and why are you pretending this is ancient history? the french were comitting war crimes in algeria against the independence movement in the 60's!!
automation is coming. expanded welfare will be necessary regardless -- we cannot have a world of 10 billion programmers and service workers. the top strata owns the vast majority of the world's wealth. if we returned to 50s era tax rates these people could still live extremely opulently and we would have morw than enough resources for all americans and immigrants.
Where did she say that society should treat its obligations towards non-members as equal to the ones it has towards members? I can't find it.
>I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality.
I don't see how her philosophy of morality does either. This seems somewhat strawmannish.
The beliefs are written down as the law but they aren’t set in stone - a candidate who ran for office on a manifesto of an open border and won sufficient votes could rewrite the law. I’m not sure if there is an electorate anywhere in the world that would go for it.
The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We unbanned you recently because almost all of your comments lately have been just fine for HN.)
It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their style guide.
I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law and in relations between each other is important— and I think that distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of have-nots.
A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" - 2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of quotes:
"Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which capitalism advanced freedom and equality."
"The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract."
The New Yorker article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the original works. New Yorker articles aren't a substitute for the real thing. For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the New Yorker article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.