Questions for Particularists
I am an American with two sisters. Suppose that, for whatever reason, one is a French citizen and one is an American citizen. Do I weigh my American sister’s interests more highly, in virtue of our shared citizenship? (Start from an egalitarian baseline, then give both a bonus for being my sister, and then give one a bonus for being a co-national?) Or do family relationships trump political relationships, so I must treat them equally, as sisters. What if our countries are at war?
If you think it is permissible to weigh the interests of countrymen more highly that of foreigners, and it is permissible to weigh the interests your family more highly than your non-family, is nepotism permissible? To be encouraged? If you’re a congressman and land a sweetheart government contract for you incompetent criminal brother, does that make you a bad American but a good brother? If you had to choose, which is it better to be?
You are the star quarterback of your high school football team. The state championship game is this evening, and your team cannot win without your gridiron virtuosity. But you discover your twin brother, who was adopted by another family and whom you have never met, is in jail, and in danger. You can go bail him out and save him from being imminently beaten in jail by a gang he has crossed, or make the big game and give your team (which contains your best friends) a shot at the championship, but not both. What do you do? What if you were raised together and joined at the hip until he got mixed up in a bad crowd? But you’re not genetically related? What if he is a French citizen? What if you have another brother on the football team? A cousin?
You are American. I have joined the French Foreign Legion and renounced my American citizenship. I have (a) betrayed you, (b) erased our prior mutual obligations as citizens, (c) both. Now, imagine you are French.
You are a Delaware patriot. Some guys from your state, who you certainly never got the chance to vote for, votes to incorporate Delaware into the United States of America. Do you now owe additional regard to the interests of Pennsylvanians? Suppose you did vote for your “representatives”? What then? Suppose you are an American patriot. A constitutional amendment is passed incorporating the United States of America into the North American Union. Do you now owe additional regard to the interests of Mexicans?
Three people are drowning in a pool and you can save just one. One is a fellow American. One is a fellow devout Catholic. One is your son’s French atheist girlfriend. Is it permissible for any of these attributes to play a role in deliberation over who will save and who you will let drown? If so, which? If more than one, which weighs most heavily, and why?
I ask because I cannot fathom a set of general principles that could possibly govern these cases. Which leads me to suspect that those who endorse the moral centrality of duties based in egocentric attachment generally have no argument, rational or moral, against policies that seem to them to run afoul of their imagined special affiliative duties, but are merely asserting an unwillingness to accept them. This amounts to little more than an affirmation of one’s prior commitments.
A principled particularist would give us something like a complete schedule of prices: how many countrymen one brother is worth; how many Frenchmen one countryman is worth; etc. We’d then know, say, how serious a transgression must be before breaking the “thin blue line” and ratting out a fellow cop, and just how many hours one is obliged to spend with one’s “bros” relative to one’s new girlfriend. We could then know how much immigrants must benefit to offset costs to natives, and thus what an acceptable (to the principled particularist) level of increase in immigration would be. However, a principled particularist is something like a contradiction. I suspect I will be told that these things can’t be measured in terms of one another with any precision. So all we can know for sure is that candidate duties to others we do not presently recognize cannot really be our duties, since they are not rooted in attachments we already take ourselves to have, and may even conflict with ones many of us are sure we do have. The easiest way to adjudicate the possible conflict is simply to ignore the possibility of new duties it would be inconvenient to have. And, thus, everything is left as it is.
September 28th, 2007 20:15
Why don’t you examine yourself and what it is that makes you more willing to die in a war to save libertarianism than a war to defend your sisters?
The world is a giant competition Will. Teams are rational.
September 28th, 2007 21:13
I don’t see how this argument is specific to particularism. Couldn’t you come up with similar dilemmas, to which there doesn’t seem to be any principled solution, for almost any moral system?
What should you do in the jail/football dilemma if you have no special relation to anyone involved? Now imagine that you are instead the irreplaceable lead in a play, with an expected audience of X - how large must X be for you to stay and act rather than bail out this man (for whom you are the only hope)? What is X if it is a highly intelligent chimpanzee, rather than a person, that is at imminent risk of suffering?
Which drowning person does a moral pluralist like you save, if you may only save one out of: a top-notch physicist, a beloved movie star, a talented sculptor, an influential libertarian writer, a successful businessman, and an effective philanthropist? Define the relevant variables and plot the indifference curves for each pair of drowning individuals.
Is it right for a man to leave his family to poverty to go paint a beautiful painting? How high on the beauty scale must the painting reach for it to be acceptable? What if he paints several beautiful paintings? Now, suppose that he has no family, but Americans will spend a total of 100,000 hours looking at his painting(s) that they otherwise would have spent working productively, thereby slowing the increase in wealth production in America and economic development around the world.
What is this exercise supposed to prove? That there is no plausible moral system that involves a small set of general principles that are simple and easy to apply?
September 28th, 2007 21:36
I’m not sure these hypotheticals really lead anywhere. Let’s take a more stark reductio: is it permissible to weigh one’s own interest more heavily than another’s? Are we obligated to act in all ways to maximize the total greater good? Is the moral imperative to spend all of our own lives - and every dollar - Bethamically? Should we shoose our romantic partners calculating what would create the greatest sum of happiness in the world, with our mutual happiness only one element? Are we permitted to provide anything for our children beyond the basics before we have used every bit of our personal resources to assist every child in the world has the basics - and then move on incremental improvements in lockstep? And Will - is this really how you live your life?
If we can make any distinction for ourselves as indivviduals, it is beyond me why logically we couldn’t weigh the interests of any individual or group to which we belong more heavily than those we do not. Your analysis of the morality of immigration restrictions seems to me more a matter of a tragedy of the commons - the moral satisfaction is personal and outweighs your minor share of any collective cost to one group to which you belong.
September 28th, 2007 22:38
What’s missing here is that the national group has attributes of sovereignty, unlike the others, it can command loyalty, and it needs to , to maintain its basic defense functions. The libertarian pretends that he has conscience which can stand up to a charge of treason, by implicitly holding that there are no enemies. The nation can command loyalty in the case where a foreigner such as an immigrant coming in on net public subsidy, increases the level of aggression within the borders; it can command at least that much loyalty. But the tolerance of a libertarian’s claims to global conscience and publicized disloyalism, is an additional feature, which the nation does not in its minimal form, need to give.
September 28th, 2007 23:44
To clarify and soften the above, our better nations are going to attend to the needs of the disloyal libertarian types, much as the Christian pacifists who are systematic and otherwise supportive of our defense, obtain privilege to be loyal in their own way. As to particularism itself, one kind involving loyalty to fellow nationals over against the foreigner, and having atributes of sov ereignty, is unique. One particularism does not imply every other, and this is all the more obvious in that they contradict each other. Smearing by use of equivocation, slippery slope and false dilemmas, might be used to wriggle out of loyalty to one’s nation, but if there were rational arguments as to why the statless person is actually better, they’d be used, and not the smears.
September 29th, 2007 09:21
I assume you’d call me an unprincipled particularist, e.g. I spend more freely for my kids’ education than (via taxes and donations) for my neighbor’s kids, yet I spend more freely for these than (via state taxes) for others in my state, more freely for these than (via federal taxes) for others in the US, and beyond that I contribute to various groups for education in Afghanistan, Iraq, Thailand and so forth — yet this is not a rigid hierarchy. I do what I can, balancing costs, as I think most of us do. I suppose that my new daughter-in-law, a Greek citizen but US graduate student, has been partially supported by my state and federal taxes, and I think that’s fine. (Back when I had to supervise graduate students, some were US citizens and some were not, but all were partially supported by US taxes, and that was fine too.) Assuming she gets dual citizenship eventually, that will entitle her to more entitlements, including a vote on which entitlements US citizens should be entitled to, and I think that’s also fine, even when she disagrees with me.
I would therefore like to propose a model for unprincipled particularism of the sort that I try to follow.
Basically I think people like me feel pulled or pushed by links to others which we interpret as implicit and explicit contracts; some of these are probably hard-wired as evolutionary psychology tries to describe, and others not. Some of them are equivalence relations readily interpreted as group memberships, and others not. There is no fixed decision procedure, no deontic-logic theorem-prover that settles choices for people like me, not even an attempt at perfect consistency: I suspect it’s more like a Minsky society-of-mind arrangement, a constant debate between very stupid speakers saying “this is okay.” and “this is Good!” and, of course, “no no No Very Bad!” They represent links, some of which carry responsibility, some of which are memberships.
US citizenship is a moderately consensual membership; it would be more consensual if it were easier to come and go (and I would like that. I would like that a lot.) It seems perfectly reasonable to me that US citizens should agree, through their representatives, to do more for each other than they do for those who have not joined up. This applies to most consensual groups. Some of these are pretty feeble: I wouldn’t even be aware of my high school class as a continuing, consensual group (derived, of course, from a non-consensual origin) if it hadn’t been for an instapundit interview of classmate. Still, it’s likely that there is some marginal request which, other things being equal, I would reject from a random member of h.sap, but would agree to from one of those people that I very hazily remember from almost forty years ago. I take it you disapprove; you would prefer to feel as strongly linked to everyone as to anyone. I’m skeptical that this is even possible, so I doubt that you can really achieve the logical consistency which you seem to think desirable. In fact, I doubt that you believe it: so I’ve probably misunderstood. I’d appreciate an exposition on what you mean by “particularism”… or of course, point to previous expositions.
September 29th, 2007 18:25
Will, I am a great fan of your writing generally, but I fear your attempt to confound opponents of liberal immigration policy has led you into a bit of a mess. In brief, you hold ‘particularism’ to a standard that cannot be met by any pluralist or agent-centered ethical theory, and imply without argument (here, and elsewhere in your writing on immigration) that no non-particularist theory could lead to particularlist policies. Most of these problems have been noted by blar and tstockman above but briefly:
1. Are we morally allowed to privilege our own interests over the interests of others? Most of us feel the answer is yes, but the argument is not a lay-up. Sam Scheffler has written whole books on this, as you doubtless know. So it’s hardly a mark of lack of seriousness to be able to provide a “complete schedule of prices” weighing your particular interests against the interests of strangers.
2. Once one endorses *any* value pluralism it is possible to formulate dilemmas and tough trade-offs. Aren’t you a value pluralist? (human freedom and human well-being, perhaps?) Can you provide a schedule of prices in all trade-off cases?
3. Even a decidedly non-particularist moral philosophy could imply highly particularist institutions and policies. Let us stipulate the ultimate non-particularist ethics: hedonic utilitarianism. While we have no special moral obligations to our children or countrymen under this stipulation, it may be utility-maximizing for parents to feel a special obligation to their children, or for people to feel strong loyalty to their tribe, or for the world to be divided into sovereign states. If so, we should be functionally particularist. (You are likely familiar with the analogous claim that even if we deny a moral right to property, we should support the institution of private property because it leads to good consequences).
September 30th, 2007 06:51
Libertarianism apparently leads to universal humanitarianism, but so does communism. No matter where you start, you conveniently end up at universal humanitarianism.
September 30th, 2007 18:10
So because Americans favoring countrymen over foreigners is wrong, Americans are obliged to allow the mass immigration of foreigners who place the interests of clan and religion above everything else. Brilliant.
“Start from an egalitarian baseline”
No.
October 3rd, 2007 20:09
I’m gratified to see that my objections have been allowed to stand without contradiction.