Download Morality - Contention 1

FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Debating Morality & Immigration
DEBATING MORALITY & IMMIGRATION
1
ABOUT THIS FILE
INTRODUCTION FROM THE COACH
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRO READINGS ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY
BASIC MORAL VOCABULARY
TWO MAIN SIDES
CONSEQUENTIALISM/UTILITARIANISM
DEONTOLOGY/CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE
RAWLS & THE “VEIL OF IGNORANCE”
3
4
8
9
10
13
14
17
20
IMMIGRATION EVIDENCE
22
PRO
RESTRICTIONS IMMORAL**
RESTRICTIONS BAD – GLOBAL COMMONS
RESTRICTIONS BAD – JUSTICE
RESTRICTIONS BAD – FREEDOM
RESTRICTIONS BAD – CON = BURDEN OF PROOF
RESTRICTIONS BAD – HUMAN RIGHTS
RESTRICTIONS BAD – DISCRIMINATION
RESTRICTIONS BAD – JESUS
RESTRICTIONS BAD – RACISM
RESTRICTIONS BAD – RAWL’S VEIL OF IGNORANCE
A2: RIGHT TO EXCLUDE (WELLMAN)
CON
RESTRICTIONS GOOD – SOVEREIGNTY
RESTRICTIONS GOOD – ASSOCIATION/DEMOS
RESTRICTIONS GOOD – RIGHT TO EXCLUDE
RESTRICTIONS GOOD – RIGHT TO STAY
A2: ARBITRARY
A2: FAIRNESS
A2: FREEDOM
A2: JUSTICE
A2: POVERTY – RIGHT TO STAY
A2: RIGHT TO STAY = EXPENSIVE
23
24
25
26
29
32
34
35
37
38
39
40
42
43
44
47
49
51
52
53
55
56
58
GENERAL MORALITY EVIDENCE
59
CONSEQUENTIALISM/UTIL GOOD
CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD – CONFLICTING VALUES
60
61
1
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD – GLOBAL PROBLEMS
CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD – POLICY-MAKING
CONSEQUENTIALISM INEVITABLE
A2: NEED ABSOLUTE STANDARDS
A2: GOOD INTENTIONS/INTERVENING ACTORS
DEONTOLOGY GOOD
DEONTOLOGY FIRST
DEONTOLOGY GOOD – SURVIVAL FOCUS BAD
DEONTOLOGY GOOD – COMPARATIVE
DEONTOLOGY GOOD – OWS EXTINCTION
DEONTOLOGY GOOD – RIGHTS
DEONTOLOGY GOOD – MORALITY
UTIL BAD – EQUALITY
62
64
65
66
67
68
69
71
72
73
75
76
77
2
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
About This File
3
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Introduction From The Coach
Debate often requires you to make arguments about the difference between
right and wrong, good and bad, important and unimportant. In order to do so
effectively, debaters have long been students of ethical and moral philosophy.
Learning about the philosophers and ideas covered here will help you make
better framework & impact arguments – on this and every other topic you may
encounter.
This file is designed to help get you started in that direction.
The first section is some background reading designed to explain the most
common vocabulary and concepts of moral philosophy in simple, everyday
language. This section is completely general, but will be helpful information if
you want to get the most out of the rest of the file.
The second section includes some topic-specific morality evidence about the
immigration topic.
As Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck has noted, morality is an especially
potent part of debates about immigration:
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
“There is something in us that likes to moralize about immigration, to view it as an activity as to
which strong normative views, including feelings of right and wrong, not merely prudence or
wisdom, are both natural and appropriate. This moralizing impulse in public policy assessment is
hardly unique to immigration. Nor am I suggesting that moral considerations actually dominate
immigration policy outcomes. In fact, the role of such arguments in any particular situation
depends on many factors. Instead, I simply mean that moral claims are inevitably a part, and
sometimes an important or even decisive part, of the lingua franca of immigration debates.”
As Professor Schuck explains later in his article, immigration policy is a topic of
moral concern and strong feeling because it involves the competing interests of
many different groups of people. He continues:
Immigration policy involves numerous actors and interests other than the immigrants
themselves and their families: the local, regional, and national communities in the states of
origin;8 the communities in the receiving states; the identity and ethos of these communities;
the immigrants' competitors for jobs, space, social services, status goods, and so forth. The
impacts on these groups are enormous at both the macro and micro levels. Some of these
impacts are beneficial, some are detrimental, and some are both simultaneously. Judgments
4
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
about benefit and detriment depend, among other things, on the units of analysis that the
analyst employs and the distributive calculus for assessing those effects across those units. The
evidence strongly suggests, for example, that immigration is, on balance, beneficial to the
United States as a whole, yet makes some individual Americans-and immigrants-worse off,
particularly at the lower socioeconomic levels. Because a serious consequentialist analysis
shows that immigration's effects are vast, difficult to define, and perhaps impossible to
measure, such an analysis is inevitably controversial and vulnerable to criticism, which further
encourages critics of any particular position to aggressively join the debate. And when they do
so, they are likely to employ moralistic arguments as well as fact-invoking, consequentialist
ones. Such critics will use these moralistic arguments in order to exploit the empirical
uncertainties and to draw on the persuasive power of claims that seem more disinterested and
that appeal to our highest ideals and most elevated self-conceptions.
Moral questions about immigration policy are highly complex. Important
points of reference center on some key questions:
1) The question of perspective. Often, immigration policy is debated at the
national level. If this is the perspective, the question will often take the
consequentialist form: “do our legal barriers help or harm our society?”
However, such an approach may not be entirely appropriate. For one thing,
this semester’s topic does not single out a specific country. Second, the
question itself overlooks the that our legal barriers might have on human
beings outside of our country.
2) The question of competing rights (entitled protections). There are many
important rights that are common in debates about immigration (freedom of
movement, freedom of national self-determination, freedom of individual selfdetermination).
3) The question of balancing rights with other important values, like safety and
security. What’s more important: freedom or safety/security?
4) The question of concept vs. reality. Many of the rights and potential dangers
that can come from immigration (terrorism, disease, etc) are considered at a
theoretical level. In reality, some arguments are stronger than others. An
important part of the debate will be working to match the moral theories up
with the rest of the evidence in the debate.
To make things as clear as possible, we can start by saying there are some
general schools of thought (2 pro, 1 con):
1) Legal barriers are wrong because they restrict freedom.
5
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
2) Legal barriers are wrong because they materially harm people (i.e.
poverty).
3) Legal barriers are justified because communities have the political right
to decide who does or does not join.
Consider the following diagram:
To this list, we might also add that the con can make a case that legal barriers
bring material benefit to people inside and outside of a given country. So, we
could thus say:
4) Legal barriers are justified because a world without restrictions would
cause more suffering/violence than the status quo.
These moral arguments can definitely be complicated, but they are very very
important questions to decide as you make a strategy for debating on this
topic.
After the immigration-specific section, there are some cards to help you with
the more general consequentialism vs. deontology debate. These cards will be
6
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
helpful on this topic – and, not to be repetitive, virtually all other topics you can
imagine.
As always, this file – and the evidence it contains – is a starting point. It would
be impossible to represent all of the moral arguments within the debate about
immigration – let alone try to cover the entire history of moral philosophy -- in
this simple file. After reading through the file, I hope you will go out and do
some additional research and exploration on your own!
In closing, let me quote another of the authors I read when researching this file.
His advice is also my own:
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
Let me conclude with this thought. I
understand the purpose of the talks over the next couple of days is to help you
prepare for debates. In those debates, I understand, that regardless of your actual views some of you will take
the pro-immigration side and others the anti-immigration side. That is fine and appropriate.
Whichever side of the debate you speak on, however, I would ask you at the end to of the day to ask yourself where
lies the Truth. And please remember that this debate involves the lives of real people, often
desperately poor people who seek only to come to this country to make for themselves and their family a
better life. I would ask you also to take morality seriously, and ask yourself by what right, by what moral theory
is it justifiable to place heavily armed guards at the border to capture, imprison, and sometimes kill these people? If you do, I think
you will find that no moral theory can justify such a monstrous social policy.
Good luck and happy debating,
Durkee
7
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
About The Author
Brought to you by:
James Durkee
of the
and
Questions?
Contact:
[email protected]
8
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Intro Readings on Moral Philosophy
9
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Basic Moral Vocabulary
Background reading:
Chapter 1: What is “Morality?,” A Free Introduction to Moral Philosophy by James W. Gray, Sept
6, 2010, https://ethicalrealism.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/introduction-to-moral-philosophy09032011.pdf
What does “morality” mean?
Morality involves what we ought to do, right and wrong, good and bad, values, justice, and
virtues. Morality is taken to be important; moral actions are often taken to merit praise and
rewards, and immoral actions are often taken to merit blame and punishment.
What we ought to do – What we morally ought to do is what's morally preferable. It's morally
preferable to give to certain charities and to refrain from hurting people who make us angry; so
we morally ought to do these things.
Sometimes what we ought to do isn't seen as “optional.” Instead, we often think we have moral
duties (obligations). It might not be a moral duty to give to any charities, but it seems likely that
we often have a duty not to hurt people.
Nonetheless, what we ought to do doesn't just cover our obligations. It's possible to do
something morally preferable that's not wrong. For example, we can act “above the call of
duty.” Some actions are heroic, such as when we risk our life to run into a burning building to
save a child. Some philosophers call actions that are above the call of duty “supererogatory”
rather than “obligatory.”
Right and wrong – Something is morally right if it's morally permissible, and morally wrong if it's
morally impermissible. For example, it's morally right to help people and give to certain
charities, but morally wrong to kill people indiscriminately.
Good and bad – “Good” and “bad” refer to positive and negative value. Something is morally
good if it helps people attain something of positive value, avoid something of negative vale, or
has a positive value that merits being a goal. For example, food is good because it is necessary to
attain something of positive value because it helps us survive; and our survival could have
positive value that merits being a goal. Something is morally bad if it makes it difficult to attain
something of positive value, could lead to something of negative value, or has a negative value
that merits avoidance. For example, starvation is bad because it could lead to suffering; and
suffering could have negative value that warrants its avoidance.
Something has “instrumental moral value” if it is relevant to achieving moral goals. Food is
instrumentally good because it helps us achieve our goal to survive; and starvation is
instrumentally bad when we have a goal to avoid suffering, and starvation makes it more
difficult for us to achieve this goal.
10
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
We take some of our goals to be worthy as “moral goals” for their own sake rather than being
instrumental for the sake of something else. These goals could be taken to be worthy for having
positive value (or help us avoid something of negative value)—what Aristotle calls “final ends”
or what other philosophers call “intrinsic values.”
Imagine that someone asks you why you have a job and you say it's to make money. We can
then ask why you want to make money and you can reply that it's to buy food. We can then ask
why you want to buy food, and you can reply that it's to survive. At this point you might not
have a reason to want to survive other than valuing your existence for its own sake. If not, then
we will wonder if you are wasting your time with a job. All of our goals must be justified at some
point by something taken to be worthy as a goal for its own sake, or its not clear that any of our
goals are really justified.
Final ends – Final ends are goals that we think are worthy. Pleasure, survival, and knowledge are
possible examples of goods that should be taken to be promoted as final ends. Some final ends
are also meant to help us avoid something of negative value, such as our goals to avoid pain and
death. The goals of attaining these goods are “final ends.” It is possible that final ends are
merely things we desire “for their own sake” but some final ends could be better and of greater
importance than others. Aristotle thought that our “most final end” or “ultimate end” is
happiness and no other good could override the importance of happiness. Final ends seem
relevant to right and wrong. It seems morally right to try to achieve our final ends because they
are worthy. All things equal, it seems morally right to try to attain happiness and survive.
Intrinsic values – Intrinsic values are things of positive or negative value that have that value
just for existing, and some philosophers think Aristotle's truly worthy final ends have intrinsic
value. The main difference here is that final ends could merely be psychological—what we take
to be worthy goals, but a goal has intrinsic value only if it really is worthy. Some people might
have “final ends” but actually be wrong about what goals are worthy of being final ends. We can
desire intrinsic values “for their own sake,” many think it's rational to often try to attain things
that are intrinsically good, and whatever is intrinsically good is good no matter who attains it.
For example, if human life is intrinsically good, then survival is good for every person. Intrinsic
value plays the same role as final ends—we think it's often morally right to try to achieve goals
that help people attain intrinsic goods and we morally ought to do so. However, intrinsic values
can conflict. If pain is intrinsically bad, that doesn't mean we should never allow ourselves or
others to experience pain because there might be intrinsic goods that can be attained as a result
of our pain. For example, homework and learning is often painful, but the knowledge attained
can help us live better lives and could even be intrinsically good for its own sake.
Justice – Justice refers to our interest in certain ethical issues such as equality, fairness, and
merit. It is unjust to have slavery or to have different laws for different racial groups because
people should be equal before the law, it's unfair, and racial groups don't merit unequal
treatment before the law. It is just to punish all people who break the law equally rather than let
certain people—such as the wealthy—break certain laws that other people aren't allowed to
break. Additionally, it's unjust to punish the innocent and to find the innocent guilty in a court of
law.
11
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Virtues – Some people are better at being moral than others. It's important that we know the
difference between right and wrong, attain the skills necessary to reach demanding moral goals,
and find the motivation to do what is morally preferable. For example, courage is a virtue that
involves knowledge of right and wrong, skills, and motivation. Courage requires us to endanger
our personal well being when doing so is morally preferable, to have skills that make it possible
to endanger our personal well being in many situations, and to have the motivation to be willing
to endanger our well being when we ought to do so.
Praise and blame – We often think that moral behavior merits praise and immoral behavior
merits blame. It often seems appropriate to tell people who have done good deeds, such as
saving lives, that we appreciate it and that what they are doing is good; and it often seems
appropriate to tell people who have done something immoral that we don't appreciate it and
that they did something morally wrong. Additionally, it generally seems appropriate to hold
people responsible for their actions and let them know that their actions could have been
different.
Reward and punishment – One way to hold people responsible for their actions is to reward
and punish them for their behavior, and this often seems appropriate. We could give gifts or
return favors to people who help us, and break our friendship or ignore those who do
something immoral. For example, a company that scams people should be held responsible and
punished by consumers who decide to no longer do business with that company. Sometimes
punishments could be severe and could seem immoral in any other context. For example, it
might be morally justified to throw murderers in prison even though it would be an immoral
example of kidnapping and imprisonment in many other contexts. We can't just throw anyone in
prison that we want.
12
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Two Main Sides
Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck:
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
But what is the right thing that morality seeks to advance? Broadly and conventionally speaking,
there are two competing answers to this question: deontology and consequentialism.
Deontology defines moral conduct as action that is right in itself, with rightness in turn being
defined in terms of certain antecedent and abstract principles or values-for example, human
dignity, equality, and flourishing. Consequentialism defines the morality or rightness of a policy
in terms of its actual, real-world effects—for example, wealth creation or production of other
forms of well-being.
13
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism/Utilitarianism
Main Idea: The morality of an action is decided by weighing the positive and
negative effects of that action. If the positive benefits are greater than the
negative costs, the action is morally justified.
Important Philosophers: John Stewart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer
Background Reading:
From “Chapter 12: Normative Moral Theories,” in A Free Introduction to Moral Philosophy by
James W. Gray, Sept 6, 2010, https://ethicalrealism.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/introductionto-moral-philosophy-09032011.pdf
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is a very simple view that matches common sense – right and wrong can be
determined by a cost-benefit analysis. We must consider all the good and bad consequences
when deciding if an action is right. Utilitarians disagree about what counts as “good” or “bad.”
Some think that fulfilling desires is good and thwarting desires is bad, classic utilitarians think
that happiness is good and suffering is bad, and pluralists believe that there are multiple
“intrinsic goods” that are worth promoting. An action will then be said to be “right” as long as
it satisfactorily causes good consequences compared to alternative actions, and it will be
“wrong” if it doesn't. (Durkee’s note: This is why it is also called consequentialism).
Utilitarianism doesn't discriminate or encourage egoism. It is wrong to harm others to benefit
yourself because everyone counts. What counts as “satisfactory” will not be agreed upon by all
philosophers. Originally some philosophers suggested that only the “best” action we could
possibly perform is “right,” but this is an extreme, impractical, and oppressive view. Why?
Whenever you are taking a shower or spending time with friends it would probably be better to
be doing something else, such as helping the needy, but it is absurd to say that you are always
doing wrong whenever you are taking a shower or spending time with friends. Additionally, it
isn't clear that there is a “best” course of action always available to us. There might be an
unlimited number of actions we can perform and at least one of them could be better than what
we choose to do. It should be pointed out that right actions and right moral decisions are two
different things. An action is right when it produces good results even if it was made for the
wrong reasons. For example, I could decide not to go to my job one day when doing so would
just happen to cause a car crash. There is no way to expect a car crash to occur that day, but my
action would be right insofar would cause positive results. People might then say, “You got lucky
and ended up doing the right thing.”
To make the right moral decision for a utilitarian means to make a decision that is most likely
going to actually be right (lead to good results) based on the available information I have.
Choosing to go to work is usually the right decision to make despite the fact that there is a
negligible chance that I will get in a car wreck. Such a decision can't take far-fetched possibilities
into consideration. Utilitarianism is not necessarily meant to be used as a “decision procedure”
14
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
to decide what to do. If we can clearly know that a course of action will produce highly good
results and negligible bad results, then that action is rational. However, we aren't always good
at knowing what actions will produce good results and we can often be overconfident in our
ability to do so. It is often wrong to choose to do something we believe will probably have good
results if that behavior is risky and has a chance of hurting people. For example, a jury shouldn't
find someone guilty when someone has been proven innocent in the hopes that it will prevent a
riot in the streets because people can't know for sure that such a decision will produce the
desired results, and they do know that the guilty verdict will destroy someone's life. To
conclude, in order to know if something is morally preferable for a utilitarian, we must ask, “Will
it lead to more benefits and less harms than the alternatives?” If the answer is, Yes, then it is
morally preferable.
Applying Utilitarianism
Killing people – Killing people is usually wrong either because people have value (and they might
not exist after dying), because everyone has a desire to stay alive, or because killing people
makes other people unhappy.
Stealing – Stealing is usually wrong because it makes people unhappy to lose their possessions,
they might need their possessions to accomplish certain important goals, and because the right
to property makes it possible for us to make long term goals involving our possessions.
Courage – Courage is essential for morality because people must be willing to do what they
believe will be right even at a personal cost. Sometimes doing the right thing requires altruism,
such as when a whistle blower must tell the American public about corruption at the work place
(despite the fact that she might face retaliation for doing so).
Education – Education is good because it helps us know how to be a productive member of
society, it helps us know empirical facts that are relevant to knowing which actions are likely to
benefit or cause harm (e.g. better parenting techniques or healthy eating), and it helps us think
rationally to make better decisions.
Promising – It is wrong to break a promise because doing so would make other people upset and
waste their time. People depend on the honesty of others in order to take business risks, plan
on their retirement, and so on.
Polluting – It is wrong to pollute if the pollution will harm others. It is preferable to refuse to
pollute if too many people doing so could also harm others, but we are not necessarily
personally responsible for the harms caused by an entire civilization.
Homosexual behavior – Homosexual behavior does not automatically cause harm and it is
something many people find pleasurable and part of living a happy life. Therefore, it is not
always wrong. Homosexuality can cause someone harm from discrimination, but to blame
homosexuality for the harms of discrimination is a form of blaming the victim just like blaming a
woman who gets raped for being too weak.
Atheism –Atheism does not necessarily cause people harm other than through discrimination,
but blaming atheists for discrimination is also a form of blaming the victim. Additionally, atheism
15
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
is often a position one believes in because of good arguments, and it is appropriate for people
to have beliefs based on good arguments. Being “reasonable” is “right” because it tends to have
good results.
16
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology/Categorical Imperative
Main Idea: The morality of an action is determined by judging by comparing it to
important rules or principles.
Important Philosophers: Immanuel Kant
Background Reading:
From “Chapter 12: Normative Moral Theories,” in A Free Introduction to Moral Philosophy by
James W. Gray, Sept 6, 2010, https://ethicalrealism.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/introductionto-moral-philosophy-09032011.pdf
Categorical Imperative
The categorical imperative asks us to act in a way that we can will to be a universal law. In other
words, it asks us to behave in a rational way that would be rational for anyone. If it is right for
me to defend myself when attacked, then it is right for everyone to defend themselves in self
defense.
Robert Johnson describes the categorical imperative as a method to find out if an action is
permissible using four steps: First, formulate a maxim that enshrines your reason for acting as
you propose. Second, recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational
agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in
these circumstances. Third, consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world
governed by this law of nature. If it is, then, fourth, ask yourself whether you would, or could,
rationally will to act on your maxim in such a world. If you could, then your action is morally
permissible.12
I will describe each of these stages in more detail:
1. First we formulate the “maxim” or motivational principle that guides our action. For example,
I might plan on eating food because I'm hungry or decide to break a promise to pay a friend back
because I would rather keep the money.
2. Second, let's transform the action into a universal law of nature. Everyone must act for the
same reason that I will act on. Everyone will eat food when they're hungry and break their
promises to friends when they would rather keep their money.
3. Third, let's consider if such a maxim could even be a universal law of nature. Could everyone
eat food when they're hungry? Yes. Could everyone refuse to pay their debts when they'd rather
keep their money? No, because that would undermine the whole point of having debts to be
paid. No one would lend money in that world. At this point we can already rule out the maxim of
refusing to pay our debts out of convenience, so it's an irrational and impermissible maxim and
we have a duty not to act from that motive.
17
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
4. Fourth, if the maxim passes the third step, could we rationally will the maxim to be followed
by everyone in our circumstances? Perhaps I can will that people eat when they are hungry, but
not necessarily in every circumstance, such as when there's limited food that needs to be shared
with others who are also hungry.
Johnson adds that we have a “perfect duty” to refrain from doing something that violates the
third step in the sense that there are no exceptions. Whenever we are in the relevant situation,
we must refrain from doing the act as much as possible. Since refusing to pay one's debts when
we prefer to keep our money doesn't pass the third step, we have a perfect duty not to refuse
to pay our debts for that reason. Kant also thinks we have a prefect duty not to commit suicide
when we want to avoid suffering.
If we have a maxim that doesn't pass the fourth step, then it's an imperfect duty to refrain from
doing it, which means we must refrain from doing it at least some of the time. Kant thinks we
can't always refrain from helping others, so we have a duty to help others at least some of the
time.
I suspect that the categorical imperative is compatible with all other moral theories. For
example, a utilitarian will have to believe that it is only rational to behave in a way likely to
promote positive values, and such moral rationality applies to everyone.
Of course, the categorical imperative doesn't require us to be utilitarians. There might be some
actions that are right for reasons other than the likelihood of producing positive results.
The categorical imperative is often related to hypocrisy, the golden rule, and the question,
“What if everyone did that?” First, our morality must not be hypocritical—what is right for me is
right for everyone.
Second, we can demand that someone treat others how she wants to be treated as long as she
“wants” to be treated in a way that rationality permits. Third, we can demand that people don't
behave in a way that is wrong for others. If “everyone defended themselves from attack,” then
people would be behaving appropriately. However, “if everyone steals to benefit themselves,”
then they will be doing something wrong. When we ask, “What if everyone did that?” we are
not asking, “Would there be bad consequences if everyone did X?” The categorical imperative
does not necessarily concern itself with consequences and it doesn't claim that something is
wrong just because too many people doing something could become destructive.
In order to know if an action is morally acceptable based on the categorical imperative we must
ask, “Is the action rationally appropriate for everyone else in the same situation?” If the answer
is, Yes, then the action is morally acceptable.
Applying the categorical imperative
Killing people – Killing people is wrong whenever it would be inappropriate for someone to kill
us. It would be wrong for people to kill us just to take our money, so it is wrong for everyone to
kill to take people's money. However, it would be right for someone to kill us if necessary to
defend themselves from attack, so it is right for everyone else as well.
18
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Stealing – Stealing is wrong whenever it would be inappropriate for someone to steal from us,
such as when they want something without paying for it. However, if stealing is necessary to
survive because no one is willing to share food, then it might be necessary to steal.
Courage – Courage is rationally necessary for us to be willing to do the right thing when the right
thing is done at personal risk to oneself. Education – Education is a rational requirement insofar
as ignorance puts others at risk. If we can rationally demand others to become educated
because of the dangers of ignorance, then we are also rationally required to become educated.
Promising – Keeping a promise is a rational requirement insofar as we can rationally demand
that other people keep their promises. It might be that breaking a promise is necessary from
time to time, but only when it would be wrong for anyone in that situation to break the
promise. For example, a enraged friend who asks for his gun you are borrowing should be
denied the weapon. It is perfectly respectful to deny someone out of their mind a weapon
because they will appreciate it later once they regain their reason.
Polluting – Although “everyone polluting by driving cars” causes harm, it isn't clear that polluting
is always wrong just like “everyone committing their life to medicine” would end up causing
harm. However, it might be wrong to cause pollution whenever we know that it will cause harm.
If we can rationally demand a business to pollute less, then others can make the same demand
on us.
Homosexual behavior – If having sex for pleasure can be rational for heterosexuals, then having
sex for pleasure can be rational for homosexuals. We can't argue that homosexuality is immoral
because it is unnatural any more than we can argue that driving a car or walking on our hands
are immoral because they are unnatural.
Atheism – Someone can rationally believe in atheism if it is found to be a sufficiently reasonable
belief just like all other beliefs. If it is rational to believe in theism if it is found to be sufficiently
reasonable, and it can be rational to believe in atheism for the same reason.
19
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Rawls & The “Veil of Ignorance”
(Source: Hammering Shield Blog, “John Rawls And The Veil Of Ignorance,” 2013,
https://hammeringshield.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/903/)
In his book, A Theory Of Justice, Rawls asks us to imagine a fantastic scene: a group of people
are gathered to plan their own future society, hammering out the details of what will basically
become a Social Contract. Rawls calls this the “Original Position.” In the Original Position, the
future citizens do not yet know what part they will play in their upcoming society. They must
design their society behind what Rawls calls the Veil Of Ignorance.
“No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his
fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the
like.”
Neither do the people know what type of society they will be entering. They do not know its
culture, its economic situation, or political climate.
It is important for Rawls that the planners of this future society operate behind this Veil Of
Ignorance, for as Rawls says, “if a man knew that he was wealthy, he might find it rational to
advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted unjust; if he knew that
he were poor, he would most likely propose the contrary principle. To represent the desired
restrictions, one imagines a situation in which everyone is deprived of this sort of information.”
Rawls contends that if “rational persons concerned to advance their interests” found
themselves in this type of Original Position, they would agree to a Social Contract in which there
existed an equal distribution of liberties and social goods. As an illustration, he describes the
following situation:
A group of people are presented a cake (that we assume they all desperately desire). One of
them must slice the cake and divvy out the portions. What instructions will they give the man
doing the slicing? Rawls says that they will tell the man slicing that he must take the last piece.
By doing this, they assure the man will cut equal pieces, for this is the best way he can assure
himself that he will get the largest share possible. If he were to cut uneven slices then the larger
slices would already be picked when his turn came, and he would be left with the smallest slice.
Similarly Rawls says that when the Original Position is behind a Veil Of Ignorance, the parties to
the Social Contract being drawn up will want make certain that —no matter what physical,
mental, economic, or social condition they wind up with in the coming society— they will get a
fair share of the things they need to make for themselves a good life. Rawls calls these
necessary things Primary Social Goods, and they include: 1) Rights and Liberties, 2) Powers and
Opportunities, 3) Income and Wealth, and 4) conditions for Self-Respect.
These Primary Social Goods “are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any
or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.”
20
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Rawls says that the parties to the Social Contract will eventually reason their way to a pair of
fundamental laws that he calls the Two Principles Of Justice:
1st— each person will be given the most extensive basic liberties possible without intruding
upon the liberties of others, and
2nd— there will be equal opportunity for everyone to climb the economic and/or social ladder
and that any social or economic inequalities that are allowed must be arranged so that they
improve the access to Primary Goods for the Least Advantaged.
For Rawls, of all the Primary Social Goods, the most important is Liberty. If there is a choice to
be made between Liberty and some other social good, Liberty always takes precedence. This
means that no one can be made to give up a single liberty merely for the sake of improving
society’s Wealth, or Power, or Economic Efficiency, or Social Welfare– or even for greater
Justice.
The one and only reason to restrict Liberty is for the sake of even greater Liberty. For instance,
when Liberties interfere with each other, some Liberties may be limited (for example, your
Liberty to play loud music might be limited so that your neighbors can gain the Liberty of getting
a good night’s sleep). And even in this special case, where some Liberties are basically
exchanged for others, Rawls says that the people who are having their Liberty restricted must
agree to the imposition.
When Rawls speaks of Liberties, he has in mind several basic types:
* Political Liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office)
* Freedom of Speech and Assembly
* Liberty of Conscience and Freedom of Thought
* Freedom Of The Person & the Right to Hold Personal Property, and
* Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest and Seizure
21
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Immigration Evidence
22
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Pro
23
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Immoral**
All moral theories support the pro
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
Moral Factors The main effect of immigration on natives is therefore primarily positive. But
suppose that the effect were negative. Would this be a good argument for restricting
immigration? Perhaps, but it would not be a moral argument. At this point, I am going to accept
for the sake of argument that immigration hurts natives in some way, say by driving down wages
of native workers. I don’t happen to believe that immigration does hurt US workers, but if you
are going to demolish an opponent’s argument, it’s always a good idea to demolish your
opponents best argument. Thus, I am going to argue that even if immigration does harm US
workers it would be wrong to prevent immigration. I will also show, rather surprisingly, that
restricting immigration is immoral from the point of view of almost all moral theories. We do
not have to debate, morality—since virtually every moral theory agrees the conclusion that
restricting immigration is immoral
24
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Global Commons
National boundaries are arbitrary – immigration debates must start from the
global, human perspective
Mathias Risse, Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy @ Harvard, 2008
(“On the Morality of Immigration,” Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 22.1,
https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/22_1/essays/001.html/:pf_printable)
We have now brought into focus one immense difficulty of discussing questions
about immigration: it easily involves
one in major moral questions. Thus, what one can sensibly say about questions that arise in the context of immigration policy
turns on what parameters one considers fixed for the purposes of the debate. Discussions about immigration, more than most other
political issues, easily become frustrating because people intuitively differ over how much political background structure should be
kept fixed, and because it is often questionable at what stage one should say that a certain proposal is untenable because "ought
implies can"—that is, there is no point in exploring a certain proposal because it is clearly not politically feasible. Of course, in the
realm of the political, what can be done depends largely on what one can convince or persuade others to approve. The limits of
what is politically doable are themselves, at least to a large extent, shaped by political debate. The idea that a fence should be built
along the U.S. border with Mexico clearly is not off limits, in the sense that the "ought implies can" restriction cannot be applied;
indeed, the proposal has been discussed. What, then, about the idea that the United States should introduce mandatory
identification cards that would include a sophisticated registration system, making it easier to track people? Or the idea that the
number of border patrol officers should be increased by a factor of twenty? Or the idea that new immigrants should receive
$100,000 in start-up support because their ancestors, unlike those of longer-term citizens, have not had the opportunity to position
themselves in the American economy? Or the idea that there should be no borders to begin with? Depending on which of these
ideas one considers feasible, debates about immigration look rather different, and in such debates people often talk past each other
because of unarticulated disagreements precisely about what can be under consideration and what cannot. Difficulties of this sort
confront us more fully when it comes to assessing illegal immigration. How should we think about illegal immigrants? First of all, are
they actually doing something wrong? True, they are breaking the law, but, arguably, from a moral standpoint not all ways of
breaking the law are to be condemned. If one subscribes to the belief that there should be constraints on the sovereignty of any
given state, it is no longer obvious that anything is morally wrong with illegal immigration per se. Specifically, if a country limits
immigration in a manner that goes beyond what it is morally entitled to, illegal immigration is a legitimate response. One
important way in which sovereignty should be constrained emerges from the idea that humanity
as a whole owns the earth and its resources in common—not, of course, all those things that in some sense are
man-made, but the original resources of the earth. After all—and this is the intuitive argument for this standpoint—such
resources are needed by all, and their existence is the accomplishment of no one. Indeed, much of
the political philosophy of the seventeenth century was guided by the idea that the earth collectively
belongs to humanity, a thought that mattered tremendously to European intellectuals of the time in assessing what sort of
claims fledgling colonial powers could make to other parts of the world. Hugo Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis was written entirely
from a standpoint of collective ownership, and related
ideas were also central to Locke, Pufendorf, Selden, Filmer, and
even Hobbes. In addition to the question of immigration, an obvious topic that would benefit from revitalizing the standpoint of
collective ownership is climate change. More generally, humankind now confronts numerous problems
that are of global import, and that in fact affect the future of the planet itself. Revitalizing the
standpoint of collective ownership could be beneficial to thinking about such problems. In the
seventeenth century the motivation behind this approach was largely theological, taking as its point of departure the biblical dictum
that God gave the earth to humankind in common. But as I hope to demonstrate here, the basic idea can be made plausible without
reference to such theological foundations.
25
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Justice
Restricting full legal immigration maintains a system where citizenship is
assigned by accident – the completely uncontrollable fate of where an
individual happens to be born determines their future. This system is immoral
because it cements global inequality.
Ayelet Shachar, Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism, and
Professor of Law, Political Science, and Global Affairs at the University of
Toronto, 2009
(THE BIRTHRIGHT LOTTERY: Citizenship and Global Inequality, Published by Harvard University
Press, p. 2-3, http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/shachar/BirthrightLottery_excerpt.pdf)
This situation may, of course, change in the future. But in today’s
world, as I will explain in the following pages, there are strong
forces that explain not only the persistence of regulated membership (at the national or supranational level) but also the
preservation of its archaic mechanism of conferring citizenship by virtue of birthright. Indeed, we cannot understand the
resilience of bounded membership—which defies the vogue predictions of its demise—unless we revisit the legal and political
institution of birthright citizenship. This institution provides a state-sponsored apparatus for handing down from generation to
generation the invaluable security and opportunity that attach to membership in a stable, affluent, and rule-oflaw society. It also
allows members of well-off polities an enclave in which to preserve their accumulated wealth and power through time. If we focus
on these transfer mechanisms, we soon realize with some surprise that today’s birthright citizenship laws resemble ancient property
regimes that shaped rigid and tightly regulated estate-transmission rules. Birthright
citizenship operates not merely as if
it were any other kind of inherited property; rather, it moves down the generations like an entail form of untaxed
inherited property.7 Today, such “entailed” transfer of property is deeply discredited: it is
banned in most jurisdictions and, indeed, is largely associated with a bygone feudal system. At
the same time, we still find strict reliance on birthright transmission of entitlement in the assignment of
the valuable good of political membership. It was none other than Alexis de Tocqueville who, in Democracy in America,
famously warned about the social and political dangers of inherited property becoming the basis of enduring privilege. A similar
cautionary tale is worth telling about birthright citizenship in an unequal world like our own. This book
does just that: in confronting the complexity of the current system of citizenship transfer, I aim to offer a new way of thinking about
political membership by drawing a conceptual analogy between birthright citizenship and inherited property. This perspective
creates a space in which to explore membership entitlement in the broader context of today’s urgent debates about global justice
and the distribution of opportunity. For
those granted a head start simply because they were born into a
flourishing political community, it may be difficult to appreciate the extent to which others
are disadvantaged due to the lottery of birthright. But the global statistics are revealing.
Children born in the poorest nations are five times more likely to die before the age of five.
Those who survive their early years will, in all likelihood, lack access to basic subsistence
services such as clean water and shelter, and are ten times more likely to be malnourished
than children in wealthier countries. Many will not enjoy access to even basic education, and
those out of school are more likely to be girls than boys.8 The odds that they will either
witness, or themselves suffer, human rights abuses are also significantly increased. What is more,
these disparities that attach to birthright citizenship are not a matter of individual desert or fault; rather,
they represent systemic and structural patterns. In such a world, citizenship laws assigning political
membership by birthright play a crucial role in the distribution of basic social conditions and life opportunities
on a global scale.9 My intention is not to belabor the familiar argument that such extreme inequality of actual
26
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
life chances is morally and ethically troubling. Rather, the point here is more subtle: by focusing on the often
neglected angle of membership transfer, I wish to call attention to the crucial role played by existing legal regimes for allocating
entitlement to political membership (according to birthright) in restricting access to well off polities and sustaining the privilege of
inherited entitlement. I further wish to destabilize the notion that such reliance is “natural” and, in this sense, apolitical. This latter
notion serves to legitimize (and make invisible) the significant intergenerational transfers of wealth and power, as well as security
and opportunity, which are currently maintained under the seal of the birthright regime of membership allocation. By highlighting
the analogy to inherited property regimes, it becomes possible to call attention to the manifold ways in which reliance
on
birth in the assignment of citizenship regularizes, naturalizes, and legitimizes distinctions not only between
jurisdictions, but also between vastly unequal bequests. Framed in this way, we can begin to acknowledge the massive
estate-preserving implications of inherited citizenship regimes as they exist today. Drawing upon the rich body of democratic theory
and property jurisprudence, this book sets out to expose—and challenge—the moral problem of unburdened intergenerational
transmission of citizenship.
The effect is global and the impact is millions of deaths.
Ayelet Shachar, Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism, and
Professor of Law, Political Science, and Global Affairs at the University of
Toronto, 2009
(THE BIRTHRIGHT LOTTERY: Citizenship and Global Inequality, Published by Harvard University
Press, p. 11-12, http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/shachar/BirthrightLottery_excerpt.pdf)
If we wish to revisit these automatic transmission principles and to consider how to better allocate across
borders the social benefits that presently attach to citizenship in a bounded community (as I believe we
should), the first order of business is to draw attention to the entrenched connection between birth and
political membership. Despite its pervasive effects, this connection has largely escaped attention in both
academic and public policy circles. Once subjected to scrutiny, this system of allocation can no
longer be taken for granted, nor can it be ignored.36 This is so for at least three reasons. First, the scope
and scale of citizenship distribution is truly grand: it affects every single human being on this
earth. Although the topic of immigration nowadays attracts considerable attention, it is still by means of
ascriptive birthright that individuals attain their initial political membership in “this or that” particular
country. And despite the public attention paid to those who go on to reside outside the polity in which
they were born, they represent less than three percent of the global population. Everyone else—namely,
ninety-seven percent of the global population, or more than six billion people—is assigned the
life-long good of membership by the lottery of birth and either chooses, or is forced, to keep it
that way.37 Second, the consequences of this membership-transfer system are profound, going
far beyond the familiar emphasis in citizenship studies on questions of identity, diversity, and civic virtue.
In an unequal world like our own, birthright citizenship does more than demarcate a form of
belonging. It also distributes voice and opportunity in a vastly unequal manner. By legally
identifying birth, either in a certain territory, or to certain parents, as the decisive factor in the
distribution of the precious property of membership, current citizenship principles render
membership in well-off polities beyond the reach of the vast majority of the world’s population.
It is in this way that citizenship may be thought of as the quintessential inherited entitlement of our time.
And what a significant inherited entitlement it is: in our world, the global disparities are so great that
under the present regimes of birthright citizenship, “some are born to sweet delight” as
William Blake memorably put it in the Auguries of Innocence, while others (through no fault
or responsibility of their own) are “born to endless night.”38 The reality of our world is that the
endless night is more prevalent that the sweet delight. More than a billion people live on less
than a dollar a day; about 2.7 billion live without access to adequate sanitation and more than
27
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
800 million are seriously malnourished.39 Add to this the almost incomprehensible fact that
eight million will die each year, as one author piercingly remarks, “because they are simply too poor
to live.”40 Or think of the shocking atrocity that we casually permit to continue every day: more than
ten million children under five years of age perish each year in the world’s poorest nations—
most from entirely preventable causes of death.41 To this we must add the stinging realization
that—contrary to the conventional optimistic story of breaking down ascriptive barriers and replacing
them with mechanisms of choice and fair distribution—under the current system of birthright,
gaining access to citizenship’s goods is clearly not open to anyone who voluntarily consents to
membership or is in dire need of its associated benefits.42 Once this more critical perspective is
taken into account, with its profound emphasis on global disparities coupled with a sharp recognition of
how tightly our membership boundaries are regulated, the existing correlation between inherited
citizenship and general well-being is impossible to ignore. The quality of services, safety, and scope of
freedoms and opportunities enjoyed by those born in affluent polities are far greater, ceteris paribus,
than the opportunities of those born in poorer or less stable countries.43 When our citizenship laws
effectively become intertwined with distributing shares in human survival on a global scale—
designating some to a life of relative comfort while condemning others to a constant struggle to
overcome the basic threats of insecurity, hunger, and destitution—we can no longer silently
accept this situation. These dramatically differentiated life prospects should disturb not only the
expectant crowd of moral universalists but also free-marketers who believe in rewarding effort
and distributing opportunity according to merit, rather than on the basis of station of birth. The
problem of unequal allocation and transfer, which has gained plenty of attention in the realm of
property, is, in fact, far more extreme in the realm of birthright entitlement to citizenship.
Redistribution ethics support open borders
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
Contemporary liberalism or any ideology which asserts the importance of redistributing wealth
from the rich to the poor would certainly favor open borders. Immigrants are, in general, much
poorer than natives. Thus, even if natives are hurt by immigration they are hurt much less than
by what the immigrants gain. Alternatively stated if you are in favor of any form of the welfare
state then you should also favor open borders. If it is right to tax the rich to help the poor then it
is certainly wrong to limit such redistribution to members of one nation—that is simply
tribalism. It’s possible to argue for tribalism, of course, by say arguing as Hitler did that there is
something special about the German volk, or as racists do that a white nation must be preserved
etc. but obviously these sorts of arguments will not win among most people today, however
successful they were in the past.
28
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Freedom
People have the right to move in search of a better life – legal barriers are an
immoral restriction on this basic human right
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
The motives of those preventing immigration were and sometimes today are distasteful and disgraceful. It is clear that if the motive
for restricting immigration is racism then such restrictions are wrong. Not everyone who opposes immigration is a racist, however. I
want to go further, therefore, and argue that even
non-racist restrictions on immigration are immoral, indeed
the motivation is irrelevant, it is wrong to prevent people from moving from one country to
another—either to stop them from getting out or to stop them from getting in. To see the immorality
it’s worthwhile noting that the issues of immigration are often thought to be international, but in fact the same issues arise
nationally. After the end of the civil war and again in the post WWII era, blacks left the American South for Northern cities like
Chicago and Detroit. They went in search of better jobs and better lives. Some in the north didn’t want them, blacks would ruin the
culture, blacks were unskilled, they would lower wages etc. All the arguments against immigration were used against blacks
migrating from the South to the North, and of course racism played a part as well. In more recent years, as the rust belt has rusted
and jobs have moved back down the south, immigration to the south has occurred and now it is the Southerners turn to decry
carpetbaggers from the North who are destroying a way of life with their new ways. The only important difference between the
national and international situations is that because of the Constitution there are few laws to prevent people from moving from one
state to another. In China the law does prohibit Chinese citizens from moving from one part of the country to another part (See
Jacob Sullum. Moving Targets. Reason Magazine, March 15, 2000). If a Chinese resident wants to move from the country to Shanghai
where the economy is booming he must apply for permission from the government. This strikes must of us as wrong but if it is
wrong to prevent a resident of China from moving from the country to the city, if it is wrong to prevent a Texan from moving to New
Hampshire, then it is also wrong to prevent a German from moving to Texas. The imaginary line separating Texas from New
Hampshire is really no different from the line separating Texas from Germany. It will be objected that Texas and Germany are
different countries while Texas and New Hampshire are not. But what sort of moral theory with serious claims to our attention
makes something as important as the right to move from one place to another rest on something as arbitrary and accidental as the
name of the place in which you were born? Pity the poor residents of Liechtenstein who on this theory have hardly any rights to
move at all. Let’s suppose in particular that immigrants lower native wages. But why should this make a difference? Suppose that Bill
wants a job which he knows Bob will also be applying for. It surely would be wrong of Bill to go to Bob’s house and nail the doors and
windows shut and plant land mines and barbed war around the yard so that Bob couldn’t leave. Yet this is exactly what we do to
prevent Mexicans from coming to the United States to look for jobs. Moreover, the consider the larger principle behind restricting
immigration to save jobs or wages—the principle is that natives can and should be guaranteed jobs with guaranteed wages—this
principle cannot be taken seriously because international immigration is just one way in which wages change. If we were to take this
principle seriously we would also have to prevent internal migrations. Plenty of people are coming to Northern California to look for
jobs in the computer industry, for example, and this just as much as immigration from India lowers wages in the computer industry.
Not only would international and internal immigration have to be prevented, we would also need population controls. As far as
wages are concerned the only difference between immigration and birth is that birth takes longer. When your neighbor has a child it
as equivalent to a worker entry the country 18 years in the future. The wage argument against immigration thus also suggests that
we should have prevented the parents of the baby-boomers from having children. The guaranteed wage argument also implies that
we must restrict technology. There is no doubt whatsoever that technology has been responsible for the disappearance of far, far
more jobs than has immigration. Edison destroyed more jobs with his lightbulb than immigrants have every done, the same goes for
Henry Ford who destroyed the horse and buggy industry, today the internet is destroying the travel agency business and the small
bookstore. It’s absurd to single out one source of job loss for special attack. Change destroys jobs but change comes from many
sources not just immigration. And, of course, change creates jobs. America has the highest standard of living of any major country in
the entire world. To maintain and enhance that standard of living America should continue to embrace those qualities which have
made America great, openness and dynamism. Openness to new technologies, new ideas and new people is America’s greatest
source of strength. To return to the moral issues let’s us change the analogy slightly and suppose that John wants to marry Jill and Jill
wants to marry John, it would be wrong of Sam to try and prevent the marriage by force. Preventing the marriage by force would
harm both John and Jill. In the same way when the government forbids an Indian computer programmer from coming to the United
States it harms both the Indian programmer and his potential employer. Thus, restrictions on immigration It’s about some people in
the United States harming foreigners and other people in the United States. I have argued so far that it
is wrong to prevent
competition by force whether the competition is from a fellow native, an immigrant, or new
29
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
technology. There is no right to a job or a wage rate but there is a right to move from one
country to another in search of a better life. This is the point of view of Thomas Jefferson, John
Locke and other great supporters of the natural rights tradition in America.
We have a moral obligation to treat all people equally – citizenship is an
outdated, arbitrary and dangerous concept
Carens ’14 – Prof of Political Science @ Univ of Toronto, PhD at Yale (Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy, Vol 17, Issue 5, Special Issue: New Challenges in Immigration Theory An
Overview of the ethics of immigration)
Citizenship in Western democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege – an inherited
status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. Like feudal birthright privileges, the privileges
that flow from birthright citizenship in Western democracies are hard to justify when one thinks
about them closely. To be born a citizen of an affluent state in Europe or North America is like
being born into the nobility (even though most of us belong to the lesser nobility). To be born a
citizen of a poor country in Asia or Africa is (for most) like being born into the peasantry in the
Middle Ages (even if there are a few rich peasants). In this context, limiting entry to the rich
states is a way of protecting a birthright privilege. Reformers in the late Middle Ages objected to
the way feudalism restricted freedom, including the freedom of individuals to move from one
place to another in search of a better life – a constraint that was crucial to the maintenance of
the feudal system. But modern practices of citizenship and state control over borders tie people
to the land of their birth almost as effectively. If the feudal practices were wrong, what justifies
the modern ones?My starting point is an assumption of human moral equality, a commitment to
the equal moral worth of all human beings. This does not entail the sort of cosmopolitanism that
requires every agent to consider the interests of all human beings before acting or that insists
that every policy or institution be assessed directly in terms of its effects on all human beings. It
does, however, entail a commitment to justification through reason- giving and reflection that
does not simply presuppose the validity of conventional moral views or the legitimacy of existing
arrangements or our entitlement to what we have. Freedom of movement is both an important
liberty in itself and a prerequisite for other freedoms. So, we should start with a presumption for
free migration. Restrictions on migration, like any use of force, need to be defended.
Nevertheless, freedom of movement is only one important human interest, and it may conflict
with others. There is no reason to assume that all important human freedoms are fully
compatible with one another or with other basic human interests. Restrictions on particular
freedoms may sometimes be justified because they will promote liberty overall or because they
will promote other important human concerns, but we cannot justify restrictions on the
freedom of others simply by saying that the restrictions are good for us. We have to show that
they somehow take everyone’s legitimate claims into account, that we are not violating our
fundamental commitment to equal moral worth. A commitment to equal moral worth may not
require us to treat people identically in every way, but it does require us to respect basic human
freedoms. People should be free to pursue their own projects and to make their own choices
about how they live their lives so long as this does not interfere with the legitimate claims of
other individuals to do likewise. To enjoy this general sort of freedom, people have to be free to
move where they want (subject to the same restraints as others with regard to respect for
30
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
private property, the use of public property, etc.). The right to go where you want is itself an
important human freedom. It is precisely this freedom, and all that this freedom makes possible,
that is taken away by imprisonment. Thus, conventional immigration controls improperly limit
the freedom of non-citizens who are not threatening the basic rights and freedoms of citizens. A
commitment to equal moral worth requires some sort of basic commitment to equal
opportunity. Access to social positions should be determined
by an individual’s actual talents and capacities, not limited on the basis of arbitrary native
characteristics (such as class, race, or sex). But freedom of movement is essential for equality of
opportunity. You have to be able to move to where the opportunities are in order to take
advantage of them. Again, the conventional pattern of border controls greatly restricts
opportunities for potential immigrants. Finally, a commitment to equal moral worth entails
some commitment to the reduction of existing economic, social, and political inequalities, partly
as a means of realizing equal freedom and equal opportunity and partly as a desirable end in
itself. Freedom of movement would contribute to a reduction of political, social, and economic
inequalities. There are millions of people in poor states today who long for the freedom and
economic opportunity they could find in Europe and North America. Many of them take great
risks to come. If the borders were open, millions more would move. The exclusion of so many
poor and desperate people seems hard to justify from a perspective that takes seriously the
claims of all individuals as free and equal moral persons. I have no illusions about the likelihood
of rich states actually opening their borders. The primary motivation for this open borders
argument is my sense that it is of vital importance to gain a critical perspective on the ways in
which our collective choices are constrained, even when we cannot do anything to alter those
constraints. Social institutions and practices may be deeply unjust and yet so firmly established
that, for all practical purposes, they must be taken as background givens in deciding how to act
in the world at a particular moment in time. For example, feudalism and slavery were unjust
social arrangements that were deeply entrenched in places in the past. In those contexts, there
was no real hope of transcending them in a foreseeable future. Yet, criticism was still
appropriate. Even if we have to take such arrangements as givens for purposes of immediate
action in a particular context, we should not forget about our assessment of their fundamental
character. Otherwise, we wind up legitimating what should only be endured. Of course, most
people in democratic states think that the institutions they inhabit have nothing in common
with feudalism and slavery from a normative perspective. The social arrangements of
democratic states, they suppose, are just – or nearly so. It is precisely that complacency that the
open borders argument is intended to undermine. For I imagine (or at least hope) that in a
century or two people will look back upon our world with bafflement or shock. Just as we
wonder about the moral blindness of feudal aristocrats and Southern slave owners, future
generations may ask themselves how democrats today could have possibly failed to see the
deep injustice of a world so starkly divided between haves and have nots and why we felt so
complacent about this division, so unwilling to do what we could to change it.
31
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Con = Burden of Proof
There are strong deontological and consequentialist reasons to set the moral
default position to open borders – the con has the burden of proof to overcome
these factors.
Rainer Bauböck, Professor of Political and Social Sciences @ the European
University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, 2009
(“Global Justice, Freedom of Movement and Democratic Citizenship,” in European Journal of
Sociology, 50.1, July, DOI: 10.1017/S000397560900040X)
Freedom of movement is, however, certainly not an unconditional right and may be constrained in
order to protect other important interests. Political theorists have generally constructed a contrast between
individual and collective interests with regard to free movement. Individuals may have strong interests to cross borders but these
can be overridden by collective interests of citizens and residents in sending and receiving societies. Sending countries may, for
example, suffer from a brain drain and receiving societies may see their domestic welfare regimes undermined. While these are valid
arguments if they can be supported by empirical evidence, we
also need to take into account those reasons that
make relatively open borders attractive because of their beneficial impact for the societies in
question. The basic argument from individual autonomy may thus be reinforced by three further
arguments about collective benefits of free movement across international borders. Liberal theorists
discussing freedom of movement have too narrowly focused on the trade-off between individual liberty and collective selfdetermination and have often ignored the positive effects of relatively open borders on political systems.3 First,
sending
societies can benefit from emigrants’ transnational ties to their countries of origin. Under the right
conditions, such transnational ties can be conducive to economic development, democratic
transition and consolidation, and improve access to ideas, networks and markets abroad. The
theoretical argument for these beneficial effects could be derived from a revision of Albert Hirschman’s theory that exit and voice
are alternative mechanisms for improving the performance of organizations and governments. In an important essay on the fall of
the Berlin wall, Hirschman revised his earlier theory by pointing out how mass emigration may lead to regime change and thus
support dissident voice inside the country instead of weakening it (Hirschman 1970, 1995). This extension of Hirschman’s original
‘‘hydraulic model’’, in which exit and voice are alternative rather than mutually supporting mechanisms could be further revised by
taking into account voice that is exercised from outside after exit. Today’s emigrants remain increasingly involved in the economic
and political affairs of their countries of origin and we need to explore the potential consequences. Second,
the dominant
response to the question why liberal receiving countries need to control immigration is: in order
to protect their welfare regimes and their national cultures. However, welfare regimes may also
be undermined by restricting immigration and certain kinds of universalistic welfare regimes can
keep borders more easily open without attracting too many immigrants. Consider the case of
Sweden, which was one of three EU member states to have opened their labour markets to citizens from the new EU member
states since 2004 and the only one to do so for Romanians and Bulgarians when these joined in 2007. In spite of its much
more comprehensive welfare state, Sweden has received much smaller absolute and relative
numbers of immigrants from the accession countries than the neoliberal regimes of the UK and Ireland (Wadensjo€
2007). Cultural reasons for restricting immigration are generally suspect from a liberal perspective. Several
authors point out that a policy of excluding immigrants on cultural grounds is discriminatory for internal cultural minorities who are
thus signalled counting as equal citizens in the criteria for selecting newcomers (Carens 1989; Miller 2008, p. 228). Yet
even a
culturally homogenous state may become more liberal internally through culturally diverse
immigration, since national cultures that are maintained through closed borders are likely to be
less liberal than those that have been transformed through accommodating diversity resulting
from immigration. Opening borders for immigration can thus, under certain conditions, promote a cultural liberalization of
32
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
democracies without undermining their capacity to maintain effective welfare regimes. Third, freedom
of movement is
both enabled by peaceful and friendly relations between states and contributes in turn to
consolidating such relations. Political theorists generally consider only what justification liberal
states owe to individuals whom they exclude at their borders. But justification is also owed to
those states whose citizens the would-be immigrants are. States may have reciprocal duties to
open their borders for migration from other states when there is no reason to assume that free
admission policies would undermine social justice, political order, economic development or
other legitimate public policy goals in either country. As I will discuss further below, the goal of promoting
freedom of movement across international borders may therefore be best achieved through building regional unions and
international associations of states that grant each other’s citizens reciprocal admission rights. These
are three
consequentialist reasons for strengthening freedom of movement and each of them may be defeated by
pointing to detrimental effects of open borders in a particular context. But taken together they add enough weight
to the basic deontological argument from individual autonomy to defend a liberal default
position in favour of open borders. The force of these arguments for free movement cannot be grasped by theorists
who consider it only as a matter of redistributive justice (e.g. Seglow 2006, 2005). A liberal perspective on free movement must then
reject both the ‘‘remedial-only’’ view of migration rights and the claim that collective self-government always requires migration
control.4
33
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Human Rights
Restrictions on immigration leave people trapped amid human rights abuses –
this is deontologically wrong.
Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck in 2008
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
Immigrants often have compelling claims based on human rights principles grounded in
noninstrumental notions of personal dignity and social solidarity. This is most obvious with
those who seek refugee status, either as refugees overseas or as asylees at the border or in the
U.S. interior. In such cases, they are, by legal definition, claiming that they have a well-founded
fear of persecution in their country of origin based on their race, religion, national origin,
political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.9 As noted below, however, the
human rights defense of immigration is not confined to those fleeing persecution; it extends as
well to close family members of the immigrant. The rhetorical trope here is an exceedingly
powerful one. The putative refugee has already endured persecution, has no safe alternatives,
and through no fault of the refugee's own, will suffer deprivations of life, bodily security, or
freedom if returned to the country of origin. Sometimes, this moral claim is strengthened by a
contention that U.S. foreign policy has played a role in creating the persecutory environment-as,
for example, with the civil wars in Central America during the 1980s, or the Iraq conflict today.
In the latter case, the U.S. government's failure to process and approve more of the claims by
endangered individuals who worked with the occupying forces or whom we placed at grave risk
for our own policy purposes is particularly egregious and reprehensible, as Congress and the
administration have belatedly recognized-so far, without much apparent effect on the number
or speed of their processing and protection.1
34
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Discrimination
Legal barriers to immigration are an immoral form of discrimination
Howard Chang, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, 2008
(“Immigration Policy: Who Belongs?: ARTICLE: The Economics of International Labor Migration
and the Case for Global Distributive Justice in Liberal Political Theory”, Cornell International Law
Journal, Winter, 41 Cornell Int'l L.J. 1, lexis)
II. Liberal Ideals and Global Distributive Justice Immigration restrictions
keep disadvantaged groups of people
in conditions of poverty and deprive them of equal access to important economic opportunities.
In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, immigration restrictions are much like laws mandating employment
discrimination or residential segregation in the domestic context. n61 When it comes to racial segregation in the domestic
context, we condemn segregation for keeping disadvantaged groups in an underclass, cut off from valuable social and economic
opportunities. For example, our courts refuse to enforce zoning ordinances or racially restrictive covenants that exclude blacks from
white neighborhoods. n62 We would not consider such laws or covenants any more acceptable if they excluded aliens rather than
racial minorities from local communities. n63 If we would reject such exclusionary practices as violations[*12]of liberal principles of
equality, then why should exclusion be any more legitimate when the exclusion occurs on a national scale rather than at the local
level? Why should it be less troubling to exclude an alien from an entire country rather than from a single neighborhood? Expanding
the geographic scope of the community from which we exclude the alien only broadens the range of opportunities that we thereby
deny that alien. n64One might object to the analogy that I draw between immigration restrictions and segregation in the domestic
context by challenging my premise that aliens are as entitled to distributive justice under our laws as natives. In particular, one might
claim that we do not owe the same concern to prospective immigrants as we do to incumbent residents. In comparing immigration
restrictions to de jure segregation in the domestic context, I have relied on the premise that prospective immigrants as well as
natives are entitled to equal concern. n65 I suggest here that the liberal ideals expressed in our declaration that "all men are created
equal" n66 require such a cosmopolitan perspective.Consider the notion of equal concern expressed in the liberal theory of justice
developed by John Rawls, who asks what principles individuals would choose behind a "veil of ignorance." n67 In this "original
position," individuals know nothing about their own personal circumstances or traits; thus, "they do not know how the various
alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general
considerations." n68 This position ensures that the parties are "fairly situated and treated equally as moral persons." n69 Rawls,
however, includes only persons within a single "society," which he describes as "a cooperative venture for mutual advantage," as
participants in the original position. n70 That is, he assumes that the "boundaries" of his principles of justice "are given by the notion
of a self- contained national community." n71[*13]This assumption, however, raises the question of whether a world in which
nations engage in international trade in goods, services, capital, and labor is a "cooperative venture for mutual advantage." n72 In
light of this international cooperation, Charles Beitz and others have argued that the
entire world is a "society" in
which all individuals would be parties to the original position. n73 Beitz suggests that "we should not view national
boundaries as having fundamental moral significance" and that "principles of justice" should "therefore apply
globally." n74Furthermore, place of birth would appear to be a circumstance that Rawls should deem "arbitrary from a moral
point of view." n75 Pogge notes that nationality based on such a circumstance "is just one further deep contingency (like genetic
endowment, race, gender, and social class), one more potential basis of institutional inequalities that are ... present from birth." n76
"Within Rawls's conception," Pogge suggests, "there is no reason to treat this case differently from the others." n77 Thus, Pogge also
argues in favor of globalizing Rawls's principles of justice. n78[*14]Citing Beitz and others, Joseph Carens addresses the issue of
immigration restrictions as a question of social justice using a global interpretation of Rawls's original position. n79 In seeking a
justification for the exclusion of aliens, he suggests, "we don't want to be biased by self-interested or partisan considerations" and
instead "can take it as a basic presupposition that we should treat all human beings, not just members of our own society, as free
and equal moral persons." n80 Carens identifies this premise as a basic feature of all liberal political theories, n81 concluding that
we should "take a global, not a national view of the original position." If we begin with equal concern
for all persons, then immigration barriers are morally suspect and demand justification. All
immigration restrictions discriminate against individuals based on their alienage. Most aliens are
born aliens because our nationality 
laws deem them to be aliens based on
immutable characteristics, including the geographic location of their birth (that is, national origin) and
the citizenship of their parents at the time of their birth. n83 This discrimination based explicitly on
circumstances of birth is at odds with liberal ideals. Carens concludes that we cannot justify restrictions "on the
35
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
grounds that those born in a given territory or born of parents who were citizens were more
entitled to the benefits of citizenship than those born elsewhere or of alien parents." n84 Similarly, in
a utilitarian calculation of global welfare, "current citizens would enjoy no privileged position." n85 Carens concludes from these
liberal premises that "we
have an obligation to open our borders much more fully than we do now."
n86 Carens condemns our immigration restrictions: "Like feudal barriers to mobility, they protect unjust privilege."
n87 How might a liberal[*15]nevertheless reject the extension of our principles of distributive justice to prospective immigrants?
Immigration restrictions are deontologically wrong because they are an
arbitrary form of discrimination
Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck in 2008
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
Many moralistic arguments in favor of immigration are premised on some notion of fairness. All
people, in Ronald Dworkin's formulation of this deontological view, have a right to equal
concern and respect simply by virtue of their humanity, a right that would be violated by any
immigration restriction that discriminates on the basis of race or some other arbitrary
characteristic. 21 A related fairness-based argument rests on the nondiscrimination principle.
This principle, to which almost all Americans claim to subscribe, likewise requires equal
treatment of all 22 people who are subject to governmental power. Most other fairness
arguments derive more or less directly from such anti-exploitation and nondiscrimination
arguments.
Some of the arguments from fairness, however, begin with consequentialist premises. They
often invoke fairness considerations to support expansionist immigration policies. One such
argument, for example, emphasizes that immigrants pay taxes, claim relatively few benefits, and
increase the wealth of our society and hence that fairness dictates-through a kind of quid pro
quo or anti-exploitation logic-that they be assured the opportunity to participate in our social
life.2 Pursuing this same logic to what they view as its logical conclusion, some immigration
proponents contend that immigrants should have an equal right to receive all social benefits and
even the franchise. 2
36
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Jesus
Christianity support’s the pro
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
Catholic Social thought is clear on the issue of emigration and immigration. Pope John Paul II, for
example, says in Laborem Exercens, that: “Man has the right to leave his native land ... in order
to seek better conditions of life in another country.” Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens More
generally, the ethic of kindness to strangers runs throughout Christianity especially in the New
Testament. In Luke, a lawyer challenges Jesus, “I know that to inherit eternal life I must love
they neighbor as myself,” he says but “who is my neighbor?”. Jesus, then replies with the
parable of the Good Samaritan, the foreigner who stops to help the injured native even when
his countrymen pass him by. Neighbors are not just the people who live next door. Perhaps
most explicitly, Matthew 25:35 tells us that at the great judgment “When the Son of Man comes
in his glory, and all the angels with him” the people of the world will be separated and those on
the Lord’s right hand will be told “Come you that are blessed by my father, inherit the Kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I
was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, [and] I was a stranger and you welcomed
me...” Today the immigrant is like the “stranger” in whom Jesus asks to be recognized. To
welcome him and to show him solidarity is thus a duty of hospitality and a fidelity to Christian
identity. (Paraphrase of Pope John Paul II).
37
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Racism
Restrictions produce racist outcomes – ww2 example
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
Let’s begin with a true example. During
most of the 19th century there were very few controls on
immigration. But beginning in the latter part of the 19th century and especially in the early
twentieth century, xenophobia and racism led to the passing of a quota system that drastically
restricted the number of people who could immigrate. After the 1924 immigration act, immigration fell by 90
percent. The new immigrant quotas were especially harsh towards European Jews. Before the
quotas had been put into place, about 100,000 Jews were migrating to the United States every
year but after the quotas were put into effect the flow trickled to only about a few thousand a
year, if that. The reason for the restrictions on immigration by Jews was not hard to understand, anti-Semitism was widespread
throughout American society. A series of surveys done between l938 and l946 showed that more than half of the people of the
United States considered Jews greedy and dishonest, and that 35% to 40% would have supported legal discrimination against Jews
such as separate restrooms, restricting them from voting and so forth, measures such as those in force against Blacks What
happened next of course is well known. Hitler came to power in Germany. Many Jews were
desperate to leave but they had no place to go. A thousand refugees on the boat “Saint Louis” left Hamburg May
l3, l939, but were refused admission to Cuba—then under the control of the United States and then were refused entry
into the United States. In the end, they had to return to Europe, where many of them were
deported to the concentration camps and were murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. AntiSemitism was so strong in the halls of government that even after the holocaust began one state department official could say that
rescuing Jews wasn’t worth it because this would end up “ridding Hitler of an enormous burden.” It’s
clear that if US
immigration policy had not been restricted in the mid 1920’s that hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of Jews who died in the gas chambers of WWII would instead have been alive
in the United States. It’s clear in fact that the history of immigration law is the history of racism.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had the not surprising purpose of excluding Chinese. Japanese were prevented from immigrating
in 1907 and all Asians were preventing from coming into the country in 1917. It is truly shocking to learn that before 1943 what
Chinese immigrants there were not allowed to become citizens, own land, and in some states they could not marry non-Chinese. In
addition to racism came the slightly more socially acceptable “cultural hypothesis” that only people from certain cultures were
compatible with American values and ideals. The Irish were said to be drunks and criminals, for example, and they professed a
foreign religion Catholicism. One scholar (Burgess, 1934) of immigration writing in the 1930’s said: “So long as this immigration was
confined to comers of the Teutonic races ... everything went well.... But now we are getting a very different sort—Slav, Czechs,
Hungarians.... They are inclined to anarchy and crime.... They are in everything which goes to make up folk character, the exact
opposite of genuine Americans.” The motives of those preventing immigration were and sometimes today are distasteful and
disgraceful. It
is clear that if the motive for restricting immigration is racism then such restrictions
are wrong. Not everyone who opposes immigration is a racist, however. I want to go further, therefore, and argue that even
non-racist restrictions on immigration are immoral, indeed the motivation is irrelevant, it is wrong to prevent people from moving
from one country to another—either to stop them from getting out or to stop them from getting in.
38
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Bad – Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance
The Veil of Ignorance support’s a ballot for the pro
Alexander Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, 2000
(“Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration,” Independent Institute,
http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486)
What about contractarianism and Rawls’s veil of ignorance? The basic contractarian argument is
that something is just if everyone would agree to it if they did not know information about
themselves which might bias their decisions—information say about their wealth, race, or sex.
To see the relevance, imagine that you did not know which country you would be born into.
Would you be in favor of open or closed borders? There is some possibility that you might be
born an American in which case we are assuming that you will be harmed by immigration and
therefore will be against open borders. On the other hand there is a much greater probability
that you will leave in a poor and perhaps dictatorial country in which case you will favor open
borders. Moreover, not only is the probability higher that you will be the sort of person who
favors open borders but the gain from open borders when you find yourself living in desperately
poor country is much greater than the loss should you find yourself living in a rich country. Thus,
everyone behind a veil of ignorance would choose open borders and open borders are therefore
just because this is what we would choose if our biases did not interfere with our moral
conscience.
39
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Right to Exclude (Wellman)
There is no deontological right to exclude immigrants – their theory is wrong
Michael Blake, Proferssor of Philosophy @ the University of Washington, 2012
(“Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? Book Review,” Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/debating-the-ethics-of-immigration-is-there-aright-to-exclude/)
Wellman argues that the right of a state to close its borders is deontic in character: it is
defended not by consequentialist considerations, but by a moral story which makes it
impossible for this right to be overridden by competing considerations. Wellman does allow that
the right is not absolute, but it is instructive that his example here is one of catastrophe: the
right might be overridden in the case of nuclear war (35-36). This right is, in other words, so
strong that it can be overridden only by the sorts of hypotheticals that we might invoke to justify
overriding the right to be free from torture. Why, though, should we think that the freedom of
association is sufficiently important to ground rights of this sort? Wellman's answer seems to be
that those who are members of a group legitimately care about its future direction, and the
admission of new members changes the nature of that group and the policies it is likely to make:
"since a country's immigration policy determines who has the opportunity to join the current
citizens in shaping the country's future, this policy will matter enormously to any citizen who
cares what course her political community will take" (40). But it seems hard to think that these
considerations, however weighty, give rise to anything like the strong deontic rights discussed
here. Imagine, for example, that the members of one demographic group begin to have children
at a rate that alarms the members of a dominant majority. Can a legislative majority, in the
name of shaping its country's legislative future -- and preserving a particular form of life -prevent the members of that community from having babies, through compulsory
contraception? Can they simply cite the fact that they do not want these prospective members
"entering" the community as a reason to impose this policy? The answer, of course, is no, which
Wellman would readily accept; it would be dramatically unjust for the government to coercively
prevent the births. This, however, shows us that the right to control the membership of a
country is not the deontic right imagined; it is, in contrast, a right that might sometimes be
trumped. Our democratic right to "exclude" the unwanted babies fails, immediately, because of
the competing value of reproductive autonomy. My worry is, though, that once we admit that
there can be such competing values, the right given by Wellman isn't anywhere near as strong
as he believes it to be. Self-determination, on the view I hold, is justly limited by the
considerations of liberal egalitarianism (which include, but go beyond, reproductive autonomy).
If this is right, then it seems to me that these considerations can extend beyond the border, to
the people who are at the border, trying to come in. Cole is right, I think, that liberalism ought to
have a global reach, and that the would-be immigrant cannot count for less in a valid liberal
framework. If this is true, though, it seems that immigration policy cannot simply cite selfdetermination as a trump against the needs and wishes of foreign citizens; they are morally
equal to insiders, and their exclusion stands in need of justification to them. This means, in the
end, that countries cannot regard immigration as simply an "internal matter" (29) over which
40
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
they have discretion; the right to control unwanted members is limited by the other rights
implied by liberal equality, and Wellman cannot think that the right to freedom of association is
nearly so strong as he supposes. I cannot work out what all this would entail here, but I believe
it would at least demand greater immigration rights for individuals facing serious deprivations in
foreign countries. Wellman allows countries to, as it were, purchase the right to exclude: a state
that has done enough elsewhere can exclude even the neediest persons who want to cross its
borders. I am not sure that this is adequate. If we recognized that the right of freedom of
association was not as absolute as Wellman believes, then I think it is at least plausible that a
state might lose the right to cite this value as a justification for returning a would-be immigrant
to circumstances under which his most basic human rights were unprotected. This might be
true, moreover, even for a virtuous country that was doing enough elsewhere (which, of course,
none are.) All I would insist upon at present, though, is that the right to exclude Wellman insists
upon here seems unjustifiably strong.
41
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Con
42
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Good – Sovereignty
This card is a straw-person – don’t quote it but you can read it to get the idea--Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck in 2008
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
The cherished principle of national sovereignty has always generated a number of restrictionist
arguments based on, in Alexander Bickel's phrase, the morality of consent.26 This is the notion
that a free and autonomous subject-here, the nation-must be free to decide for itself how to
limit its own freedom by taking on responsibilities to others. The nation, in this understanding,
possesses the unlimited power to decide whether, under what conditions, and with what effects
it would consent to enter into a relationship with a stranger. 27 On this view, the fact that a
stranger is desperate to enter, and has invested a great deal in the effort, is as immaterial as the
reasons that prompt the government to refuse admission to the stranger.28 This conception of
sovereignty implies that the nation may decide to accept as few or as many immigrants as it
likes in such categories and under such conditions as it wishes to impose 2
43
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Good – Association/Demos
People have the right to decide who joins their community – this right
outweighs individual concerns about freedom of movement
Jonathan Seglow, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Royal
Holloway, University of London, 2006
(“The Ethics of Immigration,” https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/file/b421adbe-ff39-96281bb3-712025881b18/7/EthicsofImmigration.pdf)
So much is familiar to anti-communitarians. More interesting is the democratic association argument. Following Walzer, Meilaender
also points to an essential interest in democracy between free and equal people (2001, p. 167). Brian Barry has stated bluntly that
'[i]t
is a general characteristic of associations that people are free to leave them but not free to
join them' (Barry, 1992, p. 284). Is the state an association with this right? If 'general' means universal, then Barry's claim is
incorrect. While often true of clubs, the right to refuse admission is not generally true of associations. Having the qualifications, I
would have had reason to regard it as unjust had my application to the Association of University Teachers been denied. More
crucially, most associations operate in the private sphere, where our intuitions about freedom of association are at their strongest
and where the goods denied to outsiders (golf club membership, for instance) are not always vital. States, by contrast, help
constitute the public domain, where goods are more basic and hence impartiality is more critical (Ackerman, 1980, pp. 341-6;
compare White, 1997). It is the state from which we seek ultimate recognition of our freedom and equality (Ackerman, 1980, p. 93).
Associations typically seek to deny outsiders goods available to members (Coleman and Harding, 1995, pp. 25-34; Jordan and Düvell,
2003, pp. 34-5). The associationist analogy draws much of its appeal from the fact that outsiders remain entitled to basic goods by
the state. Hence, the state is one institution against which the analogy cannot be pressed. Appealing
directly to the value
of states, David Miller maintains that citizens have a basic interest in controlling their culture
and shaping it according to their judgement (Miller, 2005, pp. 199-200). They are entitled to judge
which elements of their public culture are worth preserving (their language, for instance) and which may
be developed and adapted to suit changed circumstances. This is the democratic association argument with a
communitarian twist. However, Miller gives a robust defence in justice to non-admitted wouldbe migrants who would lose by such a
policy. Every
autonomous person has a legitimate interest in an adequate range of life options to
choose between (Miller, 2005, p. 196). However, provided your own state provides you with an
adequate range, you have no basic interest in being able to migrate to another state. Such an
interest is less vital than a people's interest in controlling their political association.
Countries should not be forced the accept outsides, just as no one should be
able to tell you who you must marry
Christopher Heath Wellman, Professor, Philosophy @ Washington University,
2008
(“Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119,
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/phil267fa12/Immigration%20Proofs.pdf)
In light of our views on marriage and religious self-determination, the case for a state’s right to
control immigration might seem straightforward: just as an individual has a right to determine
whom (if anyone) he or she would like to marry, a group of fellow-citizens has a right to
determine whom (if anyone) it would like to invite into its political community. And just as an
individual’s freedom of association entitles one to remain single, a state’s freedom of
association entitles it to exclude all foreigners from its political community. There are at least two
reasons that this inference from an individual’s to a state’s right to freedom of association might strike some as problematic,
44
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
however. First, presumably there are morally relevant differences between individuals and groups, and these differences might
explain why only individuals can have a right to self-determination. Second, even if it is possible for groups to have rights,
presumably the interests a group of citizens might have in controlling immigration are nowhere near as important as an individual’s
interest in having a decisive say regarding who he or she marries. Let us consider these two issues in turn.
Restrictions are justifiable – legitimate governments have the right to national
self-determination
Christopher Heath Wellman, Professor, Philosophy @ Washington University,
2008
(“Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119,
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/phil267fa12/Immigration%20Proofs.pdf)
In my view, autonomous individuals
and legitimate states both have rights to autonomy. This means
that they occupy morally privileged positions of dominion over their self-regarding affairs. Such a
position can be outweighed by sufficiently compelling considerations, of course, but in general people and states have a
right to order their own affairs as they please. Freedom of association is not something that
requires an elaborate justification, then, since it is simply one component of the selfdetermination which is owed to all autonomous individuals and legitimate states. As a consequence, I
think that there is a very natural and straightforward case to be made in favor of freedom of association in all realms. Just as one
need not explain how playing golf is inextricably related to the development of one’s moral personality, say, in order to justify one’s
right to play golf, neither must one show that one’s membership in a golf club is crucial to one’s basic interests to establish the club
members’ right to freedom of association. And if no one doubts that golf clubs have a presumptive right to exclude others, then
there seems no reason to suspect that a group of citizens cannot also have the right to freedom of association, even if control over
membership in a country is not nearly as significant as control regarding one’s potential spouse. What is more, for several reasons it
seems clear that control over membership in one’s state is extremely important. To see this, think about why people might care
about the membership rules for their golf club. It is tempting to think that club members would be irrational to care about who else
are (or could become) members; after all, they are not forced to actually play golf with those members they dislike. But this
perspective misses something important. Members of golf clubs typically care about the membership rules because they care about
how the club is organized and the new members have a say in how the club is organized. Some members might want to dramatically
increase the number of members, for instance, because the increased numbers will mean that each individual is required to pay less.
Other members might oppose expanding the membership because of concerns about the dif- ficulty of securing desirable tee times,
the wear and tear on the course, and the increased time it takes to play a round if there are more people on the course at any given
time. And if there
is nothing mysterious about people caring about who are (or could become) members of their golf
being heavily invested in their country’s immigration
clubs, there is certainly nothing irrational about people
policy. Again, to note the lack of intimacy among compatriots is to miss an important part of the story. It is no good to tell citizens
that they need not personally (let alone intimately) associate with any fellow citizens they happen to dislike because fellow citizens
nonetheless remain political associates; the
country’s course will be charted by the members of this civic
association. The point is that people rightly care very deeply about their countries, and, as a
consequence, they rightly care about those policies which will effect how these political
communities evolve. And since a country’s immigration policy affects who will share in
controlling the country’s future, it is a matter of considerable importance. These examples of the golf
club and the political state point toward a more general lesson that is worth emphasizing: because the members of a
group can change, an important part of group self-determination is having control over what the
“self” is. In other words, unlike individual self-determination, a significant component of group
self-determination is having control over the group which in turn gets to be self-determining. It
stands to reason, then, that if there is any group whose selfdetermination we care about, we
should be concerned about its rules for membership. This explains why freedom of association is such an integral
part of the self-determination to which some groups (including legitimate states) are entitled. If so, then anyone who denies that we
should care about the freedom of association of nonintimate groups would seem to be committed to the more sweeping claim that
we should not care about the self-determination of any nonintimate groups. But, unless one implausibly believes that we should
45
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
care only about intimate groups, then why should we suppose that only the self-determination of intimate groups matters? Thus,
people rightly care deeply about their political states, despite these states being large, anonymous, and multicultural, and, as a
consequence, people rightly care about the rules for gaining membership in these states. Or, put another way, the very same
reasoning which understandably leads people to jealously guard their state’s sovereignty also motivates them to keep an eye on
who can gain membership in this sovereign state.
46
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Good – Right to Exclude
Right to exclude must come first – the idea of justice assumes a closed political
community
Jonathan Seglow, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Royal
Holloway, University of London, 2006
(“The Ethics of Immigration,” https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/file/b421adbe-ff39-96281bb3-712025881b18/7/EthicsofImmigration.pdf)
Popular arguments for states' right to control the entry of immigrants raise the dangers of overpopulation; welfare tourism; social
disorder, crime and terrorism; threats to cultural homogeneity; and job losses and wage depression for the indigenous working
population (Hudson, 1984; Meilaender, 2001, pp. 27-30; Harris, 2002, pp. 42-75). Empirically speaking, many of these dangers are
more apparent than real. They are vigorously criticised by Harris (2002; compare Hayter, 2000). There is a near academic consensus
that migration tends to improve the states' economies, for example (as we shall see in the next section). Normatively speaking,
migration sceptics tend to assume, but not argue for, the collective right of states to determine
admissions criteria. What might ground that right? The best starting point here is Walzer's defence
of membership restrictions in Spheres of Justice (1983). Although dated, it remains much cited in recent literature (for
example, Cole, 2000, pp. 60-85; Meilaender, 2001, pp. 155-70; Benhabib, 2004, pp. 109-14), and Walzer still endorses his
conclusions (Walzer, 2003, pp. 203-4). Walzer's discussion is rich, allusive, subtle and meandering, resisting analytical
deconstruction. However, one general consideration
he offers is that the very idea of distributive justice
presupposes a bounded political community of which some people are members and others are
not (Walzer, 1983, p. 31). Political communities should retain a right of closure in order to be
communities, the critical pre-requisite for justly distributing social goods to members. By contrast,
the prior question of acquiring membership of a political community 'is not pervasively subject to the constraints of justice' (Walzer,
1983, p. 61). In effect, then, migrants have no claim in justice for admission (Moellendorf, 2002, p. 62; compare Benhabib, 2004, pp.
95-105). People who want to emigrate from poor state A to richer state B have to rest content that A too has the right to exclude. As
I have suggested, this seems an arbitrarily restrictive view of justice if we assume that every person has equal moral worth. But
Walzer's discussion is a nuanced one. Thus, in discussing the ethics of admitting refugees and poverty-stricken 'necessitous
strangers', he also advances a principle of mutual aid that plainly intrudes upon a political community's collective right to decide on
admissions (Walzer, 1983, pp. 46-51). Moreover, in criticising the 'White Australia' policy by which the Australian government
overtly discriminated against non-white would-be migrants, Walzer introduces population density as a further criterion of the justice
of admission: white Australians' desire to preserve the 'great empty spaces of the subcontinent' was unjust (especially as their
ancestors had coercively cleared those spaces of the aboriginal population) (1983, pp. 46-8). It would be unjust for Australia to keep
out non-white necessitous strangers, whatever its citizens' views on the matter. Having said all that, the
main thrust of
Walzer's position on immigration is to assert the value of democratic sovereignty over the
claims of global justice. Walzer's general argument for communitarian justice is that the meanings
of goods differs radically between different political communities. But do they always? Of course,
membership of Japanese society means something different than membership of American society. But the general concept of
membership is pretty much shared, as it surely must be if one wants to advance a view of justice that obtains within a bounded
political community of which only some people are members. Alternatively, Walzer might claim that justice without the means of
enforcement is no justice at all, merely an abstract hope.7 Further, he could argue that the conventionally sovereign state offers the
best such means of enforcement. These claims would require some elaboration (see Walzer, 1995). In the most often cited passage
in the chapter on membership, Walzer
makes a tangential suggestion: Admission and exclusion are at the
core of communal independence. They suggest the deepest meaning of self-determination.
Without them, there could not be communities of character, historically stable, ongoing
associations of men and women with some special commitment to one another and some
special sense of their common life (Walzer, 1983, p. 62). There seem to be two considerations here. There is a
communitarian claim about the overriding value of political societies possessing a certain character: a historical cluster of particular
values, tradition and practice. Plainly, large numbers of aliens would challenge that character. Informing this reading is Walzer's
likening of political communities to families (1983, pp. 41-2). Here, then, we have an academic rendering of the prejudice that a
mass influx of immigrants would swamp our way of life. The reason why justice should exist largely within and not between states is
47
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
the overriding values of a cultural community identified with the nation state (multinational states would seem to raise difficulties
for the argument). However, alongside the family analogy, Walzer offers an alternative metaphor and a different claim: political
societies are like clubs or associations (1983, pp. 40-1). This supports a second reading. No longer bound by an imperative to
preserve, club members have the freedom to decide who is privileged to be admitted. The prize value now is democratic selfdetermination; the resulting society may be plural and diverse. By contrast, the first, argument about cultural preservation, need not
involve any special commitment to democracy. I shall call the first argument the communitarian argument and the second the
democratic association argument and consider them in turn.
Barriers are morally justified by the communitarian “right to exclude”
Richard Black, Prof of Global Studies @ University of Sussex, 1996
(“Immigration and social justice: towards a progressive European immigration policy?,” Trans
Inst Br Geogr NS 21 64-75,
http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/23174784/981318689/name/622925.pdf)
Communitarian theories of justice and immigration Beyond such theories of social justice based
on the notion of a 'social contract', one of the more sophisticated analyses in recent years of the
role of social justice criteria in immigration policy is Michael Walzer's book, Spheres of justice
(1983). Writing from a 'communitarian' perspective, Walzer (ibid., 48) outlines what he regards
as the duties of states and peoples towards 'necessitous strangers'. He bases his argument
directly on the distinction between members and non-members of a society. Using alternative
analogies of the state as a neighbourhood, club or family, Walzer argues that, in principle,
nations are like 'perfect clubs', in the sense that they may decide freely and authoritatively who
should be allowed to join and may, therefore, exclude any potential immigrant. Indeed, such a
right to exclude is important since, to use another analogy, affluent and free countries are, like
elite universities, besieged by applicants. They have to decide on their own size and character.
(ibid., 32) Such an argument concurs with the Rawlsian view that justice is confined to members
of a society or state. For example, the central right of states (or clubs or families) to exclude
potential members is absolute, rooted in the notion that this is the only long-term way to
protect the coherence and identity of the group. Drawing on the work of Sidgwick, Walzer (ibid.,
39) argues that to tear down the walls of the state is not... to create a world without walls, but
rather to create a thousand petty fortresses [since] [t]he distinctiveness of culture and groups
depends upon closure. However, unlike the Rawlsian view in which the 'contract' at a societal
level is primarily a mechanism for working out individuals' moral responsibilities to each other,
in Walzer's view states and communities are also seen as having moral responsibilities.
48
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Restrictions Good – Right to Stay
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
Theorists defending immigration restrictions have rejected the freedom argument because they
contend that states have a right to control their borders, which international freedom of
movement is of insufficient value to outweigh.2 Two prominent arguments for a state’s right to
control its borders are from cultural membership and territorial attachment. The cultural
membership argument holds that cultures play an important role in people’s lives and as such
deserve respect. In the case of national cultures, people are entitled to be able to live in a
territory in which their culture enjoys national status in so far as it is widely shared among the
people who live there and is reflected in the territory’s public institutions (Kymlicka, 1995, pp.
84–93; Miller, 1995, pp. 85–8). If immigration restrictions were lifted, people living within host
states could find the national status of their culture, if not the culture itself, under threat, as
immigrants with different cultures take up residence. To protect the value of cultural
membership, then, states must have the right to exclude foreigners from their territory
(Kymlicka, 2001, pp. 264–70; Miller, 2005, pp. 199–201; Walzer, 1983, pp. 38–9).
The territorial attachment argument claims that people have important ties connecting them to
the physical environment of their home state. One such tie is the fact that by living in a country
and labouring upon its land, people shape their physical surroundings in various ways. The
environment thus comes to bear the marks of their ideas and traditions. People also tend to
have an emotional attachment to their home state’s territory: they often feel a sense of
belonging to it which they do not feel in the case of other states. This sense of belonging is
reflected and reinforced in the national cultures to which many belong: in the myths, songs and
artworks these cultures generate (Meisels, 2003, pp. 35–7;Miller, 2007, pp. 218–9). Since many
people have this connection to their host state’s territory, it is argued, they have an important
interest in protecting and controlling that territory. Unrestricted immigration could lead to
dramatic changes to a host state’s territory and perhaps even the degradation of its physical
environment. If citizens of a state are entitled to protect and control their territory, then, it is
argued, they are entitled to prevent foreigners from entering it (Miller, 2007, pp. 217–21;
Pevnick et al., 2008, pp. 251–2;Walzer, 1983, pp. 42–8).
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
Theorists defending immigration restrictions should also support the right to stay, because the
right to stay is entailed by values they champion: cultural membership and territorial
attachment. A commitment to cultural membership entails the right to stay because one is not
49
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
able to live in a territory in which one’s culture is awarded national status if one is forced to
leave one’s home state. Defenders of immigration restrictions argue that people are entitled to
live in a territory in which their culture enjoys national status. Yet they also argue that it is
unrealistic, if not unreasonable, to demand that an immigrant’s culture be awarded national
status by the state to which they immigrate (Kymlicka, 1995, pp. 95–100; Miller, 1995, p. 129). If
people are entitled to live in a territory in which their culture enjoys national status, but cannot
expect to have their culture awarded national status elsewhere, then they must have a right to
stay in their home state. A commitment to territorial attachment entails a right to stay because
when people are forced to leave their home state they are forced to leave its territory: they are
unable to continue to develop its land or enjoy living in a place where they feel a special sense
of belonging. Some people who are forced to leave their home state may, after a period of time,
come to lose their attachment to their home state’s territory as they become settled elsewhere,
but even when this is the case it does not negate the fact that an injustice was done to them
when they were forced to leave.11 If the theorists defending immigration restrictions on
territorial grounds are correct, the attachment that people feel for their home state is morally
important and can justify certain entitlements, such as the right to exclude foreigners from the
territory. Yet if this attachment is so important that it can justify the right to exclude, then it can
also justify the right to stay. Indeed, the ability to exclude foreigners from a territory is of
questionable value to the people who live there if they cannot remain there themselves. If the
attachment people feel for their home state’s territory is morally important, people must have
the right to stay in their home state.
50
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Arbitrary
The arbitrary nature of national geography doesn’t undermine the right to
exlcude
Jonathan Seglow, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Royal
Holloway, University of London, 2006
(“The Ethics of Immigration,” https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/file/b421adbe-ff39-96281bb3-712025881b18/7/EthicsofImmigration.pdf)
Miller's arguments around democratic association, adequate options and overpopulation appeal
to a common intuition: a people's social infrastructure should be able to satisfy their basic
interests; hence (refugees aside), immigration is rarely a claim in justice. In a few remarks in The Law of Peoples Rawls elaborates
on this assumption (Rawls, 1999, pp. 8-9, 38-9). A state's territory, however arbitrary its origin, is its people's
collective asset or property (compare Kymlicka, 2001, pp. 265-7; O'Neill, 1994, pp. 70, 85-6). In a 'realistic utopia' (absent
wars, persecutions, famines and so on), a territory should be able to support its people in perpetuity. Pressure to emigrate
can only mean that a people has not sufficiently taken care of its territorial asset. However, the
burden of their irresponsibility cannot be shifted onto others without their consent. In a realistic utopia peoples' territories can
support them in perpetuity and problem levels of immigration would be eliminated. Until then, states that are more fortunate have
duties of assistance towards 'burdened societies'. In connecting a people with their unique place, Rawls seems to return us to the
communitarian argument (indeed he explicitly endorses Walzer (Rawls, 1999, p. 39, note 48)). Most states have diverse peoples, not
a singular people: what distinguishes them is a common set of legal and political institutions (compare Benhabib, 2004, pp. 78-80).
The cogency of Miller's and Rawls's assumption that a state should meet its people's interests turns in part on whether we regard
migration as exceptional - only a small minority of the world's population migrates even in an open-borders regime like the
European Union (EU) - or the norm - migration has been endemic throughout human history and created states like the present USA.
A neutral liberalism of the kind Rawls once espoused that might try to achieve some impartiality between would-be migrants and
those who prefer sedentary lifestyles (compare Jordan and Düvell, 2003, p. 143). Elsewhere in his work Rawls appeals to the
normative ideal of free and equal individuals as a critical lever on collective social arrangements of which his reliance on peoples is
also an instance (Rawls, 2001, pp. 18-24; Benhabib, 2004, pp. 82-4). The democratic
association argument,
advanced in different ways by Walzer, Meilaender, Miller and Rawls, offers a moral
endorsement for the way immgration policy currently stands. Unlike open borders, it does not
foist on receiving states an ideal far removed from their citizens' actual motivations. Moreover,
democratic association is not just a practical reality; it is a normative ideal. One of the freedoms
that free and equal citizens ought to have is the freedom to decide on matters of common
concern with their fellow citizens. The moral problem is when this collective freedom impacts upon the interests of
those excluded from the ambit of decision-making, or to put it concretely, when immigration restrictions keep out those who would
stand hugely to gain. I shall return to the tension between the ideals of democratic sovereignty and cosmopolitan justice in the
conclusion.
51
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Fairness
Immigration restrictions are deontologically justifiable – governments have
great responsibility for their own people than they do for strangers
Yale Law Professor Peter H. Schuck in 2008
(“The Morality of Immigration Policy,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, January 1,
2008,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2653&context=fss_papers)
Not all fairness arguments, however, favor more immigration; some militate against it. This is
particularly true of those that emphasize our greater responsibility to the most vulnerable of our
own people. Usually linked to a consequentialist claim that immigrants hold down the wages of
low-skill Americans, especially among vulnerable minorities, much of this opposition points to
the moral imperative of favoring the interests of our families and our own people over the
interests of strangers.25
52
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Freedom
Immigration policy that results in huge populations being functionally forced to
leave they home stay violates freedom of movement worse than any
immigration restriction
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
The Right to Stay Before defending the claim that a failure to assist can violate the human right to stay, let me explain what the human right
to stay is and why people have it. Although some aspects of the human right to stay already enjoy recognition in international law,the right I shall argue
for is a moral, not a legal, human right.8 At
core, it is a right not to be forced to leave one’s home state.9 The
right thus seeks to protect people against at least three sorts of threats. The first is expulsion: the right
seeks to protect people against being forcibly expelled from their state at the orders of their government or
some other agent. The second is persecution: the right seeks to protect people from being forced to
leave their state for want of security or liberty. The third is desperate poverty: the right seeks to
protect people against having to leave their state in order to satisfy their basic needs of
subsistence. Since expulsion and persecution represent violations of the human right to stay,
refugees constitute one group of people whose right to stay has been violated. Since, as I shall argue,
desperate poverty can also represent a violation of the human right to stay, desperately poor
economic migrants form a second group of people whose right to stay has been violated. Admittedly
the threats referred to are only a sub-set of the factors that cause international migration. People can and do migrate voluntarily, under circumstances
and for reasons that are not morally troubling. The
right to stay does not stand in opposition to migration itself
but rather to certain causes of migration, in particular those that force people to leave their
home state by denying them any reasonable alternative. Moreover, the human right to stay is not an absolute right.
There are likely to be circumstances under which the costs of upholding the right to stay are sufficiently grave to justify its restriction, a point I shall
return to in the next section. Indeed, on the most plausible accounts of human rights, few, if any, human rights are absolute. On this view human rights
are ‘resistant to trade-offs but not too resistant’ (Griffin, 2008, p. 37).When the costs of upholding a human right are particularly grave, it may be
legitimate for a duty-bearer to refuse to fulfil the duties the right ordinarily entails. Under ordinary circumstances, however, duty-bearers must fulfil their
duties. The right to stay can thus be summarised as a non-absolute right which, at core, protects people against those factors that might otherwise force
them to leave. Why do people have a human right to stay in their home state? There are at least three powerful arguments for the right: one from
freedom of movement, a second from cultural membership and a third from territorial attachment. Since it is these three values that feature
prominently in the immigration debate, theorists in that debate should support the human right to stay. Consider first freedom
of
movement, the value championed by critics of immigration restrictions. Freedom of movement,
by definition, entails the freedom to stay. One has freedom of movement if one has control over
one’s movements and one does not have control over one’s movements if one is forced to
move. When a number of Native American tribes, such as the Creek and the Cherokee, were death marched out of their homelands in the southeastern United States in the 1830s, they were not prevented from moving, but they were nevertheless denied freedom of movement. The right
to freedom of movement includes the right to stay as well as the right to move.10 The fact that
commitment to freedom of movement entails the right to stay can also be seen from the fact
that the same interest is at stake in each case. This is the interest that people have in freely
being able to make personal decisions without restriction on their range of options. Theorists who make
the freedom argument against immigration restrictions note that these restrictions prevent people from accessing options in other states: if someone is
prevented from entering another state then they cannot get a job in that state, join one of its religious institutions or visit friends and family who live
there. Yet the same is true if people are forced to leave their home state:their ability to access such options in their home state is likewise curtailed.
Theorists who criticise immigration restrictions on freedom grounds should thus support the right
to stay. Indeed, they have reason to accord the right to stay even more importance than the
right to immigrate for which they argue. This is because the options that are most important to
53
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
us are normally situated in our home state. These are the options we have already chosen and
made an integral part of our lives: our family, our friends, our religion, our career, etc. It is
ordinarily worse if these options, which we are currently committed to, are taken away from us
than if further options, to which we have made no such commitment, are removed from our
reach (Raz, 1986, p. 411). Sad as it may be if someone cannot enter a foreign state, it is ordinarily worse if they are forced to leave their own
(Carens, 1992, p. 29).
54
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Justice
They have the burden of proof – if you have any doubt that open borders will
fail to remedy inequality, vote for the con.
Rainer Bauböck, Professor of Political and Social Sciences @ the European
University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, 2009
(“Global Justice, Freedom of Movement and Democratic Citizenship,” in European Journal of
Sociology, 50.1, July, DOI: 10.1017/S000397560900040X)
There are three problems with this view. A first question is whether open borders would be an
effective remedy against global injustice. A second difficulty is that from the domestic
perspective of liberal democracies immigration control has to be maintained precisely under
conditions of global injustice if open borders would undermine conditions for social justice
inside the polity (Baubock € 1997). A third problem is with permitting states to constrain free
movement under conditions where there is no longer any justification for doing so. I will not say
much here about the first and second problems. These are important objections against an open
border argument but they depend on controversial empirical hypotheses that cannot be easily
tested. Would open borders lead to an international redistribution of wealth that benefits the
globally worst off, or would such a policy instead merely enhance inequalities within each
society and leave immobile populations in developing countries even worse off? If open borders
are proposed as a remedy for global inequality then it must be shown that they would
effectively improve the situation and that they would do so more efficiently than alternative
policies of international redistribution of resources rather than people (Pogge 1997; Seglow
2005, p. 329). Would liberal welfare states be undermined by an open door policy or could they
be sustained through effective internal controls of employment standards? If they cannot be
maintained, then open borders would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of social justice.
This would be bad news also for poor countries attempting to build political institutions capable
of reducing domestic inequality (van Parijs 1992).
55
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Poverty – Right to Stay
They have it backwards – people have a fundamental right to stay where they
live without having to tolerate poverty. Wealthy countries have a moral
obligation to provide international assistance, not open borders
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
Should rich states use immigration as a means to address global poverty? A common answer to this
question is that rich states have a choice: they can either admit poor foreigners as immigrants or they can
provide alternative means of assistance, such as development aid, to poor people in their home
states. Interestingly this ‘choice view’ finds support from both sides in the immigration debate, that is, both from theorists who
criticise immigration restrictions and from theorists who defend them. This article argues against the choice view. If rich states can,
without severe cost, assist poor people in their home states, then rich states must do so. To
pursue an immigrationbased solution to poverty when alternative means of assistance can be implemented without
severe cost is to perform an injustice, for it violates the human right people have to stay in their
own state. This human right to stay is entailed by the values of freedom of movement, cultural
membership and territorial attachment. Since it is these values that feature prominently in the immigration debate,
both sides in that debate should reject the choice view. The article thus seeks to forge a new consensus on the question of
immigration as a tool against poverty. Whatever one’s stand regarding the justice of immigration restrictions, all should agree that
rich states should not use immigration as an alternative to seeking to assist poor people in their
home states.
More evidence
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
The Failure to Assist as a Violation of the Right to Stay The idea that people have a human right to stay which protects them against
threats of expulsion and persecution may not seem controversial, but why should the human right to stay entail a duty to assist poor
people in their home state? To answer this question we should first distinguish between two groups of poor people: those who may
be described as ‘desperately poor’ since they lack the means to satisfy their basic needs of shelter, health care, subsistence, etc., and
those who can satisfy their basic needs but are nevertheless poor when compared to most of those living in rich states. As we have
noted, theorists disagree over whether rich states have a duty to assist poor people who have enough to satisfy their basic needs,
but there
is general agreement that rich states do have a duty to assist desperately poor people (so
defined). Moreover, whether one adopts an egalitarian or sufficiency view of global distributive justice, relieving desperate
poverty is clearly the more pressing moral concern. For these reasons, in making my argument I shall focus primarily
on the case of the desperately poor and only later turn to the case of poor people whose basic needs have been satisfied.13 In the
case of the desperately poor, the
important point to note is that migrants who migrate to escape
desperate poverty are forced to migrate. Someone can be forced to do something not only by being directly coerced
to do it but also by lacking any reasonable alternative to doing it (Cohen, 1988, pp. 238–54). A life led in desperate poverty in a poor
state cannot be considered a reasonable alternative to the opportunity to satisfy one’s basic needs in a rich state.Desperately poor
people who migrate from poor to rich states in search of a better life should thus be regarded as people who are forced to leave
their home state. If people have a human right to stay which protects them against being forced to leave their home state, then
56
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
people also have a right to have their basic needs addressed within their home state. A
migration-based approach to global poverty that does not seek to assist desperately poor people in their home
state thus stands in need of special justification. Without such justification, it violates the human right to stay.
57
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Right To Stay = Expensive
Unchecked immigration also imposes huge costs on wealthy countries – this
response is hilarious and absurd
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
While the idea of a human right to stay challenges the choice view, theorists proposing the
choice view provide no argument against this challenge. They do not, for instance, present the
objections explored in this section. They provide no argument against positive human rights;
indeed, at least one of these theorists defends the existence of positive human rights (see
Miller, 2007, pp. 163–200). Nor do they argue that a duty to assist people in their home state
would be too demanding. Indeed these theorists are poorly placed to make arguments against
imposing demanding duties upon rich states since the choice view could itself prove extremely
demanding. This will be the case whenever both options, to admit and to aid, entail large costs.
There will be circumstances when it is costly for a rich state to assist poor people in their home
state (e.g. because the home state suffers from a poor climate) and yet also costly to admit
them as immigrants (because further immigration would threaten such problems as
environmental destruction and loss of cultural identity). If supporters of the choice view are
themselves to avoid placing overly burdensome duties upon rich states,they will have to limit
those duties by making some similar exception in cases of severe cost of the sort I have made
above.16
They ignore the people who wish to stay behind
Kieran Oberman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, PHd in Economics
@ Oxford, 2011
(“Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay,” POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011 VOL 59,
https://philpapers.org/archive/OBEIGP.pdf)
This article has not sought to intervene in the debate over the justice of immigration
restrictions. Nor has it objected to immigration per se. Instead it has argued that both sides in
that debate, given their own commitments, should oppose the use of immigration to address
global poverty as an alternative to assisting people in their home state. Theorists should
continue to debate the claims of people who wish to migrate across borders, but in doing so
they should not ignore the claims of those who wish to stay behind. In a just world, people
would continue to have many reasons to migrate, but poverty, at least of an extreme kind,
would not be one of them.
58
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
General Morality Evidence
59
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism/Util Good
60
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism Good – Conflicting Values
Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values
Bailey, 97 (James Wood 1997; “Oxford University Press; “Utilitarianism, institutions, and
Justice” pg 9)
A consequentialist moral theory can take account of this variance and direct us in our decision
about whether a plausible right to equality ought to outweigh a plausible right to freedom of
expression. 16 In some circumstances the effects of pornography would surely be malign enough to justify our banning it, but in
others they may be not malign enough to justify any interference in freedom. I? A deontological theory, in contrast,
would be required either to rank the side constraints, which forbid agents from interfering in
the free expression of others and from impairing the moral equality of others, or to admit defeat
and claim that no adjudication between the two rights is possible. The latter admission is a
grave failure since it would leave us no principled resolution of a serious policy question. But the
former conclusion is hardly attractive either. Would we really wish to establish as true for all times and circumstances a lexical
ordering between two side constraints on our actions without careful attention to consequences? Would we, for instance, really
wish to establish that the slightest malign inegalitarian effect traceable to a form of expression is adequate grounds for an intrusive
and costly censorship? Or would we, alternatively, really wish to establish that we should be prepared to tolerate a society horrible
for women and children to live in, for the sake of not allowing any infringement on the sacred right of free expression?18
Consequentialist accounts can avoid such a deontological dilemma. In so doing, they show a
certain healthy sense of realism about what life in society is like. In the world outside the
theorist's study, we meet trade-offs at every tum. Every policy we make with some worthy end
in Sight imposes costs in terms of diminished achievement of some other plausibly worthy end.
Consequentialism demands that we grapple with these costs as directly as we can and justify
their incurrence. It forbids us to dismiss them with moral sophistries or to ignore them as if we
lived in an ideal world.
61
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism Good – Global Problems
Nuclear war requires the evaluation of consequences
Michael Moore, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at University of San Diego School of Law, 1997, Placing Blame, p.
719-721
3. Non-Absolute Moral Norms: Threshold Deontology Apart from the exceptions that the content of moral norms must have for
them to be plausible, a third modification of absolutism is the softening of the 'whatever the consequences' aspect mentioned
earlier. This aspect of absolutism is often attributed to Kant, who held that though the heavens may fall, justice must be done.
Despite my nonconsequentialist views on morality, I cannot accept the Kantian line.
It just is not true that one should
allow a nuclear war rather than killing or torturing an innocent person. It is not even true that one should
allow the destruction of a sizable city by a terrorist nuclear device rather than kill or torture an innocent person. To prevent
such extraordinary harms extreme actions seem to me to be justified. There is a story in the Talmudic
sources that may appear to appeal to a contrary intuition. 122 It is said that where the city is surrounded and threatened with
destruction if it does not send out one of its inhabitants to be killed, it is better that the whole city should perish rather than become
an accomplice to the killing of one of its inhabitants, Benjamin Cardozo expressed the same intuition in rejecting the idea that those in a lifeboat
about to sink and drown may jettison enough of their number to allow the remainder to stay afloat. As Cardozo put it: Where two or more are
overtaken by a common disaster, there is no right on the part of one to save the lives of some by the killing of another. There is no rule of human
jettison. Men there will often be who, when told that their going will be the salvation of the remnant, will choose the nobler part and make the plunge
into the waters. In that supreme moment the darkness for them will be illumined by the thought that those behind will ride to safety. If none of such
mold are found aboard the boat, or too few t<3 save the others, the human freight must be left to meet the chances of the waters. 123 There is
admittedly a nobility when those who are threatened with destruction choose on their own to suffer that destruction rather than participate in a prima
facie immoral act. But what happens when we eliminate the choice of all concerned to sacrifice themselves? Alter the Talmudic example slightly by
making it the ruler of the city who alone must decide whether to send one out in order to prevent destruction of the city. Or take the actual facts of the
lifeboat case'24 to which Cardozo was adverting, where it was a seaman who took charge of the sinking lifeboat and jettisoned enough of its
passengers to save the rest. Or consider Bernard Williams's example, where you come across a large group of villagers about to be shot by the
army as an example to others, and you can save most of them if you will but shoot one; far from choosing to 'sink or swim' together,
the villagers beg you to shoot one of their number so that the rest may be saved. 125 In all such cases it no longer seems virtuous to
refuse to do an act that you abhor. On the contrary, it
seems a narcissistic preoccupation with your own
'virtue'—that is, the 'virtue' you could have if the world were ideal and did not present you with
such awful choices—if you choose to allow the greater number to perish. In such cases, I prefer Sartre's
version of the Orestes legend to the Talmud: the ruler should take the guilt upon himself rather than allow his people to perish.'26
One should feel guilty in such cases, but it is nobler to undertake such guilt than to shut one's eyes
to the horrendous consequences of not acting.
Utilitarianism is the only moral framework to use when confronting large
impacts.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant
Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19)
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34 Imagine that
you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an
army captain is about to
order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone
in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil
wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a
rifle and
tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns
you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the
consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by
refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both
traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at
62
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist
burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one
innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some
point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more
important than the lives of countless others? Is
it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit
remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do
absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world
should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he
did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now
that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it
seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of
proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
63
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism Good – Policy-Making
Social policy-makers always work with incomplete, imperfect knowledge –
these situations demand the use of a utilitarian moral framework.
Goodin 95 – Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the
Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public
Philosophy” pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there
is something special about the situation of public
officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them adopt a form of
utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding with that larger argument, I must
therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and their
situations that makes it both more
necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider,
first the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and
uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course.
But in the nature of things, private
individuals will usually have more complete information on the
peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible
choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, at relatively poorly informed as to the
effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are
generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people
as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public policy
makers to use the utilitarian calculus – if they want to use it at all – to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing
aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But
they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion.
Their knowledge of generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for
that.
64
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Consequentialism Inevitable
Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks.
Joshua Green, Professor of Psychology @Harvard University, 2002
(Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And
What To Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s
what we mean by 302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting
to solve moral
problems using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but
dogmatism all the same. However, it’s likely that when some people talk about “balancing
competing rights and obligations” they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of
their use of deontological language. Once again, what deontological language does best is express the thoughts of
people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To
do this would be a violation of his rights!”19 That
is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have
Rights, Too!” rather than, “Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again,
rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes
rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children
whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those children. One
finds oneself balancing
the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to
save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as
thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And what’s wrong with that?
Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best
to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either
dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.
65
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Need Absolute Standards
Total absolutism doesn't exist - morality can always be overridden in certain
circumstances
Rescher (Philosphy Prof. @ Pittsburgh) 89 Nicholas, Moral Absolutes, p. 7-8
One cannot say simply and flatly that a certain wrong action (lying, stealing, etc.) is never to be done.
For in difficult situations virtually any sort of action can be the lesser of two "(moral) evils.
When done solely on this basis (as "the lesser evil”), an otherwise reprehensible act can be
redeemed as verual. We cannot say that the good, man would, never Knowingly do a wrong action, but only that he would not
do so unwarranted!^ in the absence of appropriately extenuating circumstances, without overriding reasons of appropriate moral
bearing. Moreover, in
the overall economy of rational deliberation morality is just one good among
others (albeit a particularly important one)./Thus we cannot say that morality must always override all other considerations—
that the negativity of a minor moral transgression must (rationally) always outweigh, nonmoral positivities such as (say)
the greater welfare good of the community. The principle fiat moralitas mat caelum—"Let morality be done though
the heavens fall!"—clearly has its problems.
66
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
A2: Good Intentions/Intervening Actors
Their ethics can rationalize every evil—all actions can be described as having
"good intent".
Porter '96 (Jean, U of Notre Dame, "'Direct' and 'indirect' in Grisez's moral theory," Theological
Studies, Dec., 57(4), ProQuest)
Nonetheless, Grisez's reformulation is more than a clarification. The relationship between the agent's intention and the causal
structure of the act did play a crucial role in traditional moral theology, because it provided an objective basis for assessing the
intention of the agent. Without some such basis, the agent's intention could be described in terms of whatever could be said to be
the agent's purpose or motive in acting. In that case, it would be difficult to see how the doctrine
of double effect
would rule anything out, since any act can be said to be directed to some good or other, in terms
of which the agent's intention could be described. As Elizabeth Anscombe remarks: For after all we can form intentions; now if
intention is an interior movement, it would appear that we can choose to have a certain intention and not another, just by e.g.
saying within ourselves: "What
I mean to be doing is earning my living, and not poisoning the
household"; or "What I mean to be doing is helping those good men into power; I withdraw my intention from the act of
poisoning the household, which I prefer to think goes on without my intention being in it." The idea that one can determine one's
intentions by making such a little speech to oneself is bosh.(45) The question that arises is: Does Grisez's
interpretation of the direct/indirect distinction similarly provide an objective criterion for determining what the agent's intention is?
Or does it leave open the possibility of describing the agent's intention in terms of whatever good purposes motivate the act in
question? If the latter is the case, then Grisez cannot really distinguish between those acts which attack an instance of a basic good, and other, similar acts which merely allow damage to some instance of a basic good, simply on the basis
of an analysis of the structure of the act. In that case, we must suspect that his distinction between direct and indirect harms actually reflects prior moral evaluations, which rest on other considerations. In order to address these questions, it will be helpful to take
each of the two considerations which Grisez puts forward in turn. Hence, we will first examine the criterion of goodness of intention, and then the criterion of indivisibility of performance. GOODNESS OF INTENTION AND THE DESCRIPTION OF AN ACT What does it
mean to say that an act may be morally justified, if the agent's intention is morally good, and the bad effect is not necessarily included in the attainment of the intended good? As we have already indicated, Grisez does not hold that the necessity in question is causal.
Rather, in these cases, the bad effect is not necessary to the attainment of the good end because it is not necessarily included in the very idea of the good end. In such cases, the good and bad effects may be said to flow indivisibly from the agent's action, and the
moral character of the action is determined by the good outcome at which he aims rather than by the bad outcome which he permits. And so, for example, a woman who shoots her would-be rapist in self-defense does not intend his death; she intends to stop his
attack, and only accepts his death as a side effect (in the moral, not the causal sense) of her act. (This assumes, of course, that it is really necessary to kill the assailant, and also that the woman's purpose is good, in the sense that she is not using the necessity for selfdefense as a pretext to kill out of hatred or a desire for revenge.) On the other hand, if the proposal which the agent choos es, and which therefore determines his will, necessarily includes bringing about a death, then the act is ipso facto ruled out: On this analysis,
choosing to kill is adopting a proposal precisely to kill or to do something understood in such a way that its meaning includes bringing about death. For example, people who choose to shoot someone in the heart or to administer a lethal dose of opiates ordinarily
understand what they choose as ways of ending life, and when a proposal is so understood, its very meaning includes bringing about death.(46) What is the distinction between a proposal for action which necessarily includes the intention to kill, and a proposal
which does not? Grisez rules out the traditional answer, that the distinction lies in the causal relation between the victim's death and the good sought by the agent, and he does not offer any alternative criterion in the physical order, Thus, when Grisez says that an
action with both good and bad effects is not defined by the bad effect unless it is necessarily included in the agent's intention, the kind of necessity in question would appear to be logical necessity. In support of this interpretation, consider the following: If an action's
description, however limited, makes plain that such an action involves a choice to destroy, damage, or impede some instance of a basic human good, the wrongness of any action which meets the description is settled. Additional factors may affect the degree of
wrongness, but further descriptions of the act cannot reverse its basic moral quality. So, moral norms derived from this mode of responsibility can be called "moral absolutes."(47) If this interpretation is correct, then Grisez would be relying on a familiar feature of
the logic of action descriptions, namely, the fact that any action may be described correctly in an indefinitely large number of ways. Thus, the action of the woman who stops her assailant by cutting his throat can be described as stopping an attack, or as stopping an
attack by killing one's attacker, or as killing an attacker, or as killing a person, or as cutting a person's throat, or as making slashing motions with a knife. Clearly, each of these descriptions conveys something different about the action; but it is equally clear that none
of them is incorrect as a description of the act and, correlatively, none is logically necessitated by the facts of the case. Thus nothing prevents Grisez from fixing on the first of these descriptions as the agent's "proposal," that is to say, the description under which her
will is determined. Nothing prevents this, but nothing requires it either. Herein lies the difficulty in Grisez's analysis. Suppos edly, the fact that an act's description clearly indicates that it involves a choice to "destroy, damage, or impede" some instance of a basic good
serves to distinguish it from an act which indirectly brings about the same effect. But as we noted above, an act which involves indirect killing in Grisez's terms can also be described in terms of the killing which it brings about. To continue with his own example, the
action of a woman who stops her attacker by cutting his throat can be described as an act of self-defense by killing, or even just as an act of killing. By the same token, an act which is a direct act of killing in Grisez's terms could be redescribed in terms of the good
sought, in such a way as to omit any mention of the killing itself. How, then, can Grisez distinguish between forbidden acts of killing and permissible acts which have deadly side effects on the basis of the description of the act alone? Perhaps the key to Grisez's
"Descriptions of actions adequate for moral evaluation must say or imply how the agent's
will bears on relevant goods."(48) Following this line of analysis, Grisez could admit that there are indefinitely many correct
descriptions for every act, and yet still hold that only one of these is morally relevant, namely, that which describes the act in terms
of what the agent does in fact intend. Yet this argument does not resolve the difficulty. If one accepts the Thomistic principle that
response can be found in a remark immediately preceding the passage quoted above:
every action is directed knowingly towards the attainment of some good (as Grisez does), then it follows that every
action can
be described in terms of some good which the agent is voluntarily seeking. Why should the
agent not describe his intention in terms of that good, relegating the harms which he [or she]
brings about to foreseen but not chosen aspects of the act? This brings us to the position which Anscombe
described as "bosh," namely, that the agent can determine his intention simply by focusing on the good at which he aims. ***Edited
for gendered language
67
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good
68
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology First
Deontological principles of rights should be considered first – other
interpretations are assigned no moral value if conflicting with the principles of
rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the only
way to guarantee freedom
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The priority of right asserts then that the reasons supplied by moral motives-principles of right
and their institutional requirements-have absolute precedence over all other considerations. As
such, moral motives must occupy a separate dimension in practical reasoning. Suppose then a supplementary stage of practical
reasoning, where the interests and pursuits that figure into ordinary deliberation and which define our
conception of the good are checked against principles of right and justice. At this stage of
reasoning, any ends that directly conflict with these moral principles (e.g., racist ends or the
wish to dominate others), or whose pursuit would undermine the efficacy of principles of right (e.g., desires for unlimited
accumulation of wealth whatever the consequences for others), are assigned no moral value, no matter how
intensely felt or important they may otherwise be. Being without moral value, they count for nothing in
deliberation. Consequently, their pursuit is prohibited or curtailed by the priority given to principles
of right. The priority of right then describes the hierarchical subordination in practical deliberation of the desires, interests, and
plans that define a person's rational good, to the substantive demands of principles of right.32 Purposes and pursuits that are
incompatible with these principles must be abandoned or revised. The same idea carries through to social and political deliberations
on the general good. In political deliberative procedures, the priority of right means that desires and interests of individuals or
groups that conflict with the institutional requirements of principles of right and justice have no legitimate claim to satisfaction, no
matter how intense peoples' feelings or how large the majority sharing these aims. Constitutional restrictions on majority rule
exhibit the priority of right. In democratic procedures, majorities cannot violate constitutional rights and procedures to promote,
say, the Christian religion, or any other aspect of their good that undermines others' basic rights and opportunities. Similarly, the
institutional requirements of Rawls's difference principle limit, for example, property owners' desires for tax exemptions for capital
gains, and the just savings principle limits current majorities' wishes to deplete natural resources. These desires are curtailed in
political contexts, no matter how intense or widely held, because of the priority of principles of right over individual and general
good.33 The priority of right enables Rawls to define a notion of admissible conceptions of the good: of those desires, interests and
plans of life that may legitimately be pursued for political purposes. Only
admissible conceptions of the good
establish a basis for legitimate claims in political procedures (cf. TJ, p. 449). That certain desires and
pursuits are permissible, and political claims based on them are legitimate, while others are not,
presupposes antecedently established principles of right and justice. Racist conceptions of the good are
not politically admissible; actions done in their pursuit are either prohibited or discouraged by a just social scheme, and they provide
no basis for legitimate claims in political procedures. Excellences such as knowledge, creativity, and aesthetic contemplation are
permissible ends for individuals so long as they are pursued in accordance with the constraints of principles of right. Suppose these
perfectionist principles state intrinsic values that it is the duty of everyone to pursue. (Rawls leaves this question open. cf. TJ, p. 328.)
Still, they cannot supply a basis for legitimate political claims and expectations; they cannot be
appealed to in political contexts to justify limiting others' freedom, or even the coercive
redistribution of income and wealth (cf. TJ, pp. 331-32). This is because of the priority of right over the good. Now
return to Kymlicka's argument. Kymlicka says both Rawls and utilitarians agree on the premise of giving equal consideration to
everyone's interests, and that because utilitarians afford equal consideration, "they must recognize, rather than deny, that
individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims. That is, in Rawls's classification, a position that affirms the priority of
the right over the good" (LCC, p. 26). Since "Rawls treats the right as a spelling-out of the requirement that each person's good be
given equal consideration," there is no debate between Rawls and utilitarians over the priority of the right or the good (LCC, p. 40).
69
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
70
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good – Survival Focus Bad
Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever
means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 – Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy
from Harvard University (Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p 91-93)
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the
name of
survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of
individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two
decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to
other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention
camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat
to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the
Aryan race was one of the
official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless
apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities
tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival
has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The
main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity
for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and
Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of
the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from
marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts
to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus
procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose
works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced
abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these
reasons it
is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival."
There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for
sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to
recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only
about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that.
It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore,
suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential
tyranny survival as value is that it is
capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease,
provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both
biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human
achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor
and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of
survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be
made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if,
because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.
71
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good – Comparative
By guiding social choice, deontology ultimately achieves the same result as
utilitarianism without compromising the individual
Schroeder 86 – Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., “Rights Against Risks,”, April,
Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
The rights tradition and utilitarianism, the two grand opponents in American jurisprudence, clash on many different issues and
fronts.235 There are, however, many ways to classify ethical theories, and in one crucial respect these two belong together. They
seek the same kind of answer to the question of conflicting values. For its part, utilitarianism aspires to clear and unique answers for
every question of public choice. If only we can determine the various utility functions of individuals affected by those decisions-a
heroic assumption-the absolutely correct action will be known.
Utilitarianism employs a method for producing
that absolute answer that threatens to obliterate the individual, and hence rights theories reject
that method. In affirming the primacy of the individual, however, those theories do not abandon
utilitarianism's ultimate objective to identify absolutes-clear and definite answers-to guide social
choice or to determine the constraints of justice. In this respect, such theories still live in utilitarianism's shadow.
72
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good – Ows Extinction
The utility of a society only has value when its individuals are treated with
dignity. A free society that sacrifices some of its own individuals to prevent
human extinction is morally corrupt.
Shue 89 – Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University (Henry, “Nuclear Deterrence
and Moral Restraint, pp. 141-2)
Given the philosophical obstacles to resolving moral disputes, there are at least two approaches
one can take in dealing with the issue of the morality of nuclear strategy. One approach is to stick
doggedly with one of the established moral theories constructed by philosophers to “rationalize” or “make sense of” everyday moral
intuitions, and to accept the verdict of the theory, whatever it might be, on the morality of nuclear weapons use. A more
pragmatic
alternative approach assumes that trade-offs in moral values and principles are inevitable in
response to constantly changing threats, and that the emergence of novel, unforeseen challenges may
impel citizens of Western societies to adjust the way they rank their values and principles to
ensure that the moral order survives. Nuclear weapons are putting just such a strain on our moral beliefs. Before the
emergence of a nuclear-armed communist state capable of threatening the existence of Western civilization, the slaughter of millions of
innocent human beings to preserve Western values may have appeared wholly unjustifiable under any possible circumstances. Today,
however, it may be that Western democracies, if they are to survive as guardians of individual
freedom, can no longer afford to provide innocent life the full protection demanded by Just War
morality. It might be objected that the freedoms of Western society have value only on the assumption
that human beings are treated with the full dignity and respect assumed by Just War theory. Innocent human
life is not just another value to be balanced side by side with others in moral calculations. It is the raison d’etre of Western political,
economic, and social institutions. A free
society based on individual rights that sanctioned mass slaughter
of innocent human beings to save itself from extinction would be “morally corrupt,” no better than
soviet society, and not worth defending. The only morally right and respectable policy for such a society
would be to accept destruction at the hands of tyranny, if need be. This objection is partly right in that a society
based on individual rights that casually sacrifices innocent human lives for the sake of common social goods is a contradiction in terms. On
the other hand, even Just War doctrine allows for the unintentional sacrifice of some innocent human life under certain hard-pressing
circumstances. It is essentially a consequentialist moral doctrine that ascribes extremely high – but not absolute – value to innocent human
life. The problem for any nonabsolute moral theory, of course, is where to draw the line.
Maintaining proper moral values is the only way to obtain a free society, which
outweighs nuclear extinction
Shue 89 (Henry, Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University, “Nuclear Deterrence
and Moral Restraint, pp. 134-5)
But is it realistic to suppose that American citizens would risk not just their own lives but their families and their nation in using
nuclear weapons to save Western Europe and other free societies from Soviet domination, especially if the United States’ allies are
not willing to risk nuclear destruction themselves? According to one 1984 poll, 74 percent of Americans queried believe “the U.S.
should not use nuclear weapons if the Russians invade Western Europe.” Nuclear Protectionists, however, would reply that further
public debate might convince more Americans that deterrence cannot be had on the moral cheap. If
the United States is
determined to deter a Soviet attack on Europe, it must have a moral nuclear strategy that it is
willing to implement. Without effective population defenses, such a strategy could require that the United
States accept an unequal risk of nuclear destruction to ensure the survival of free society. In the
extreme, this could mean that the United States must be willing to sacrifice itself for values higher than
73
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
its own national survival. Thus, Nuclear Protectionism views both Just War morality and national “self-centered” as
unworkable foundations for U.S. security policy.
74
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good – Rights
A deontological framing maximizes the good by emphasizing rights and acting
on an individualist basis
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
Many moral views can admit that right acts in some sense promote the good. In Kant, for example, all have a duty to promote the
Realm of Ends; each person's doing so is, we might say, instrumental to realizing this ideal community. But here the goodness of this
good is just defined as the state of affairs in which
conscientious moral agents all freely act on and from the moral law. By acting and willing
according to this principle, all treat the humanity of others as an end in itself. Moreover, to say
this good is "maximized" when everyone does his or her duty really adds nothing; and it
misleads us as to the structure and content of Kant's principle of right. By contrast teleological
views (1) define the good independent of any moral concepts; and then (2) define the right
purely in instrumental terms of principles of expedience, i.e., as what most effectively and
probably realizes the greatest amount of good.
end is not an independent variable that is being promoted; this
75
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Deontology Good – Morality
Deontology morality maximizes good to its fullest extent while utilitarianism is
indifferent to distribution of good
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
It is perhaps a moral truism to say that people ought to do what they can to make the world as
good a place as possible. But construed in a certain way, this becomes a highly controversial thesis about morality: that the
right act in any circumstance is one most conducive to the best overall outcome (as ascertained, say, from an impersonal point of
view that gives equal weight to the good of everyone). This is Consequentialism.' More simply, it holds Right conduct maximizes the
Good. G. E. Moore held this thesis self-evident. Non-consequentialists argue nothing could be further from the truth. So
far as
they do, it appears (to consequentialists at least) they are committed to the indefensible idea
that morality requires us to do less good than we are able to. John Rawls's teleological/deontological
distinction is different. Teleo logical views affirm the consequentialist thesis that the Right maximizes the Good. But
they hold an additional thesis: "the good is defined independently from the right" (TJ, p. 24), or, as Rawls often says, independ
ent of any moral concepts or principles.2 To see how this view differs from consequentialism, consider a thesis once proposed
by T. M. Scanlon.3
A standard objection to consequentialist views like utilitarian ism is that they are
indifferent to the distribution of the good; this is purportedly a necessary feature of such
views, since they define right and justice as what maximizes overall, or aggregate, good. Scanlon
argued there should be a way to incorporate distributive concerns into a two-level consequentialist view. If we treat fairness or
distributive equality as a good in itself, then it must be considered along with other goods like net aggregate satisfaction in
determining the value of overall outcomes that are to be maximized. Rights could then be introduced at the level of casuistry, to
promote the good of equitable states of affairs. The two-level consequentialist view Scanlon suggests would not be teleological on
Rawls's account; it would be deontological. As Rawls says: If the distribution of goods is also counted as a good, perhaps a
higher-order one, and the theory directs us to produce the most good (including the good of distribution among others) we no
longer have a teleological view in the classical sense. The problem of distribution falls under the concept of right as one intuitively
understands it, and so the theory lacks an independent definition of the good. (TJ, 27)
76
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
Util Bad – Equality
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal
inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force
of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal
concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not
utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of
the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern
utilitarian theory is just the other way: utilitarianism
is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by
legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a
separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a
doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be
that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior
requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen
as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases
added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a
universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example,
that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed);
or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose
equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining our resources
and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal
consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better
explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is the
utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect
collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals' "interests" as their actual (or
rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically,
in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are
more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means
have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires
maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization?
Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that, to
say we ought to give equal consideration
to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to
proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely formal principle, which requires certain added, independent
assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product"
of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure.
That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of
which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a
person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation
stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they
were his own, sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual"
utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of
choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the
impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism
and its decision procedure, then maximizing
aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure
77
FOR MORE EVIDENCE GO TO
CONTENTION1.COM
that gives equal consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is.
If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration. Utilitarians appeal to impartiality
in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27).
Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of others as if they
were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand, made possible by
equal consideration and sympathy. The
significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration
have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal
consideration are desires or experiences of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or
experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact
that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more
accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal
consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of
clarity is gained. It is in this sense that persons enter
into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any
mention of them can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how
to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that
utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality
and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor substantive
equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures.
Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on distributions even get underway, it
is
little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such substantive inequalities. What follows is that
utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do
utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern and respect.
Although utilitarianism claims to result in equality, its nature to only regard
people as one entity rather than a group of individuals inherently contradicts
the principle of equality
Freeman 94 – Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and
the Priority of Right,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
To sum up, though utilitarianism incorporates equality as a property of the justification of the
principle of utility, and of the decision process through which that principle gets applied, it does not leave any place
for equality in the content of that principle. On its face, this standard of right conduct directs that we maximize an
aggregate. As a result neither equality or any other distributive value is assigned independent
significance in resulting distributions of goods. Kymlicka claims that, because Rawls sees utilitarianism as teleological, he
misdescribes the debate over distribution by ignoring that utilitarians allow for equality of distribution too. But the distribution
debate Rawls is concerned with is a (level 2) debate over how what is deemed good (welfare,
rights, resources, etc.) within a moral theory is to be divided among individuals. It is not a (level 3)
debate over the distribution of consideration in a procedure which decides the distribution of these goods. Nor is it a (level 1)
debate over the principles of practical reasoning that are invoked to justify the fundamental standard of distribution.
78