Comments Elsewhere

Well, I helped get us into this mess; let’s see how far I can help us get out of it.

By Radgeek’s definition, does a greater affinity for family and friends than strangers make one a bigot? —Jonathan Wilde

No, not unless you think that preference for your friends and family over strangers is rationally unjustifiable. I think that’s obviously false in the case of friends (part of what ‘friends’ means is that you prefer them to strangers, or foes), and usually false in the case of family (although someone who’s more of a mad dog moral individualist than I am might object).

Of course, someone might go on to try to push the point in favor of overt racism or nationalism on the claim that the racial or ethno-linguistic groups we belong to are like a sort of extended family. (So extended that it extends beyond what normal people use the words “extended family” to mean, i.e. people who have traceable relations to you within some small number of generations.) I think this is sheer mystification, and frankly that it’s insulting to the ties of family to try to pass off my relationship to some dumb jerk who happens to come from my hometown or (worse) who just happens to share my native language or dialect or (worse yet) just happened to be born within the same State-drawn lines in the sand as I was, as something of a kind with my relationship to my sister or my parents or my cousins.

On the other hand, it’s also worth pointing out that there are some things for which it would be bigoted to prefer your kin, say, over strangers: for example, if you think that you have the right to slay someone at will unless they are your kin, that’s a bigoted belief. Specifically it’s a rather narrow form of tribalism. It’s worth noting that this is relevant to the open borders argument: I happen to agree with Micha about the ethics of “Buy American!” campaigns, but even if you don’t think that a boycott of foreign-made goods is rationally indefensible, the issue at hand in immigration policy isn’t just a consumer boycott; it’s whether or not you should call men with clubs and guns to attack foreigners who try to cross a government-drawn line in the sand without a permission slip. Part of the reason I’m as confident as I am about the claim is that opposition to open borders logically commits you to the claim that foreigners, as foreigners, lack at least some of the individual rights that you are willing to recognize for citizens.

It is not at all clear to me why being bigoted (as defined by Rad Geek) or racist (meaning to discriminate on grounds of race) is immoral, let alone unlibertarian. —Paul Coulam

Whether bigotry is unlibertarian or not depends on what you think “libertarianism” means. It’s true that being racist doesn’t mean that you therefore endorse violations of the non-aggression principle. (Although most racists actually have, historically, endorsed all kinds of brutal rights violations, it’s conceivable that you could have, say, a commitedly non-violent faction of the Klan that seeks to create a white separatist community solely through the exercise of free association and peaceful property rights.) But just because a set of beliefs is logically consistent with the non-aggression principle doesn’t mean that it can’t be unlibertarian. That follows if you think that the only ethical commitment entailed by libertarianism is a thin commitment to the non-aggression principle. But I think there are good reasons to favor a “thick” version of libertarianism (which requires strict adherence to the non-aggression principle, but which also calls for ethical and political commitments other than just non-aggression). For a start on the argument for that conclusion, see Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?.

As for whether bigotry (as I defined it) is immoral or not, well, the definition was framed in such a way that bigotry is a vice term: the intolerance has to be rationally unjustifiable (most people don’t consider intolerance towards serial killers a form of bigotry, for example). So in order to qualify as a bigot (as I defined it), you have to at least be indulging in a cognitive vice. I guess whether that means you’re also indulging in a moral vice depends on whether or not you think that it can be moral to treat one person worse than another without any rational justification. I don’t think it can.

Note that this leaves open the question of whether or not racism (as the term is commonly used) is a form of bigotry: to show that it is, you’d have to show that racial prejudice is rationally unjustifiable. I think most civilized people these days have a pretty good idea of the reasons why that is, but if you want to press the point we can argue about that. (The main thing is to get clear on where the argument actually is.)

Rad Geek says that [everyone who opposes open borders is, therefore, advocating a policy for bigoted reasons.] Apparently because he claims that there are no non-bigoted reasons for opposing open borders. Couldn’t someone simply be in error due to confusion? —Paul Coulam

You’d have to explain what sort of confusion you have in mind. Lots of people make errors due to confusion, but sloppy thought isn’t necessarily a defense against claims of bigotry (lots of bigots think sloppily; so what?).

In particular, failing to think seriously about a government policy that you endorse means for the victims of that policy isn’t an innocent confusion. The fact that people often endorse policies that entail treatment of foreigners that they would never endorse for fellow-citizens or their family is a sign that people often fail to think about things that they should think about. Why do they indulge in these cognitive vices for foreigners and not for fellow-citizens or their family? And why shouldn’t we chalk up that cognitive vice as part of a particular (fairly common) form of bigotry?

You might point out that there could be a consistent totalitarian who just thinks that the government has a right to assault anyone that it sees fit. True; but that just means that the person holds to another form of bigotry: bigotry in favor of government officials over their subjects.

If you have some sort of innocent confusion that you think would fit the bill, feel free to specify it, and we can discuss whether that avoids bigotry or not.

I think that everyone who is against open borders is against it for bigoted reasons; that’s because there are no non-bigoted reasons to oppose open borders.

This is nonsense. I’m heavily in favour of open borders, but I recognise there are plenty of non-bigoted reasons to oppose it: national security risk, fear of public services being overwhelmed by an influx of poor people, belief that major cities would be ringed with violent, desperately-poor shanty towns of new immigrants. I reject all these arguments, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. —Wild Pegasus

On the contrary, I think that all of those arguments are transparently bigoted. The notion that you have the right to discard presumption of innocence, due process of law, individual property rights, etc. for some set of people for the sole reason that those people are not (yet) citizens of the state that you live in—worse, in the name of mythical collectivist interests like “national security” and “public services”—are obviously bigoted. They may not be specifically nationalist or racist (some people favor immigration restrictions for reasons of class prejudice, for example, rather than racism or xenophobia), but they are bigoted all the same.

To put it another way, there’s nothing in the arguments you give above that essentially has any connection with national borders; you could press every single one of the arguments that you use above as an argument for internal passports, restricting immigration from Kentucky to New York, restricting immigration from rural Illinois to inner-city Chicago, shooting people from inner-city Chicago who try to buy houses in suburban Chicago, etc. The fact that most people—even if they don’t very much like the internal migrations that they’re experiencing in their communities—would be appalled by ideas like these, but aren’t appalled when the argument is used to justify the same summary policies against foreigners, should be a sign that something is rotten here.

(Of course, if they did feel comfortable endorsing these kind of internal immigration policies, they might not be xenophobes but it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that they are a particularly appalling sort of classist, racist, or what have you.)

As for the application of the same principles to “Buy American!” campaigns:

1. “Buy American” is not necessarily protectionism. One could advocate free trade and Buy American.

Well, whether it counts as “protectionism” or not depends on whether you think “protectionism” has to entail government policy or not. Whether you call it “protectionism” or not, I think there are some ethical issues in common between government protectionism and voluntary boycotting of foreign goods (even if the boycotters are principled free traders). E.G., both the “Buy American” campaign and the government protectionism usually operate on the premise that you ought to chip in for American companies just because they’re American. I think that sort of thing is stupid enough when the pitch is some kind of allegiance to fellow alumni of my University or to people who happened to be in a chapter of the same fraternity as you; it makes it that much worse when it is called for on the basis of the territorial lines drawn in the sand by a continent-spanning government.

2. It’s not just “Americans” they expect will be better off. The people who support Buy American believe that their livelihood, and that of their friends and family, depends on people purchasing American-made goods. They might even be right. I don’t see how it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer one’s one livelihood to someone else’s, nor why it’s unreasonable or unjustifiable to prefer the livelihood of your friends and family to someone from Ghana. — Wild Pegasus

Then they’re being gulled by ridiculous pseudo-economic arguments. This might be a perfectly good reason to (sometimes, at least) buy locally, or to favor your friends and family in your business dealings. But if that’s a good argument for buying locally, it’s a better argument for my buying goods from Toronto than it is for my buying goods from Los Angeles; and if I lived in Los Angeles it would be a better argument for buying goods from Tijuana than it would be for buying goods from Chicago. Of course, there are some further complications that are caused by existing government violations of laissez-faire principles; but that’s increasingly untrue in the age of NAFTA, and in any case it’s a good reason to curb the violations, not to join a Know-Nothing boycott.

Of course, there is a further question of why people are gulled by such bad arguments. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that most people just don’t know a lot of economics. But another reason is because people are gulled into thinking that fellow residents of the United States as such have more in common with them than people who live not so many miles away, but happen to be over a border. I think part of the reason that people tend to stop thinking about other people when they hit a national border is that they are buying into statist mystifications; and part of the reason is plain xenophobia. But both reasons are rationally unjustifiable, and both of them constitute a particular form of bigotry.