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.

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.

Ghertner:

Actually, I should reword my response to Brian, for it sounds too much like Long and Johnson are crediting these economic factors as both necessary and sufficient, whereas what they are really saying is that these factors, while perhaps necessary, are not alone sufficient. Cultural changes are needed as well.

Well, the quotes from Spencer are mainly to demonstrate the feminist bona fides of 19th century radical libertarians, and to call attention to Spencer’s analysis of the relationship between patriarchy at home and militarism abroad; it’s not meant to endorse Spencer’s broader sociological (or archaeological) views. I can’t speak for Roderick, but speaking for myself, I think that Spencer’s points about militarism and patriarchy are solid, but that his claims about the economic history of patriarchy are vulnerable to roughly the same objections that MacKinnon raises (in TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE) against a similar account by Friedrich Engels. Essentially, the account ends up explaining male dominance only by assuming that the social relations that obtain under male dominance (for example, the mother of a child serving as its primary caregiver) also obtained in the primitive state of society before (on Engels’ or Spencer’s account) patriarchy arose in it. Maybe those relations did obtain, but if so you haven’t accounted for patriarchy in history; you’ve just shown that one sort of patriarchal society developed into another. I don’t think that historical political economy is either sufficient or necessary to explain sexual politics (although of course historical trends, such as the economic and political dominance of intensely patriarchal societies in Europe and the Muslim world for hundreds of years, have no small influence on the matter). Of course, it’s also questionable how far any desire to tie the rise and solidification of patriarchy to some over-arching world-historical principle—be it Spencer’s Evolution or Engels’ Dialectic—is supposed to help us in understanding the institutional structure of patriarchy today or the ethical questions concerning it.

Frank:

The easy simple answer is that the revealed preferences of those particular females is that particular “misogyny” is ok by them. The more tenuous and contorted answer involves some sort of claim of false consciousness inculcated by patriarchy. The problem is that, although the latter is an article of faith among anti-porn feminists,

Actually, it isn’t. Certainly there are some anti-pornography feminists who have made use of the notion of “false consciousness,” but Catharine MacKinnon isn’t among them; she has explicitly attacked the notion in her published writings.

Of course, MacKinnon and Dworkin and nearly all other radical feminists do think that patriarchy distorts the incentives and therefore the preferences that women have, often in ways that make most of the choices that women face in some respect destructive to deeper interests that they have. But why shouldn’t they think that? All cultural systems alter the incentives and therefore the preferences that people living under them have; that’s what cultural systems do. And it would be frankly batty to hold that there couldn’t be any such thing as a cultural system that, in at least some cases, prompts people to make choices that are destructive of some of their deep interests. Of course, that only militates against ruling out the theory on apriori grounds; it leaves open the empirical question of whether pornographic sexuality really is destructive of women’s deep interests. But that’s fine; that’s a question better addressed by the foundational works from the feminist pornography debate than I could hope to address it in the space of a comment box.

(You might say that any theory on which someone can be said to have deeper preferences that are somehow or another betrayed by their actions from revealed preferences is a theory of “false consciousness.” O.K., but then you are not using the phrase as Marxists or as radical feminists use it. You’re also not using the phrase to mean anything that anyone in their right mind would find particularly objectionable.)

Frank again:

“You say you are happy to perform in porn/consume it or you do perform/consume porn but these aren’t your real preferences but the result of patriarchal brainwashing”. This is the path towards totalitarianism. Surely you can see the extension of this line of thinking to areas other beyond porn?

I think this is a misrepresentation of the argument that most antipornography feminists give (as I mention above; the notion that women are “brainwashed” by patriarchy is fundamentally alien to feminists like MacKinnon and Dworkin). But suppose that it were an accurate representation. Would it follow that it’s the path towards totalitarianism? Only if you think that once “you may choose A under present circumstances but it is actually destructive to your deeper interests” is established, “there ought to be a law against choosing A” follows. But why should you think that? You can think that some people act in self-destructive ways without thinking that there ought to be a law to stop them from doing so; the whole institution of giving and taking advice rests on that assumption.

Dworkin and MacKinnon, for their part, don’t think that either—there are many reasons to object to some of the legal measures that they’ve endorsed, but those measures were never aimed at coercing women into making more “liberated” choices and did not rest on any particular theory about women’s real or illusory preferences. (Their antipornography ordinance, for example, had no provisions for ex ante bans on pornography, and the parts of it that are objectionable from a libertarian standpoint don’t rest on some theory about women’s “real” interests; they rest on imputing responsibility for violations of rights to pornographers in a broader way than libertarians ought to allow.)

Ghertner:

Now, unless you think that women form a different sort of category than blacks and Jews, I don’t understand the objection. As I said, all porn is not necessarily misogynistic, just as all performances with black actors are not necessarily racist. But a minstrel show is racist, and a Max Hardcore video (NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR ANYWHERE, REALLY) is misogynist, to take an extreme example of both. I don’t see how a person can defend either of these things as not extremely harmful to blacks and women, even if all of the participants claim that they enjoy this sort of thing.

Part of the problem that I have in pornography debates is that a substantial number (tho’ certainly not all) of the people on the pro side seem to be arguing, at some point or another, in bad faith. They’ll say things like “Oh, well, of course Hustler is misogynist; I’m just saying that there is good pornography out there” or “Yeah, I know that Max Hardcore videos are pretty vicious; I just don’t think you should treat everything as if it were like those.” But when push comes to shove these end up just sounding like feints. If everyone who said something like that backed it up by lending their support to protests of the transparent misogyny in Hustler (or, say, the farrago of lies in a film like “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), then anti-Hustler campaigns (say) would be a hell of a lot stronger than they actually are, whether or not the antipornography movement itself had much steam to it. But they don’t, mostly; the talk amounts to little more than the talk from anti-abortion demagogues who object that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should’ve been more careful about contraception—and then doing nothing to make contraception more accessible (say, by lobbying the FDA to make EC available over the counter). All too often this kind of tactic amounts not to an analytic distinction amongst kinds of pornography, but rather as a way of begging off any kind of criticism towards any kind of pornography.

Micha,

I’d like to set aside the question of forseen and intended consequences for a moment. Not because it’s unimportant or uninteresting, but because I don’t think that it actually bears very much on the issue with Max Borders. There is another important distinction that needs to be made here, and once made I think the question of forseen and intended consequences can be mooted without any effect one way or another on the debate over the permissibility of boiling innocent foreigners alive. There is an important disanalogy between the Eric case and what Borders says about boiling foreigners: in the case of Eric, I think it would be seriously mistaken to conclude that what the Eric case shows is that sometimes you can shoot innocent babies without their rights being violated, or that there are cases where assaulting innocents is not blameworthy. Not so: the baby’s rights are being violated; it is being murdered. What the thought experiment shows is that the blame falls on Eric, not on the shooter. Why? Because it is Eric, not the shooter, who made it so that the baby would be shot. Killing innocent babies is not permissible on any theory of rights that could be plausibly characterized as “libertarian”; what the Eric case is meant to show is not that it’s permissible, but to open the question of who is to blame for the rights violation.

It’s an interesting and important question how far this analysis applies, and whether it applies to some of the different attempted justifications of torture that have appeared (I think it doesn’t apply to most of them; because most of them actually involve a situation in which the torture victim is not innocent, and so have to do more with procedural rights and proportionality than with non-aggression). But however broadly or narrowly it may apply, it doesn’t do Borders any good. His claim isn’t that, when boiling innocent foreigners alive serves American interests, the fault for the boiling might rest on someone other than the boiler (who would it rest on?). His claim is that there just isn’t any question of objective fault at all. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t do anything wrong to an innocent civilian under a foreign sovereign; you could at most do something that would be foolish strategically, or perhaps something that you would find gross. Whereas the question of whether you can shoot the baby to stop Eric hinges on who gets the red card in the human rights game (you or Eric or both of you), the question that Borders raises is whether boiling innocent civilians is even governed by the rules of the game at all. Borders’ stated position is that trying to blame anyone (much less demanding restitution from them) for boiling a completely innocent foreigner alive is like trying to pay with a cheque in a society that has no banks. Those of us who find his position monstrous (and/or anti-libertarian) are concerned with that, not with a disagreement over who properly to blame for the boiling.