Gary:

You made a definitive statement on the matter. I think you are wrong.

That’s fine. I made a statement which was over-broad or underqualified. Point taken. But I think that you do the same if you mean what you seem to mean when you say:

As I wrote, its a rather subjective judgment as to which is worse.

If you just mean that there are some cases of torture for which it is a matter of subjective judgment whether or not death would be preferable to them, I agree; but if you mean to apply “it’s a rather subjective judgment” to the statement “Being killed is worse than being torture,” that seems to suggest something stronger. If, for example, you mean that it’s a subjective judgment as to death is worse than any given instance of torture, I think that’s got to be false. There are clear cases where death is worse than torture. That’s not to say that torture is OK or even bearable; it is to say that there are at least some cases—indeed, a lot of them—in the face of which people would—indeed, did—do what they could to survive, and they would be quite right to do so.

If you mean something like: it’s a rather subjective judgment whether killing is a worse sort of thing to do to a person than torturing—well, maybe, but what reasons would you give for saying that? If it’s something like, “it’s subjective because there are cases in extremis where it’s not clear that death is worse”, then I’d just say that cases in extremis often don’t prove any point about the comparison of sorts. (I don’t think the badness of killing as a sort of thing to do to a person is determined by the worst conceivable sorts of deaths, either.) I think there are pretty good reasons to hold fast to the intuition that killing is the worst kind of thing you can do to a person—as a claim about the character of sorts, not a universal claim about their instances—even if there are individual instances in which killing Jones may not be as bad as something else you could do to her.

There’s an underlying point to all of this quibbling that applies to the article and the forgoing argument. It’s this: there is a class of punishments—even if it’s debatable just how deep into Hell that class extends—that most people recognize as plainly barbaric, but which they do not consider worse than having your throat cut. These include flogging, rubbing wounds with brine, severe beating, branding with hot irons, chopping off fingers or hands, raping, stabbing with the intent to maim or just to make you hurt like hell, at least some forms of systematic torture, and so on. You might say that there are other forms of systematic torture that are worse than death. Fine; but as long as there’s a number of instances greater than zero that are not as bad as death, that means that doing anything in that class to a prisoner, in the name of achieving a particular purpose, is fair game as long as killing the prisoner in the name of that purpose is also permissible.

Most people aren’t willing to say that those kind of punishments are fair game. So they shouldn’t be willing to say that killing the prisoner for punishment is fair game, either.

Brian:

Whereas Mark Kleiman laid out a pretty good argument why societies & governments ought not condone torture and the intentional infliction of pain and suffering on prisoners.

Are there any reasons Kleiman gives against condoning torture or corporal punishment that are specific to torture or corporal punishment? Any that cut against only those and not also against condoning slaughter?

Gary:

I can think of instances where death would be perferable to torture; where torture would be much worse than merely dying. Of course which is worse is based on some rather subjective decision-making.

Brian:

I can see several instances where being killed is preferable to torture. If my options are: [extreme mutilating torture that leaves you in unbearable pain, or a relatively painless immediate death] … and those are my 2, metaphysically certain options, I choose B. Granted some people may love existence so much that they’d choose A still, but I’d find living after A to be intolerable.

Granted: there may be cases in which one might rationally choose death over extreme ongoing pain. But most forms of torture and almost all forms of isolated mutilation, flogging, beating, etc. are not like this; as horrifying as they would be to go through, most people would nevertheless undergo them rather than being killed in even the most painless fashion. (It’s also interesting that even in the strongest cases, both of you seem inclined to think that it’s a matter open to debate and individual variation whether or not death is preferable to the torture.)

So let’s skip over the borderline cases and talk policy. Here’s one: for some particularly heinous crime X, which is currently a capital offense, everyone convicted of X is (for the sole purpose of punishing her or him) to be flogged and rubbed down the back with brine, then branded with hot irons, then forced to eat his or her own excrement, and then incarcerated in an ordinary prison for the rest of her or his life. Do you think that this policy is morally any less permissible than killing the condemned for X? Why or why not?

Actually, let’s not skip over the borderline cases. Here’s another policy: for some particularly heinous crime X, which is currently a capital offense, everyone convicted of X is (for the sole purpose of punishing her or him with intense bodily pain) to be sentenced to daily torture of the most bizarre and Satanic kinds. However, the condemned is allowed the option of a painless assisted suicid at any point if he or she wants it. Do you think that this policy is morally any less permissible than killing the condemned for X? Why or why not?

Brian:

Additionally, there are plenty of times when it is socially necessary, in terms of cost-benefit, signalling effects, yada yada, where it is useful and beneficial to kill a prisoner

What “signals” are sent by killing a prisoner that could not also be sent by mutilating or torturing him or her? What costs are saved by killing her or him that are not saved by mutilating or torturing her or him? What benefits accrue from killing her or him that do not accrue from mutilating or torturing her or him?

Brian:

If you look at it another way, a death is a one time suffering event; be it long and drawn out or quick and dirty, at the end, the suffering ends (absent a position that there is a soul which continues to suffer from death after removal from a physical body).

With torture, the mental and physical pain of the event stays with the victim for the rest of their life.

So from a utilitarian POV (ala our friend Joe’s position), you could say that you get more negatives from the torture than from death.

Well, appeals to oblivion either don’t cut much ice or else prove far too much. If the only thing you’re willing to count as disutility is present or future sensate pain, then the fact that the prisoner is oblivious would make death come out higher in the calculation than being tortured for the same amount of time. But it would also make death come out higher in the calculation than being bored and mildly uncomfortable for the same amount of time, or any other situation with a net negative utility at all. But that doesn’t show anything about death; all it shows is that you shouldn’t be so radical a hedonist about utility and disutility.

If, on the other hand, you’re willing to count more than just present or future sensate pain as a form of disutility then it’s not clear what a bare appeal to the fact that the dead are (may be?) oblivious doesn’t prove anything in particular. You’ve shown that death doesn’t involve one kind of disutility—present or future sensate pain—but you haven’t shown that it doesn’t involve any kind of evil for the dead. You’ll either have to demonstrate that, or else demonstrate that whatever evils are involved are not cumulatively as bad as the evils involved in being in a particular kind of pain for the same amount of time.

(Note also that if this is the way you’re going to set about doing the calculation, it makes the policy decision of whether or not prisoners should be executed dependent on holding a particular, currently unpopular, eschatological theory. I think the theory you’d have to hold is probably the right one; but that does seem like an awkward position to be stuck in when trying to justify a particular criminal justice policy.)

Brian Doss:

Its an argument against capital punishment iff you assume capital punishment is on the same moral plane as torture & inflicting intentional suffering on prisoners.

Well, but why wouldn’t you say that execution of prisoners is on the same moral pain as torture or other gratuitous hurting of prisoners?

Being killed is worse than being tortured, and it’s far worse than an isolated caning or painful restraint. So what sort of reasons could you give for the permissibility of slaughtering prisoners that wouldn’t provide just as good reasons for the permissibility of mutilating, torturing, or gratuitously hurting them?

Ah—not only have we got Justin Raimondo complaining of “character assassination;” we have Justin Raimondo complaining about “character assassination” in the pages of The Palmer Periscope, a weblog created for the sole purpose of obsessively trashing one man, Tom G. Palmer.

Which makes the whole thing feel rather like opening up an issue of Pravda and reading an article on distortions and lies of the U.S. foreign press.

Gracias. ;)

Yo juraba que habías nacido en Alabama

Ah—no. Vivía en Alabama desde hace once años, pero nació en Texas (donde viven la mayoría de mis parientes), y de niño vivía yo en San Antonio y Houston por muchos años antes de que nos mudáramos a Auburn.

Fully addressing the question of thick and thin morality would take a lot more space and time than I’ve got at the moment, of course, so instead I’ll focus on one specific issue and beg off the rest until later: the question of “rationally defensible” and “rationally indefensible” lifestyles:

It is asking far too much of people to demand that their preferences must be ‘rationally justifiable’ in order to count as moral, indeed I don’t think that such a standard can even be coherent. We accept readily enough that when choosing sleeping partners we can be as ‘irrational’ or as ‘bigoted’ as we like in choosing whom to let enter our bodies or whose bodies we choose to enter. By extention I think the same applies to our non-corporeal property. So if someone wishes to open a nightclub for gay men only or a country club for WASP’s only or establish a town only for Welsh speaking Hindus nothing unlibertarian nor, I contend, even immoral is committed thereby.

Well, but there are a lot of things that need to be unpacked here.

Firstly, are we asking whether you’re morally obligated to have a rational justification for forming friendships (or sexual liasons, or …), or whether you’re morally obligated to have a rational justification for treating Smith and Jones differently with respect to X given that Smith is your friend (or lover, or…) and Jones is not? I think the second question is actually the only one I broached, not the first; but I think most of the suspicion towards the notion of “rational justification” in these spheres gets whatever plausibility it has from the first. All I urged above is that “Smith is my friend and Jones isn’t” is a rational justification for treating Smith better than you treat Jones with regard to some things (although not, importantly, with regard to coercive violence), but that “Smith happens to have been born in the same country as I was but Jones wasn’t” is not, and that it’s wrong to treat Jones worse than you treat Smith without any good reason to do so. That leaves open the question of what to say about the grounds you might or might not have for having become Jones’s friend but not Smith’s in the first place. You might say, “look, you said that treating Jones worse than Smith without a rational justification is immoral, so doesn’t that mean you also need to come up with some rational justification for becoming Smith’s friend rather than Jones’s if you want to maintain your position?” Well, only if becoming Smith’s friend but not becoming Jones’s is treating Jones worse than you treat Smith. I don’t think it is, unless you can articulate some way in which becoming Smith’s friend but not Jones’s is in some way (e.g.) unfair to Smith. (Which it might be—if, for example I become Smith’s friend because he flatters me but despise Jones because he honestly criticizes me. But I think that forming friendships like that is pretty clearly ethically objectionable.) The fact that there’s a certain amount of arbitrariness involved in the formation of many of our ties doesn’t entail that by forming those ties we are treating anyone any better or worse than anyone else.

Secondly, what do the notions of “rational justification” and “rationally indefensible” come out to? To be sure, I left that open in giving my own definition—which makes for a pretty thin definition of bigotry, I guess! But it’s important to note that when I described bigotry as “rationally unjustifiable” group-preferences, I was using the terms in such a way as to qualify bigotry as a vice term. (I think it’s part and parcel of how we use the word “bigot” that bigotry is eo ipso a bad thing to practice.) If that’s how it’s being used, then it’s important that you can draw a distinction between conduct that’s merely arbitrary and conduct that’s irrational. Doing A instead of B even though you haven’t got any reason to pick A over B isn’t the same as doing A instead of B when you’ve got a reason not to pick A over B. Merely arbitrary decisions can often be perfectly ethical—it may be that the choice is just not one in which ethics makes a ruling. But actively irrational decisions can’t be; as such they entail overruling ethical constraints. My claim is that bigotry (by definition) involves group preferences that are actively irrational, not just arbitrary. Someone’s merely arbitrary group-preferences may be signs of partisanship, or boosterism; they may even (in some cases) be signs of a silly disposition. But they’re not of themselves signs of bigotry. Bigotry as I defined the term is bad not because it’s arbitrary, but because it hurts people; not because it’s independent of reason but because it’s contrary to it. (This attaches to the question about forming, say, Welsh/Hindu-only towns. The question is, first, whether that exclusiveness is reasoned or arbitrary; and then, second, if it’s arbitrary, whether it’s merely arbitrary, or whether it exists in a social context where it’s actively harmful. In this respect there’s a pretty distinct moral difference between, say, Welsh/Hindu-only towns, on the one hand, and white seperatist institutions on the other: there may be reasons to think that a Welsh/Hindu-only town is silly, but there are also good reasons to think that it’s harmless to non-Welsh/Hindus. But that’s not at all clearly the case with whites-only towns (or, say, whites-only boycott campaigns) in a society with a history of violent, pervasive, and intensely damaging white supremacism.

This is also connected to the question of forming friendships and sexual liasons, incidentally: part of the issue here is the need to distinguish whether “Your decision to X is/is not rationally justifiable” means “Your decision to X has/has not got an articulate rational justification,” or “Your decision to X is rationally corrigible but is/is not undefeated by any other considerations.” Note that I left this entirely open in the definition; the only proviso is that a decision that flunks at least the second test (i.e., a decision that’s rationally corrigible and in fact should be constrained for other reasons) is immoral. Whether the stronger claim that a decision on this or that particular topic that flunks the first test is also therefore vicious.

(You might ask: “Well, what about decisions that the first test flunks, and that the second test can’t be applied to, because they aren’t made on rationally corrigible grounds?” The answer is that nothing that could qualify as a decision is rationally incorrigible. Those would not be decisions at all, but tics or fits.)

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:

1. 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)

2. 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:

1. 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

2. 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.)

3. 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.

El primer texano que te cae bien? Quizás no sepas que naciera yo en San Antonio—hace todos estos años que conoces a un texano y no lo sabes!

No somos todos Bushistas!

Here’s how Kinsella answers my question about immigration onto private property and the use of helicopter shuttle services:

I would not oppose immigration only onto private property, but as soon as he is caught on public [property] he would be jailed for trespass. Which is basically the same thing as today’s immigration polices.

No, it’s not. If you were arrested for criminal trespass you would be charged with either a misdemeanor or a low-grade felony (depending on the state and the nature of the offense). The likely punishment would be a fine. It would not be sustained imprisonment and it sure as hell would not be the solution currently favored by La Migra—deportation, i.e., exile and confiscation of property. If you’re seriously proposing that we treat undocumented immigrants like trespassers then simple considerations of proportionality would mean that federal immigration policy as it currently stands would have to be completely dismantled and reconfigured to look more like the issuing of traffic tickets.

That’s not to say, though, that the trespass-on-public-property argument works in the first place. It doesn’t. Quite frankly, it’s crap. Here’s what Kinsella used to back it up earlier:

Well. In my view the American people as taxpayers—or some of them—are true “owners” of public land.

Of course, the “or some of them” is necessary to do your mischief. Because, as you know, or ought to by now, immigrants pay taxes too. Among other taxes, they pay gasoline taxes more or less in proportion to their use of roads.

Ergo, it seems that as soon as an immigrant has filled ‘er up, he has (thereby) become an American taxpayer, and (thereby) gained as good a claim to access to the roads as anyone else.

You might claim:

1. That a driving (i.e., taxpaying) immigrant does own a share of the roads like everyone else, but the decision of the majority of the joint owners overrules the individual’s decision to allow herself to access the road. But it’s an awfully strange kind of joint ownership in which the majority of the owners can simply categorically exclude another owner from accessing the commonly-held property no matter what.

2. That once immigrants have paid taxes they have access to the roads, but all you propose is a policy that would close government-controlled property to people who haven’t paid taxes yet, and so do not yet have any ownership claim. But there are lots of ways that an immigrant who has never set foot on a government road could go about acquiring shares of ownership if that’s how it really is—for example, by paying an agent to purchase some taxed gasoline on her behalf, and then using her newly-bought shares in the government roads to drive out and get it. Or by buying it from someone else who’s willing to sell their shares. (I, for one, have no particular interest in owning or investing in highways, and would be glad to sell.)

That said, note that all of this is predicated on a particular theory about what the “ownership” of the roads amounts to in the first place. Even though I don’t think that theory proves what you want it to, I think it’s frankly ridiculous on its face, and ridiculous in ways that undermine the possibility of alternatives giving you the results you think you can get from this theory. In particular, to get the policy outcome that it’s licit for majority opinion to close down the entire road system (and all other government-controlled land) to immigrants, you have to hold:

1. That everyone in the shareholding class owns a share in the entire network of roads

2. That they own all the parts of the network of roads equally (so, for example, you have as much of a say as I do about how to dispose of the roads between my apartment and some place that an immigrant guest of mine might work)

3. That the terms of this joint ownership are such that a sufficiently large number of shareholders can overrule the decisions made by one of the shareholders for non-interfering use of any part of the network. (Such as, for example, driving an immigrant guest from my apartment to her place of work.)

If you don’t have all of (1)-(3), then the trespassing-on-the-roads argument never gets off the ground—since to get the conclusion that approximating the enforcement of private property rights on roads, you first need to show that the entire network of roads—not just this or that byway—can be closed to immigrants. But (1), (2), and (3) are all obviously false; insofar as there are any legitimate property claims that can be disentangled here, you’ll have a decentralized patchwork of claims over different parts of the road system, not a giant joint stock corporation in the road network as a whole. There are good reasons to think that I have some legitimate property claim to the street outside my house; some mootable reasons to think that I have some rightful claim in the major thoroughfares in my city; very little reason to think I have any claim on the interstates; and no reason whatsoever to think I have any claim to the roads in front of your house.

This is connected with your sympathy for monarchist immigration policy:

Almost every American would want SOME restrictions on immigration, and it seems clear that a private monarch-owner would also do this.

But why should anyone care what One Big Cartel on the whole goddamn continent-spanning network of roads and government-controlled property would do? That’s not at all interesting for the property rights that would arise in a free society (in which the OBC would collapse due to calculational chaos); it’s not at all interesting for the issue of property rights in this vale of tears (in which neither I nor the collective of American taxpayers nor any monarch has any just claim on the road in front of your house); and it’s not even interesting for the sorting out of utilitarian considerations (since the decisions of OBCs are not reliably efficient).

So why bring it up?

Regarding Switzerland:

I think this is just ridiculous. It is quite clear if Switzerland had open borders then it would radically change.

Of course it would radically change. Everything changes. So what? The question isn’t whether it would change or not but whether the change would be damaging. And why in the world would it be? Because the Swiss would have to figure out how to cope with enclaves of people who have a different religion or speak another language? Well, gee, the whole bloody country is nothing but a loose confederation of unassimilated ethno-linguistic enclaves. Of all the countries in the world to pick for your example of how large-scale immigration and “multiculturalism” would inevitably lead to catastrophe and civil war, Switzerland is so unhelpful to Hoppe that the choice seems downright perverse.

Are you saying that if you did believe this, you might agree with his conclusions? Is your difference only an empirical one?

No. Utilitarian considerations about the plausible effects of large-scale immigration don’t have anything to say to the permissibility of using violence against peaceful immigrants.

However, Hoppe is making a sociological claim in the passages that you quoted above, in addition to his claim about justice. Although I don’t think he would have made the case for immigration restrictions if he were right about the plausible consequences of large-scale immigration in a statist world, it’s also worth pointing out that he’s also wrong on what the plausible consequences actually are.

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.