Government by choice: classical liberalism and the moral status of immigration barriers.

• Author: Maloberti, Nicolas
• Position: Essay

My object in this article is to answer the following question: Can we accept the fundamental tenets of classical liberalism and at the same time support the state's raising of immigration barriers? I argue that if we accept these tenets as essentially correct, we should regard immigration barriers as essentially illegitimate.

I do not believe, however, that a direct appeal to individuals' property fights or other fundamental rights, such as the right to associate, is enough to establish such a conclusion because under certain conditions it is permissible to infringe on individuals' rights. Therefore, we must determine whether such conditions validate the raising of immigration barriers. Moreover, we run the risk of ignoring important issues if we focus exclusively on how things should be in an ideal world, regardless of how things are in the world in which we actually live.

Classical liberals believe that the state's role should be limited to some basic functions, such as protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts, and national defense. Under current conditions, however, virtually all existing states have gone beyond such limits, with a corresponding extension of their taxing power. In particular, states impose severe limitations on the use of individuals' property in the form of regulations, licenses, antidiscrimination laws, and so forth. They also bring about massive wealth transfers in the form of corporate subsidies and welfare benefits.

From a classical-liberal point of view, these actions create nonideal conditions. The thought that under certain conditions of injustice we should be allowed to act in ways that would otherwise be morally impermissible is not implausible. We consider, then, whether we can make a classical-liberal case for immigration barriers given the injustices inherent in current institutions.

Classical Liberalism

Classical liberals tend to support government's limitation to certain basic, minimal functions. They also tend to stress the importance of institutional restrictions that prevent government from extending its power. Classical liberals have offered alternative rationales in support of their conception of the proper scope and limits of government power, ranging from hedonistic forms of utilitarianism to uncompromising forms of deontology. The most convincing of such rationales, however, share a common ground.

Individual Rights: Guarantors of Sovereignty

The highlight of the ethical component of the most attractive versions of classical liberalism is the fundamental importance assigned to individuals' capacity to lead their own lives, where this capacity is taken to require an allocation of rather stringent and extensive areas of moral freedom in which others should not interfere. Classical liberals tend to reject certain patterns of moral reasoning that would subordinate the individuals' capacity to lead their own lives to the will of other individuals, to the promotion of social benefits, or even to the promotion of the same individuals' self-interest and moral good. Classical liberalism is in this sense an individualistic philosophy. It empowers the individual in a way that communitarian and nationalistic philosophies do not. (1)

An assignment of ownership rights, both over one's body and over external objects, is generally taken to play a fundamental role in the concrete representation of that commitment to individual sovereignty. The basic thought is that an individual's capacity to lead his own life would be seriously truncated should others have a right either to move or to block the movements of his body or to interfere with the use of the external resources the individual needs in order to achieve virtually any of his purposes. Under a system of collective ownership over external resources, for example, no individual has the liberty to use or possess such resources without everybody else's approval. Whether individuals are capable of leading their own lives thus depends on factors completely beyond their control. If we are genuinely concerned with individuals leading their own lives, we must leave room both for their making all sorts of decisions about how to use their bodies and for their appropriating and using external resources without having to secure anyone's approval. Of course, this reasoning does not entail that individuals should not be allowed to develop joint-ownership arrangements in a cooperative manner. The point is that individuals must be recognized as having an original, unacquired right not to be precluded from their private acquisition and discretionary disposition of external resources. (2)

This sort of consideration in favor of private rather than collective ownership, however, is indeterminate among different regimes of private property. It is with regard to this indetermination that the distinction between classical and modern liberals can be made. Modern or egalitarian liberals do favor private rather than collective property. Modern liberalism, in its most prevalent form, tends to maintain that the distribution of external resources should not depend on morally arbitrary factors, such as an individual's superior genetic endowment or his family's socioeconomic status. In general, egalitarian theorists claim that "undeserved" income may be coercively redistributed to compensate for the misfortune of others when this misfortune is similarly undeserved. (3) More specifically, they tend to propose a redistribution of the unequal income that results from individuals' unequal circumstances. They do not propose to redistribute the unequal income that results from individuals' different choices. (4)

Classical liberals, in contrast, tend to disagree with the claim that just because there is no moral reason that individuals' circumstances ought to be as they are, these circumstances are of no moral significance in deciding, for example, whether a particular individual or somebody else should have exclusive control over the income stemming from the use of his talents. (5) We may agree that a significant proportion of Lionel Messi's income can be traced to his inborn talents. But classical liberals would remain unconvinced that this fact shows that somebody other than Lionel Messi has a legitimate claim over that income. Moreover, the connection between self-ownership and ownership of external resources might be tighter than modern liberals tend to assume. So it is unclear whether the alleged redistributable nature of the income generated by the use of individuals' superior genetic endowment, for example, is compatible with granting individuals an exclusive right to decide how to use that endowment, a right that is required by any genuine concern for individual sovereignty. If there are reasons why it makes sense to expropriate coercively the talented person's income that stems from the use of his natural talents, for example, why do those same reasons not support coercing the talented person to prevent his attempt to stop producing that income?

Classical liberals have argued on different grounds in support of the system of strong ownership rights they favor, so it would be inaccurate to claim that they regard individuals' rights as "natural rights" if we take this notion to refer to a particular sort of normative rationale. However, the notion of natural rights is also understood in reference to the independent normative status that such rights are taken to have in relation to certain contingent social facts. In this sense, it is uncontroversial that classical liberals regard individuals' rights as "natural." Individuals' ownership rights are not taken to be contingent on any sort of social or cultural recognition. Classical liberalism, then, is clearly incompatible with the idea that the mere fact that a legal system is in force in a certain society is a reason for considering it morally justified. Classical liberalism is also incompatible with the view that the fundamental moral values protected by a system of ownership rights are relative to culture and that individuals may be deprived of such values if the current cultural practices allow it.

A "Constrained" Conception of Human Nature

If the notion of individual sovereignty captures classical liberalism's strongest ethical commitment, Thomas Sowell's (2007) notion of a "constrained" vision captures its most fundamental understanding of the nature of man. According to Sowell's conception of human nature, the moral limitations of man in general and of his egocentricity in particular are neither lamented nor regarded as things to be changed. They are treated rather as inherent facts of life.

According to a "constrained" vision, as Sowell explains, the fundamental moral and social challenge is to make the best out of the possibilities that exist within the bounds set by those inherent facts of life. To expend energies in an attempt to change human nature is seen as basically foolish and usually dangerous. Characterizations of individuals as purely self-interested, in the sense of being concerned only with their own well-being, certainly do not have empirical support. For example, individuals follow moral norms, and under certain conditions those who follow such norms end up worse off than they could have been had they simply ignored them. Furthermore, individuals sometimes go beyond what those norms demand, making significant sacrifices of their own well-being for the sake of others. A "constrained" vision of human nature, however, need not claim that individuals are purely self-interested. The most plausible understanding of classical liberalism's conception of human nature is one that depicts individuals as predominantly self-interested.

Gregory Kavka provides an illuminating explanation of this notion, analyzing the thesis of predominant egoism in terms of four propositions (1986, 64-80). The first proposition is that for most people in most situations the altruistic...