Ordinary people often give surprisingly bad arguments against libertarian conclusions. 

Take, for example, the libertarian case for open immigration.  One of the most common responses to this proposal is the argument that because immigrants will rely heavily on various social welfare services and will cost US taxpayers a lot of money, we therefore have the right to exclude them.  But even apart from the questionable empirical presuppositions it makes about the net cost of immigrants, this argument fails as a matter of simple logic in two ways. 

First, the argument is, in technical philosophy-speak invalid .  That is, even if it was true, the premise (that immigrants’ use of social services cost taxpayers money) would not come anywhere close to logically entailing the conclusion (that the state should coercively prohibit potential immigrants from crossing the border).  For starters, the mere fact that others' activity will cost us money does not necessarily mean that we're morally justified in using serious coercion to prevent them from doing so.  Poor people moving from West Virigina to New York would likewise impose a net cost on New York's social services, but I've not yet heard of anyone proposing a wall around that state.  Furthermore, if increased strain on social services is really what was driving people to oppose immigration, there are plenty of cheaper and more humane ways of addressing the problem.  We could, for instance, allow immigrants to live or work here only on condition of waiving their eligibility for various social welfare programs.  Or we could impose a surtax, or require that they provide evidence of employment before immigrating.  Such policies make many of us squeamish, but I suspect that most potential immigrants would greatly prefer them to a policy of outright exclusion.

Second, the argument is overly-inclusive.  That is, if the premise did support the conclusion, it would support a lot of other things as well, which most people who support restrictions on immigration would not (and should not) want to support.  Poor people in the US who have children, for instance, also impose a cost on US social welfare systems.  If we are justified in using men with guns to stop poor people from crossing the border, are we justified in using them to stop poor people from having children as well?

Academics, and well-educated non-academic like the readers of this blog, can probably come up with a plausible-sounding (though to my mind, not ultimately convincing) list of reasons for why these two policies are not really analogous.  And if were the only case in which we saw this pattern of reasoning exhibited, we might be reluctant to criticize ordinary thinking on this issue too harshly.

But as Bryan Caplan has demonstrated, these same kinds of problems beset all of the most common objections to open immigration.  The arguments do not just fail; they fail spectacularly.  They fail so spectacularly, in fact, that one starts to doubt that the people who make them are being driven to their anti-immigration conclusions by the arguments, rather than being driven to search for just-barely-plausible sounding arguments by their prior commitment to anti-immigration conclusions.

And they are precisely the same kinds of failures that we see in objections to many other libertarian proposals.  Janet Radcliffe-Richards, for instance, in her 1996 article, “Nephrarious Goings-On: Kidney Sales and Moral Arguments,” finds a similar pattern of failed reasoning in the arguments ordinary people make against legally permitting individuals to sell their kidneys.  Arguing that poor people who want to sell their kidneys are too ignorant to recognize the risks, she argues, doesn’t support a prohibition on sales – at most, it supports providing people with the information and counselling necessary to help them make better decisions.  And even if it did support a prohibition on sales, the same argument would support a prohibition on organ donation as well.  Other arguments based on the alleged coerciveness or exploitativeness of sales fail in similarly disastrous way.  Much the same, I suspect could be said about objections to the legalization of certain drugs, for the repeal of laws against price gouging, for the toleration of sweatshop labor, and so on.

What’s going on here?  According to Radcliffe-Richards, arguments against kidney sales are driven not by reason, but by repugnance:

“In fact there is a strong, widely held and quite independent conviction that organ sales must be wrong, into whose defence has been pressed a motley array of arguments that could not have begun to persuade anyone who was really trying to work out the rights and wrongs of the issue from scratch. The prohibition of organ sales is derived not from the principles usually invoked in its support, but from a powerful feeling of repugnance that apparently numbs ordinary moral sensitivities and anesthetizes the intellect, making invisible the obvious harms of prohibition, giving plausibility to arguments whose inadequacy would in less fraught contexts proclaim itself from the rooftops, and, in doing both these things, hiding the extraordinary force of its own influence” (p. 406).

But repugnance is not a good guide to moral truth, she says.  What’s worse:

“If we allow the feeling to direct our actions, the effect will be that we will try to get rid of whatever causes it. If it is not reliably connected to anything that ought, morally, to be eliminated, the only systematic benefit of removing its cause will be the elimination of the feeling as an end in itself. This is, of course, a great advantage to all those sensitive Westerners who suffer from it. Prohibition may make things worse for the Turkish father and other desperate people who advertise their kidneys, as well as for the sick who will die for lack of them; but at least these people will despair and die quietly, in ways less offensive to the affluent and healthy, and the poor will not force their misery on our attention by engaging in the strikingly repulsive business of selling parts of themselves to repair the deficiencies of the rich” (p. 406).

If, then, exploitation of the poor triggers repugnance, but neglect of the poor does not, then a repugnance-driven morality will lead us to prefer the latter over the former even when the former is better for everyone involved – especially the poor.

Radcliffe-Richard’s story is broadly compatible Jonathan Haidt’s analysis of the role in disgust in moral reasoning.  And while neither “repugnance” nor “disgust” seems quite the right candidate for the driving force behind opposition to open borders, I suspect a similar emotionally-driven process of moral rationalization might be at work there.

Does this sound right?  And if so, what if anything does it tell us about the role of moral argument in changing people’s minds?  Can impartial reasoned analysis hope to change people’s minds if all they’re looking for is a story to justify what they already believe?  If philosophers care about convincing people of ideas that they believe are true, should they pay more attention to presenting their arguments in emotionally-appealing ways?  And what are the plausible candidates for cases where libertarians are driven to policy conclusions by their emotions, rather than by reasoning?  If Haidt’s analysis is right, we less libertarians are less driven by disgust or empathy than either liberals or conservatives.  But I’m sure we have our emotional hot buttons too.

NOTE: Two links above, to papers by Michael Huemer, appear to be temporarily non-functional due to a quota imposed by his ISP.  They should start working again soon.  The links are, in paragraph 3, to his paper “Is there a Right to Immigrate,” and in paragraph 7, to his “America’s Unjust Drug War.”  Access to Radcliffe-Richards’ paper, also linked in paragraph 7, requires a subscription to the journal.

UPDATE: The links to the Huemer papers are now fixed.