Paul: I do think…
Paul:
I do think that genuine confusion alone can also suffice as explanation. Surely it must be admitted as a logical possiblility no matter how suspicious you (probably rightly) are, but I will cite the case of a former flatmate of mine. He was a young, PC, Australian almost as free from the taint of the usual race and nationality based bigotries as a man can be but he opposed open borders to Australia based on the grounds that it was more or less full and simply couldn’t accomodate more people. This error seemed geuinely to be based on ignorance and confusion about economic and geographical matters. I take your point about how excusable ignorance and confusion is but I think it trivialises the point you were trying to make to construe all such confusion as bigotry.
Well, there are two different claims that need to be distinguished here. I’m making both, but you’re probably right to point out that they’re not sufficiently distinguished:
The empirical claim: as a matter of fact, most people’s confusions about immigration policy have at least some roots in cognitive vices that are connected with paradigm cases of bigotry (e.g. racism, xenophobia)
The conceptual claim: as a matter of conceptual analysis, anything that someone could hold as a reason for government immigration restrictions qualifies as a form of bigotry.
Part of the reason I may have run these two claims together above is that part of what’s involved in making (2) plausible is trying to show how some common, allegedly innocent reasons for favoring immigration restrictions are in fact connected with recognizable forms of bigotry. But of course you’re right that you can grant (1) but not (2).
On the other hand, I think that (2) is true. The reason why, roughly, is that calling for government immigration restrictions as such (provided that the excluded class isn’t defined by any manifest criminal behavior) requires calling for the application of force to stop the peaceful movements of people because of their group-membership (if nothing else, their status as foreigners) without regard to their individual conduct. As such it requires coercion on collectivist premises (even if the alleged goal is something like “national security” that involves discarding all kinds of basic procedural rights commonly granted to citizens in favor of what is in effect a collectivist state of war). And I think that any reason that could be given for attacking peaceful individual people based solely on collectivist group status is as such a bigoted reason. (You might say the bigotry is imputed backwards here; the reasons for the position have to include at least one bigoted reason, or else the argument won’t go through). I grant that this commits me to saying that some things are forms of bigotry which might not be considered paradigm cases (e.g. statist presumptions about what government officials can rightly do to citizens), but I think that the simple definition of “bigot” is a pretty sound one, and if it leads to that conclusion I’m pretty willing to sign on to it.
(As for the case of your friend, and other related “overpopulation” arguments: I think that these are in fact connected with a pretty humdrum form of bigotry, i.e. xenophobia. The “-phobia” might be misleading, since it suggests some form of active fear or hostility, but I think it’s appropriate enough in analogical use. The important thing to note is that there are any number of ways to deal with a over-large population. For example, you could shoot people on the street, or you could burn down their houses and put them on ships to New Zealand. Of course I imagine your friend would find these solutions horrifying; as well he should. But signing on for a policy that has effects not much better for desparate refugees—interdiction at sea, incarceration in squalid refugee camps, etc., in the case of Australia—means that you’re willing to do something to foreigners that you wouldn’t be willing to do to your fellow citizens. Of course you might say that he [confusedly] wasn’t really thinking about what the policy meant for it’s victims. I don’t doubt that’s true, but the question is: why wasn’t he thinking about that?)
On thick and thin:
Time for questions and discussion was, as ever, too short but I did get in the point that these ‘thick’ versions of libertarianism lead into error. Hoppe, as you correctly identified, errs in spreading the bread of libertarianism with a thick layer of ‘conservative’ jam but it seems to me that you and Roderick are making an equivalent error when you stir in a cornflour of egalitarianism to thicken the thin gruel of libertarianism. My point is that these adulterations of libertarianism spoil [its] natural bland flavour, the great virtue of which is that it leaves others to freely choose to add their own (non-agressive) cultural/ideological ingredients.
Well, one question here is how far one can conceivably talk about libertarian virtues in isolation from the other virtues at all; I’m not sure that you can. (I’d suggest here the usual Socratic reasons for thinking that character traits are individuated as virtues or vices not just by their effects or their intrinsic qualities, but also by their relationships to the other virtues and vices.) My suspicion is that if you try to give any kind of genuinely ethical content to the virtue of libertarian justice without connecting it with other virtues and vices (such as broad notions of fairness, kindness, dignity, etc.), you won’t even get thin gruel; you’ll get something so thin that it ends up (to further abuse the metaphors) dissolving so thoroughly that it slips out of your spoon and leaves nothing of substance at all. (To come around more directly to the point, I think that the “libertarianism” of a Hoppe, for example, veers between a confused reach toward the good and something else that has nothing in particular to do with libertarian justice except a mostly shared set of policy conclusions, depending on which parts of his position are in the ascendency at any given point. Of course the fact that someone does happen to agree with most of your policy conclusions can be politically very important, even if their reasons for it are hostile to your own. But that’s a separate issue of strategy.)
Even supposing that you can separate out some common element, though, between Hoppean libertarianism (in his worse moments) and, say, the sort of libertarianism that Roderick and I are trying to foster, it’s still important to note that there are at least three levels of criticism that you might want to separate out that “thick” libertarians might engage in:
Non-libertarian concerns: there are cases in which the full bundle of ethical commitments that a person has is such that her “thick” commitments aren’t in logical contradiction with her commitment to “thin” libertarianism, but are objectionable in their own right
Indirect libertarian concerns: there might be cases in which the full bundle of ethical commitments that a person has is such that some “thick” commitment, even though it’s not in direct logical contradiction with her commitment to “thin” libertarianism, does end up partaking in confusions that have something in common with, and conducive toward, violations of “thin” libertarianism (e.g. various forms of collectivism, moral skepticism, an affection for macho patriarchy, etc.)
Direct libertarian concerns: there might be cases in which the full bundle of ethical commitments that a person has is such that some “thick” commitment ends up directly compromising her commitment to “thin” libertarianism (e.g. by turning a blind eye towards pervasive individual rights violations such as race slavery, coercive immigration restrictions, battery and sexual violence against women, beating of children, etc.)
It’s clear enough, I guess, that (1) only relates to the question of whether a position is “libertarian” or not insofar as you are willing to push the sort of foggy worries about the unity of virtue that I push above. Of course, there may be good reasons to direct criticism towards something independent of its relationship to libertarian justice principles, but it only has bearing on libertarianism insofar as you might need to show how the direction of criticism is compatible with libertarian justice principles (which was, after all, one of the purposes behind Roderick’s and my essay).
But that also leaves (2) and (3) to consider. Even the thinnest form of libertarianism has to concern itself with (3), for obvious reasons, since (3) directly touches on whether a particular libertarian’s full stock of beliefs ultimately prevents them from staying true to the non-aggression axiom. As it happens I think that (3) is actually far, far more important than many people in the libertarian movement often seem to realize (not just because Hoppe’s stance on immigration is a case in point—although it is—but also because of, say, the fact that men like Jefferson and Calhoun are frequently cited as libertarian forebearers even though they personally held other human beings in chattel bondage.)
But it’s also important to note that there may also be good reasons for libertarians, as libertarians, to concern themselves with (2). Partly for strategic reasons: you might think that people who don’t fall into the failings of type (2) are more reliable allies. But partly also because if those confusions really are analogous or identical, in some important respect, to the vices or confusions that lead to hypocritical compromises of the non-aggression principle (as in (3)) or outright abandonment of it (as in various forms of statism), then directing critical scrutiny to the kinds of failings that put people into category (2) or into category (3) can help us get correct error (a valuable aim in its own right) and also articulate more clearly what libertarianism really is and what the grounds for it are.
Of course, if one ends up defending a pretty thin account of moral commitments as such outside of non-aggression, as you do above, then that undercuts a lot of the possible ground from which you might launch into criticisms of types (1)-(3) in the first place. But that’s really a separate topic entirely, so I’m going to beg off of that for the moment and post it in a separate reply.
Anticopyright.