You could say these institutions are just monopolies extracting rents and reducing freedom. You could say that in a righteous world there would be no such institutions, but most of the people that study them (Clay/Wright and Greif are all at Stanford) believe they enable trade. By enforcing cooperation between “us,” these institutions create even the possibility of trade. For most contracts intended to create trade across time or space, at least one of the parties has an incentive to renege. Once you send me the load of wheat on credit, why would I pay you back? Institutions that enforce cooperation make this less likely.

The size and scope of these institutions are limited by biology (and history… most institutional change doesn’t happen immediately, it evolves). How does our brain decide who is “us” and who is “them”? Why can we only cooperate with one of “us”? This is where our feelings of affiliation enter the picture.

I certainly tend to feel more of a “connection” to other Americans than I do to Ethiopians, just as I tend to feel more of a connection to people who attended my High School than those who didn’t. But I just don’t think this sense of connection has much if any bearing on the weight we give to people’s interests in distinctively moral deliberation.

I fully understand the fact of the expanding circle of affinities, and there is of course nothing wrong with putting your own kids first, etc. But I strongly resist the idea that the construct of national citizenship defines a strong set of exclusive mutual obligations. It is true that we are heavily conditioned to identify with our nationalities, but I don’t think our conditioning has much by way of normative teeth.

Americans weighing the interests of Americans more heavily than that of Canadians makes about as much sense as Iowans weighing the interests of Iowans more heavily than that of Minnesotans. There is no principled reason why moving up to the nation-level jurisdiction should leave us with profound exclusive obligations. This is especially clear when we realize that it is a completely open option to define a larger jurisdiction. Texas wasn’t always a part of the United States. And the U.S., Canada, and Mexico weren’t always a part of a North American Union. But they could be. And we could reconstruct our sense of the bounds of attachment, just as many Germans and Danes now see themselves as Europeans. To think today’s system of political organization somehow maps on to a deeper moral reality strikes me as pretty naive.

As a Canadian living in southern Ontario, I have to say I feel more of a connection with people from, say, Edmonton or Halifax than with those just across the border in Buffalo. To me it does make sense that, at least when it comes to matters of government policy, we consider the interests of other Canadians above those of Americans; and I can’t think of many people who would disagree.

If it’s merely a matter of competing intuitions, then the debate may be difficult to arbirtrate. But I would hazard that Daniel’s position is the one held by most of the people most of the time, because people generally happen to recognize obligations to family members or neighbours or fellow citizens prior to obligations to “humanity”.

I was wondering if you could expand on the position you’re defending here. In taking human well-being as your moral baseline, are you adopting a kind of utilitarian ethics? What considerations are relevant to a moral act, on your account? Do these differ when it comes to politics? You have probably dealt with these questions already in the past, and I notice that in an earlier posting you say that you incline toward the moral philosophy of Hume and Smith, but it might be helpful if you spelled out these issues.

Anyway, what does wanting to feel connected have to do with prohibiting people from seeking opportunities to help themselves through voluntary cooperation?

Don’t you feel a connection with your friends and family and if you were to meet them unexpectedly on the street, wouldn’t you treat them different then the strangers around you?

Wanting to feel connected isn’t arbitrary. With whom we choose to be connected may be, but its at least a little determined by biology and history.