My post on whether there is a right of national self-determination was inspired by a conversation about the current Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Given the conclusion of that post, that there is no such right, given a moral position in which all rights pertain to individuals not groups, what are the implications for the current conflict?
Your contention that a polity has the right to exclude potential immigrants who want to cause harm, even if only in the far future at the ballot box comes up a lot in the discussion of (normally) Muslim immigration to the UK (and probably other western countries). To what extent does / should this right actually hold, particularly in the case of 'quietist' authoritarian groups who campaign for illiberal ends within a democratic structure?
Some examples:
Those planning violence - excluding them seems clearly justified.
'Quietist' authoritarians - would appear to be excludable under your arguments? This seems very hard in practice and is certainly not current policy.
Proselytisers / ideas - If it is wrong to exercise the right of free movement to harm other people or deprive them of their rights, is it not wrong to exercise the right of free speech to encourage others to do the same? And if we would compromise on free movement in the above cases, why would we not also compromise on free expression (for citizens, not just potential immigrants)?
It seems hard to arrive at a practical policy that does not entail placing potential immigrants into 'risk buckets' with different restrictions for different groups, however this also seems deeply illiberal.
I agree that the principle I am arguing for is hard to apply in practice, and likely to be used to justify bad policies. But I think it's clearly true in the simple case, knocking the gun out of the hand of the person trying to shoot me, so it can't be entirely false.
Part of the problem at present is that almost everyone believes in democracy. So immigrants with bad views don't have to plan to kill anyone to be a threat, they can just vote to have the government kill or otherwise oppress people. That makes anyone whose moral views substantially differ from yours a potential threat.
My own view is that such arguments do not justify immigration restrictions in any case less extreme than Hamas members wanting to come into Israel. But I don't like to claim to have compelling arguments when I don't, so thought I needed to point out a hole in the moral argument for open borders.
There are both practical and moral concerns wrapped up in all of this.
I think for both practical and moral reasons that a polity should be able to exclude whoever they want from their country.
Morally I think they should be able to exclude those who disagree with the cultural understanding of the receiving country, especially if the potential immigrants would be against the very rules that allowed them to come in and take over (free immigration, right to vote, freedom of expression, etc.).
Practically, I think they should be able to exclude anyone they want for whatever reasons. Unfortunately, much of the world doesn't get along well with the rest of the world, and the most stable configurations appear to be where these groups are separated by what we call national boundaries. These boundaries can be effectively locked down so as to prevent the intermingling of groups.
In the cases where these boundaries are not enforced, it gets a lot more complicated. I don't think it's morally acceptable (or usually practically possible) to retroactively deny admittance to a group that's already there. There are variations, and someone who snuck in a week ago is definitely different from someone allowed to come in 50 years ago. At some point, though, it's not possible to remove them.
I consider myself fairly libertarian, but not when it comes to immigration. The free movement of people is fine when they have shared cultures and values, but definitely doesn't work when they don't. It should be up to the receiving group to decide if the values are similar enough.
"whoever they want" assumes that polities want things. Part of the point of my previous point was that they don't, that that's a metaphor and a misleading one.
Can I translate your point into "it is a good thing if some people, those who disagree with the cultural understanding of the receiving country, especially if the potential immigrants would be against the very rules that allowed them to come in and take over (free immigration, right to vote, freedom of expression, etc.) are excluded from a country"? That avoids what I see as the misleading implication of treating a polity as if it was a person and wanted things.
Doesn’t that just kick the can down the road? If it is incorrect to talk about a polity “wanting things” why is it not equally incorrect to talk about “the cultural understanding of the receiving country”?
Whenever Ilhan Omar opens her mouth, it seems to me that admitting a ton of Somalis was a right stupid idea. But the Somalis who are here now would probably disagree. And like it or not, their input must now be considered part of “the cultural understanding of the receiving country”.
You think that the countries of South America have a low average IQ? I don't know what the evidence is, but I wouldn't expect it.
So far as Africa is concerned, have you read and do you think you can rebut the arguments offered by Chanda Chisala? I discussed them and provided links in a post some time ago:
That site does not seem to provide any explanation of how they get their numbers, on that or other things, which strikes me as a reason not to rely on them. Their climate change page takes current orthodoxy about what policies are good or bad for granted.
The Web seems to have a consensus that South American countries have average IQs between 80 and 90. This might all come from one flawed source (e.g. Suriname seems to always be at the top with 90) but it might also be consistent because it’s true. I’d be interested to hear what evidence you would accept, given that even making such a claim these days is so fraught with peril.
I think I would want a link to an article that described clearly how its numbers were calculated. That still wouldn't make me sure it was right, but it would shift my view.
My impression, from following discussions of these issues, is that the evidence on average IQ of different racial groups in the US is pretty solid, but I'm much less confident on international comparisons. It's too easy for a "fact" to be based on one article by a researcher who knows what result he wants. I've seen quite a lot of that in the climate context, have been working on an article I expect to post in another week or two about an important example, where a fact many people in that argument take for granted is due to a simplifying assumption that badly biases the result in a predictable direction. I've emailed the lead author and will see if I am missing something.
In the IQ case, the political pressure makes it hard to know what is true. Not only is it unpopular to produce evidence for IQ differences, it is unpopular to seriously argue about the subject, so we don't get much good critical examination of arguments for racial differences as well as arguments against.
Part of what I like about Chisala, who is arguing against claims of low African IQ, is that he does take the other side seriously and as a result can do a more persuasive job of arguing against it than I had seen in the past from more orthodox critics.
This IQ argument made by forumposter123 is very easy to dismiss. There is no evidence that the group IQs mean anything at all. For example India has average IQ of 76 and yet, Indians in USA tend to be highest IQ people who are very liberal and very productive members of society.
Also, there is no link between IQ and Liberalism either. Is Russia with its 90+ average IQ more liberal and more freedom loving India with average IQ of 76 ? I do not think so.
Also low IQ parents can produce high IQ children. A lot of people including your own grandparents weren't particularly intellectuals and yet their arrival in USA produced some fine minds from which we have benefited.
I think the real problem here is Islamic ideology. It is indeed an ideology that competes with and against western values.
One interpretation of the examples you cite is that the group IQ figures are wrong, which is what Chisala argues. A different one is that they are correct but group IQ does not predict the things you mention. For your Indian example the obvious explanation is that Indians in the US are a very non-random selection from Indians in India.
Low IQ parents can produce high IQ children but they are much less likely to than high IQ parents, as demonstrated by the two generations of my family for which we have relevant data. For all I know my grandparents had high IQ's as well, but not in an environment which led them to be intellectuals.
Having property claims go back decades is at best debatable. At least in Anglo-American law, we have the principle of adverse possession, under which, if I act for a number of years as if something were my property, it becomes (in some measure) my property: If, for example, I walk across your yard to get to the road, eventually I acquire an easement that permits me to go on walking across your yard in perpetuity. This is probably a good legal principle, if we want to avoid ongoing conflicts.
If we aren't trying to achieve some Platonic ideal of justice under which all wrongs are set right (and, for example, any survivors of the Canaanites have claims against both the Jews and the Arabs), but simply to settle current conflicts and get on with our lives, at some point we need to be ready to stop entertaining old claims.
I thought that the principle of adverse possession required the person whose property you're walking across to not do anything to try and prevent you from doing it? Am I mistaken there?
The legal specifics of adverse possession may not apply exactly in this case. But I think the broader legal principle that some rights are established by time needs to be considered.
I'm not sure which claims William is talking about. The Jews have a very ancient claim to the land, but even aside from adverse possession it isn't clear how that translates to individual claims.
My guess is that he is thinking of the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 and had their land seized, and that doesn't fit the legal category of adverse possession at all — robbery doesn't establish title, with very limited exceptions (stolen goods sold in a public market in daylight at one point in English law).
There might be a practical problem in determining who owned what plot of land and who the heirs are — I don't know whether the necessary records survive. In the worst case you could auction off the land to convert it to money, then divide the money evenly among the descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1948. You can probably do better than that.
Maybe I misunderstood your arguments, but I think some of your arguments seems to me still see moral issues in terms of group rights.
You wrote: “Hence it is not a rights violation to keep a Palestinian Arab known to want to kill Jews, for example one who was part of the October 7th Hamas raid, far from areas inhabited by Jews.”
But WHO is the (natural or legal) person having rights to keep a Palestinian out of Israel if an Israeli citizen is willing to sell or rent his land to that Palestinian? Any unwilling Israeli citizen who is suspicious of the trustworthiness of a Palestinian definitely has the moral right to refuse to sell or rent him any land. So, is it the Israeli government that, like any government that forbids free trade, has the moral right to ban any free trade of lands in Israel between a willing Israeli citizen and a Palestinian willing to immigrate?
It seems that you meant the WHO is the government – an “agent” of a group, whether it’s a democracy or a dictatorship -- as you wrote in the following:
“It follows from this argument that the Israelis have a legitimate right to restrict, to some degree, the settlement in Israel of those presently living in Gaza or the West Bank.” “The same argument that implies that Israelis have some right to restrict immigration of Palestinians to Israel also implies that the Palestinians had some right to restrict immigration of Jews to Palestine.”
This, it seems to me, is an argument through the viewpoint of group rights, perhaps for practical reasons but not as a principle. I can, in practice, approve of it. (Taiwan, the place I live, as a group faces a similar situation w.r.t. China and the government has very strict restrictions over the immigration or even visits by mainlander Chinese, a measure of which I approve given the possible military threats from China.) But I think this is only a practical argument and cannot be in principle reconciled with the Libertarian view of individual rights.
My comments are all about individual rights. Of course, if I have a right to do something, for example to keep a Hamas terrorist far from me, I also have a right to organize a bunch of people to do so, but that's still an individual right not a group right. It doesn't depend on whether a majority of Israelis or the politicians they have elected agree with me. If you are my neighbor and want to sell some land to someone who wants to murder me and let him live on it I have an individual right to use force to prevent him from getting close enough to kill me.
There might also be some other unusual property about the externalities that could be generated from free immigration from Gaza or the West Bank. And this may allow us to cast doubt on even the legitimacy of some “self-defense” actions in the near certainty case (that is, whether the social net benefit of using forthright force is positive in that case). This leads to my concern about the general implication of your argument on the stability of Anarcho-Capitalism.
If there is anything unusual about the possible externalities from the Palestinian immigration, then, I suspect more or less speculatively that it has something to do with status competition, group/collective identity, and the endowment effect as often seen in an ethnic conflict. I take the following three assumptions as known facts shaped by evolutionary selection: 1) People care about not only absolute/real resources they own but also their relative status in the society in order to (maybe not self-consciously) compete for mating opportunities and hence reproductive success. 2) Human is good at dividing the world into Us v. Them and identifying himself with or being altruistic towards some particular ethnic or cultural groups as if that helps his genes spreading. 3) Human tends to fight harder, as a commitment strategy hard-wired into human brains, for the property he views as his endowment/territory than for the one he senses as originally others’. (You have, I believe, discussed them all in your Machinery or Economics and Evolutionary Psychology.)
Being sensitive to Us v. Them, with “Us” being good and smart and “Them” evil and stupid, it may be cost-effective for people to apply statistical discrimination in making decision regarding social interactions. Competition for status at the individual level thus could be influenced by the stereotype labeled to one’s group. So while status competition is usually confined to being local in terms of social networks or geographic vicinity, group identity might make an individual feel that his group’s competition against a rival group for relative collective status or collective dignity has some “local” effects for him even if he personally does not closely interact with any individual members of the rival group. Now adding in the endowment/territory effects: If many individual members of both groups involved in the conflict honestly regard lands in dispute as “their” (the group’s) territory, and they have strong group identity so commit themselves to guarding this endowment, then can using pre-emptive force at the individual level by any one side deter future hawk/hawk interactions? While a commitment to fighting hard by one side against the intruders will raise the absolute level of the expected cost of invasion by the other side, it could also raise the expected relative status of those “intruders” if they, feeling endowment-deprived and treated unfairly, also commit to fighting to recover their “lost territory” (Keeping fighting may prove either that you are superior if you win or that you are tough to play with even if you lose). So it is possible that committing to fighting by one side will not deter the counter-attack from the other side just by raising their expected cost of attacking, but might instead also raise their expected net benefit (i.e., lower their expected net cost) of counter-attack (The raise of collective relative status could be a benefit to an individual fighter). So while a hawk/hawk interaction is costly to both sides, can there be any agreement to legal rules reached in the long run? Could Anarcho-Capitalism be free from oscillation between violent conflicts and ad hoc or strategic bargaining/“peace treaty”? As this sort of competition is basically zero-sum, it is not clear to me that using pre-emptive force at the individual level by any one side will make the status quo territorial control become a Schelling point, or will direct the intermittent hawk/hawk conflicts to converge to a long term equilibrium (whether it’s efficient or not). Of course, even if what I said is plausible, I don’t know whether, compared to a society with a government and a state, a stateless society will be worse or less stable with respect to the problems I mentioned. And, as I understand it, welfare economics is about the trade-off between two alternatives and the betterness of a choice.
A side remark: I think the recent Hamas attack has posed a dilemma to Israel (in terms of a group). On the one hand, for the interest of its majority, Israel needs to fight hard against Hamas to signal its commitment to defending itself in order to deter any future attempt like the Oct 7th one. On the other hand, Israeli’s attacks on Gaza risk intensifying ethnic identity of all Palestinians, Arabs, and even the Muslims around the world, and leading to a possible endless (at least in the “short run”) hawk/hawk game of mutual threat.
This might be a late response, and I divide it into two posts since it is a bit too long.
By using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case to test the individualistic moral system that you hold, you “point out a hole in the moral argument for open borders.”
As I understand that your “post wasn't from the standpoint of either political practicality or utilitarianism, and probably didn't maximize for either,” I think your individualistic argument might have some general implications beyond the open border issue on the efficiency and stability of Anarcho-Capitalism, about which I’ve some thoughts as follows.
First concerning the efficiency problem. You believe that an individual has moral rights of using pre-emptive force against anybody who is living next door who the individual has “good reason” to believe is life-threatening to him. Then, in a world with many uncertainties, it’s possible that if we want to guard our property with high certainty, we would have to adopt a strategy of group profiling, e.g., to keep out a man by force from our neighborhood based on his ethnic group. We are, it seems, relying on a unilaterally (and privately) enforced inalienability rule to protect our own interests. How likely can the strategy of using force against others by statistical discrimination be not only private-interest serving but also socially efficient (as a clear-cut self-defense action probably is in a near certainty situation)? Assuming the probability of an immigrant intending to expel or kill me is 60%, the benefit of my pre-emptively killing an ill-intentioned immigrant is B (= my willingness to pay for my life + savings from not having to fight in the future by deterring any future similarly intentioned immigrants), the cost of my killing an immigrant (his WTP for his life) is C, and the benefit of killing an innocent immigrant is zero (because he was not dangerous so killing him gets no benefits from my avoiding being killed). Then the expected net benefit of killing a random immigrant in a pre-emptive fashion is 0.6(B-C) + 0.4(0-C). That is, the social expected net benefit is positive if and only if B>1.67C.
If we are indiscriminately concerned with potentially high-damaging neighborhood activities, then it seems that we might also use such force against many those other than the potentially hostile immigrants. A chemical factory nearby (or, “in my backyard”), for example, could have some probability of causing deadly explosion incidents. So, may I or should I burn the factory down as a pre-emptive measure if the factory fails to show me a reputable safety record or if I think it’s the cheapest way for me to prevent any such possible damages (a question similar to one raised by Nicolai)? Suppose the probability that that chemical factory will cause a life-threatening incident is 1%, then the expected net benefit of my burning down a random chemical factory in a pre-emptive fashion is 0.01(B-C) + 0.99(0-C). That is, the social expected net benefit is positive if and only if B>100C. [B: the benefit of burning the factory down when it’s dangerous; C: the cost of burning it down (= loss of the gains from trade between the chemical factory and its customers, i.e., loss of “consumer surplus + producer surplus” from the chemicals trade). The benefit of burning the chemical factory down when it is not life-threatening is zero.]
If the hypothetical numbers given above are not too unrealistic for the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and for a typical chemical factory, then using pre-emptive force seems to be comparatively more legitimate in the case of Palestinian immigrants than for the chemical factory, at least if we take the approximately utilitarian criterion (the efficiency criterion) as an important ethical principle. However, the low requirement of B>1.67C for having positive social net benefits from killing a random immigrant or, equivalently, a 40% probability of killing an innocent person, may be still too callous to be acceptable for many people’s moral intuition (a viewpoint that may be consistent with the observation of most people’s willingness to pay for motor vehicle safety in real life). A much smaller probability such as 1/10,000 of mistakenly killing an innocent may be more consistent with our daily risk-taking behavior, and with this the social expected net benefit of killing a random immigrant is positive as long as B is approximately greater than C -- a condition almost the same as that for self-defense in the certainty case. But I do not know how close this small chance is to the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian case.
Besides using naked force, however, we have options of bribing the immigrants to leave, moving away ourselves, or allying with other individuals to buy and own a lot of lands to make sure that they are not sold or rent out to any potentially hostile immigrants (admittedly, allying for preventing the externalities can be a public good). While these options may produce ambiguous efficiency performance for the immigration case, the above numerical examples have shown that, for many “ordinary” externalities like the chemical factory, it’s probably more efficient to adopt the property rule or liability rule that allows for free contracting between the polluters and the pollutees than to use a unilaterally enforced inalienability rule. In spite of this, why should I, in an stateless society with private law, agree to either of these rule instead of just using naked force (by myself or allied with a bunch of talented gangsters) if I believe that it’s cheaper or more productive for me to resolve the quarrel between you and me on a property or an externality (just as any talented mugger or robber does)? So even if there exist some equilibria, some of them might be on a path dominated by a few criminal cartels with increasing returns to specialization and scale in using force, where everybody at his optimum recognizes the special rights of the criminal gangsters and the ordinary people drop their commitment to claiming some particular rights against the gangsters. (While I believe you have discussed to a certain extent about the problem like this in your Machinery, I still bring it to attention because I think this problem is of fundamental importance for Anarcho-Capitalism and the individualistic moral system you propose.)
Or one may argue that the "practical" consideration for forbidding free immigration can be justified on the ground that some possible externalities (e.g., violent attacks) may be generated by way of free exchange of lands between individual Israelis and Palestinians. And this consideration may not contradict individual rights.
The West has an idea about how to handle forced land acquisition, for future cases (being against it, forcefully). Nobody seems to have a good plan for dealing with already successful land grabs. Looking at Crimea, I think we've decided that it was justified enough, and too hard to reverse - both practical instead of moral concerns. The Russian controlled vote afterward to justify being annexed by Russia was a fig-leaf that met the accepted standards but really only confirmed what everyone already knew - that the Russians had successfully taken it and would not give it back. Russians appear to be a true majority in Crimea, and with the naval base and other major installations, it was significantly controlled by Russia already.
My best guess is that what actually happens is a combination of "Might makes right" and a term that used to be very common in European diplomacy but would be considered morally wrong now - "fait accompli." That could be translated "something that's already done" and was used to signify when some group/country took an action that changed the political landscape and would be difficult to reverse, especially without sparking a major war. Russia taking Crimea was definitely an example of this. The problem with the fait accompli approach is that the counter is to believably signal that you will use disproportionate force, typically go to total war, if they attempt it. I would say that this was one of the causes of WWI, and was definitely a direct cause of WWII (the Allies clearly signaled to Hitler what would happen if he kept invading countries, drawing the line at Poland).
I think WWII and the US/Western European response to Communist uprisings supported by the USSR is the reason that we don't talk about fait accompli like we used to. We are absolutely signaling that such takeovers are not going to be allowed. But they still totally work. What Israel is doing in the West Bank with settlements is absolutely the same idea. When one side wants something and diplomacy isn't working, it's often quite effective to just do it anyway, when one side has the power to do so. It's quite dangerous though. Russia played with fire again with the more recent invasion, and Israel likely is as well.
My post wasn't from the standpoint of either political practicality or utilitarianism, and probably didn't maximize for either. I was trying to work through the implications of my individualist moral system in a complicated situation where it isn't what the relevant actors are actually following.
My prediction is that the Israelis will never compensate the Palestinians whose land they seized — from their standpoint, why should they? They, like many other people, are doing morality in terms of groups not individuals. The Palestinians' group had been killing members of their group, had invaded with the objective of killing or driving out all members of their group, so after defeating them it was just to take their land.
I haven't found any reference to Israel offering compensation yet — can you point me at some? But in looking for that I came across “The United Nations and Palestinian Refugee Property Compensation” by Michael R. Fischbach, Journal of Palestine Studies , Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2002), pp. 34-50. It has a fascinating account of attempts by UN people to calculate the value of land seized in 1948. Most of it was aimed at a total figure, but at least some of the data needed to figure out what Arab refugee was owed how much apparently still exists, which I didn't expect. Of course, the original land owners are almost all dead by now, so one would also need data on the identity of their heirs to do what I argued, in terms of individual rights, should be done.
Another interesting point is that one of the things blocking agreement shortly after the war was that the Israeli representatives wanted the value of Jewish land seized by Arab countries, in particular in the West Bank, which at that point was controlled by Jordan, set off against the value of Arab land seized by Israel. That made sense in terms of group rights but not in terms of individual rights.
You wrote 'On the other hand, a considerable majority of the Arab population of what is now Israel was forced out by the 1948 war and kept out thereafter. '. Most of those people have subsequently died of old age; 1948 was 75 years ago, and most of them weren't infants. Yes, their heirs deserve compensation for lost property, but you're discussing inherited rights to residency or citizenship. Can you provide an expanded argument for that -- with pros and cons?
As I hoped would be clear from my previous post — of course there is no guarantee that someone who read this one also read that — I don't believe that groups, including governments, have rights, so don't think there are rights to citizenship. In terms of my argument a random citizen of Sweden or India has the same right to buy land in Israel from a willing seller and live on it as a citizen of Israel does and nobody has a right to vote, since I don't think there is a moral (as opposed to a pragmatic) case for democracy.
> any more than it is wrong to shoot back at someone shooting at me from behind a hostage
That's an interesting issue, because if the police hit you while aiming for a hostage taker, you may *indeed* feel entitled to compensation from the police. If you die, there's no way to render compensation to you, and as a result I am not sure how else to categorize it than as a wrong, an involuntary one at that.
Hostage situations have a long and well-thought-through theory and practice, since it is such a common thing for criminal operations to do. Here are a couple examples of hostage situations where the police found themselves subject to public censure after accidentally shooting hostages while aiming for the hostage takers:
The first one came up in Dog Day Afternoon, a movie which addresses hostage situations in a serious way. Perhaps it's role is as the moral counterweight to Die Hard.
Here's another hostage situation which ended very badly, this time through a more forgivable failure:
Like you said, none of this is relevant; the parties involved are not thinking according to hostage ethics. The fact that they declared war is very meaningful because terrorism is handled under enhanced criminal law, but war is carried out under the Geneva conventions. The break from hostage situation thinking was very explicit and I am with you in questioning it.
I disagree that this is a question of individual rights vs 'government' rights, a false dichotomy. In a modern democracy, the government is composed of the citizens, all of them. Government is the crude mechanism we use to manage a country composed of individuals, who have individual rights.
I have a right to exclude a violent intruder from my home. I also have the right to exclude a non-violent intruder, if he is unwelcome. A government has a similar right to exclude non-citizens, as an extension of the individual right to exclude unwelcome intruders, if the citizens agree. The entire nation is, in extension, my home.
Some years back I wrote a lengthy post on this topic, is anyone is interested.
Your argument breaks down if you also take into account the rights of your neighbors who want to sell or rent their property to a foreigner you consider unwelcomed, and / or to have him as a neighbor.
No, it doesn't. Property ownership is not one, single thing. Perhaps you have heard of the 'bundle of rights' to property? It's quite possible to own, for example, the surface rights to build a home, without owning the subsurface rights to mine for minerals which are owned by someone else. Basic real estate law here.
The US government is the collective owner of certain rights, granted to it by a charter, voted on by the states and inhabitants at the time the charter was written. Citizens voluntarily gave up certain things in order to gain certain things. All real estate property sold since then in the US is subject to those limitations.
It's one thing to talk about philosophy and ideal worlds. Our world has a history which includes agreements made many generations ago, with everything since then built on top of them.
"Citizens voluntarily gave up certain things in order to gain certain things."
This is factually incorrect, this never happened. What actually happened is that a long time ago, a small group of long dead men, declared that every property owner in a half of a continent has to pay them and obey them. And can vote once in awhile if they want in a popularity contest of wannabe criminals who will violate their property rights in the next term. And so on ad infinitum.
But even if your neighbors voluntarily gave up some rights to the government (which they never did), how exactly and why you acquired a right to exclude people you consider unwelcomed from your neighbors property and not vice versa? If you have such a right, why hasn't your neighbor who welcomes people you consider unwelcomed, and maybe considers that the people you welcome are unwelcomed?
If you are in Europe, Asia or Africa, you are basically correct. But in the US, we are the descendants of the conquerors, or voluntary migrants into this system. (Excluding Natives and Blacks, obviously). The governing structures were designed by the people on the ground at that time. There is no ancient warlord class in the US unless you consider the entire White population as such.
As for your second paragraph, it's all part of a contractual system that has ongoing force. You appear to be arguing from an 'anti-contractarian' standpoint. Or, perhaps since there was not 100% signed and co-signed buy-in, the contract is not valid? Yes, I have read Lysander Spooner. Sadly, we live in a fallen world, with limited resources, time, and knowledge, and we have to start somewhere. For me, speaking of the US and the constitution, that seems like a convenient place to start.
Does the immoral value of the massacres between Hamas and Israel stem from the intention or the consequences?
Hamas entered Israel with the intention of killing Jews, and is firing thousands of rockets with the intention of killing Jews. The intentions are abominable, but the consequences are weak. There were "only" 1,300 Jewish deaths in the October 7 attack, and very few deaths from rockets, since they were all neutralized by the Iron Dome.
Israel intends to neutralize the Hamas terrorists, which may be morally acceptable. But to do so, Israel has bombed the Gaza Strip, with gigantic consequences, since there are thousands and thousands of civilian victims.
If immorality comes from consequences, as utilitarian morality assumes, then Hamas is less immoral than Israel.
If immorality comes from intentions, as Kantian morality assumes, then Hamas is more immoral than Israel.
It's curious that the left, which is quicker to defend Hamas, uses utilitarian morality.
This is a very balanced take on the subject. Rights are a funny issue, where in general the two prong of "recognizes" / "is enforced" comes into play - I think people think of all rights as 'natural rights', or that a right they feel strongly about must be 'natural', but natural right is supposed to imply that nature itself, whether it be physics or the nature of the Earth or men, enforces it, in which case it's important to recognize it, like the natural right-of-way of large, heavy vehicles in considerable motion. Most other rights seem to be declared and enforced above nature, some being customary and so instantly or reflexively enforced by people (i.e. property against theft) while others being more or less just the explicit declarations of political powers, and therefore all the more whimsically enforced. In this case, I think 'group rights' make about as much sense as individual rights in general, although specifically the 'right' of a defeated people to have their land back isn't a natural right (the closest we get to natural is 'uti possidetis' of trad international law.) - in that case, it might be a right granted by some power, such as the US-in-fact (instead of the US-de-jure of the Constitution.) However, this also suggests that bombing Gaza and telling people to evacuate is pretty much a certain campaign of execution, since in Uti Possidetis unless some stipulation gives them that land back, they're not leaving it, on threat of bombs or not, given that originally those who stayed rather than left and survived were the only ones that got anything.
It is also useful to think of rights as a description of human behavior, which I think is what you are doing. My version of that was, among other things, an earlier post:
yes, historically "rights" do get confused with morals, although they are distinct. I think English is not the only language where there is confluence. The idea of rights is that these are the things that are enforced because they are right to enforce. With natural rights, I think there is more confusion here, because there becomes a confusion about who actually enforces them, and whether they are 'right' in the moral sense if they are in practice unenforceable. But that's Carlyle ("before we consider the rights of man, we must consider the mights of man" I think was his phrasing.)
Because of this, I would tend to ignore the moral part of rights, since in our world there are so many different systems of justice that it's not possible to intuitively grasp the morality of things others may consider right or 'rights', instead one has to look at people's behavior; whether they do enforce them, or more generally, whether they are enforced or not.
One needs to look at the moral category in order to decide how to act, what acts you might take are right or wrong. If you don't believe that people have a right to their property there is no reason not to steal it if you are reasonably sure of getting away with doing so.
People disagree, of course, about what rights people have, more generally about moral questions, but almost everyone actually believes in the general idea that some acts are right and some wrong. Those who do not believe that we describe as psychopaths.
To be honest, I'm not sure it would be correct to describe such a person as a psychopath - a psychopath (the older term for anti-social personality disorder?) refers to someone lacking certain innate empathic traits that are necessary to read or understand other people's emotions. Emotion can play a role in morality (esp. moral feeling, but contra Hume feeling isn't morality) but is unrelated to your ability to make moral decisions (i.e. be a moral agent.) So while a psychopath would be nigh-impossible to emotionally manipulate into moral action, their lack of empathy doesn't make moral agency impossible (or even improbable;) nor does it therefore excuse them from social expectations towards morays. While I used to say that such a person (who doesn't believe in right and wrong) is 'evil', I think that isn't correct either. I do not think a person's judgments towards action (in Aristotle's sense) happen without morality; "this is right"/"this is good" can have shades of utility or necessity, but the will does not move towards anything but the good. Thus the more likely case in the world in general is that evil people have a distorted formation of right and wrong, where most categories fall into different places, one reason why it is easy for someone who is anti-social to be evil (because we adjudge about half of morality to pertain to interpersonal relations) -- they are unlikely to be taught by anyone, especially in our society, what is right and wrong, but are expected to pick it up, or in the case of classic cases of serial killers, actively taught by their parents a kind of anti-morality (through rounds of neglect and punishment) where the only thing that is right is what makes you feel powerful. If however, an anti-social person can still be loyal, they can still be good, since all good flows from obedience to a good person, and loyalty to them indeed calls them to obedience if they are able. (Lewis plays with this concept in That Hideous Strength.)
I do think there is a tendency of some people to call those whose map of right and wrong differ extremely 'evil' without first examining that map, or if we're to get into spirituality, whether indeed such a person has a conscience. In my view, a person who does not believe some acts are right and others are wrong is harmless (except towards themselves?) because their will will remain unmoved, except perhaps towards mere bodily urges. Perhaps the worst such a person could become is someone like Gollum - the worst danger you might have is getting between him and some little thing he wants in his hand or belly.
If I understand the history of land purchases correctly, the British never allowed high-value land sales (by anyone to anyone) because of glaring inconsistencies in (and general messiness of) the Ottoman land registry resulting in rampant fraud (sellers not having proper title, not disclosing long-term tenants, etc.). This actually made the situation worse, because it created a black market for land, with sales contracts not registered anywhere, resulting in even more fraud.
“If someone decides to play Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at my head instead of his, one chance in six of firing, I still get to knock it out of his hand. On the other hand, anyone who flies an airplane anywhere close to me is imposing a very small probability of crashing through my roof and killing me; that does not give me a right to forbid airplane flights. I do not claim to be able to prove moral claims; both of those are reports of moral intuitions, I suspect widely shared.”
It is not necessary to moralise these claims. One can explain them first and foremost as objective consequences of applying libertarianism. The tacit theory of liberty that libertarianism presupposes, or entails, can be explicitly stated as “the absence of interpersonal initiated constraints on preference satisfaction” (more handily, but less precisely, “the absence of initiated imposed costs”). But put aside the explanation of that theory for a moment.
When perfect liberty is not possible, we have to weigh any clashing constraints. Playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s head is a huge initiated constraint on the victim’s preferences as regards what is done with respect to his head. Not allowing such behaviour is a relatively tiny constraint on the would-be perpetrator. Allowing aeroplane overflights is a tiny constraint on the preference for safety of the people it overflies. Disallowing all aeroplane overflights would be a huge initiated constraint on all of the people who prefer to fly.
But is this not doing an interpersonal comparison between initiated constraints in terms of the disutility they cause? (Interpersonal utility comparisons of any sort being something that economists generally try to avoid if possible, as being unscientific and subjective.) That can, at least largely and in principle, be avoided by doing a type of intrapersonal comparison instead. Throughout your lifetime you will find yourself on different sides of clashes of initiated imposed costs (such as aeroplane overflights). The question that you then ask yourself is: which relevant general rule is likely to least initiate an imposed cost on me over my lifetime? Apart from some lunatics or any empirically misinformed people (although that could occasionally be a majority) the answer is likely to be very close to the same for everyone. (For a more detailed philosophical explanation and defence of this theory, see https://jclester.substack.com/p/eleutheric-conjectural-libertarianism and https://jclester.substack.com/p/avoiding-interpersonal-utility-comparisons.)
You write 'Hence it is not a rights violation to keep a Palestinian Arab known to want to kill Jews, for example one who was part of the October 7th Hamas raid, far from areas inhabited by Jews.'
Who is going to keep the murderous Arab far away from areas inhabited by Jews? The state of Israel? If so, I think it could be argued that legitimising such actions - any actions - of that state is in itself a violation of individual rights, albeit different ones such as taxation.
Also, what if the Arab lives close to the state border where Jews live close to the Israeli side of the border (such as is the case with Gaza and Jerusalem, where Jews and violent Arabs live in close proximity to each other, only separated by a state border). Is the Israeli state justified in taking extra-territorial action to move the murderous Arab further away from the border?
My own view is that there is neither justification for the existence of the state of Israel (nor of any other state, for that matter), nor justification for pre-emptive action such as having a state move the Arab far away. As for the gun-to-the-head metaphor, I think the threat of merely having an anti-Jewish person living next door to is not quite enough to warrant it as there are too many uncertainties: The Arab may have changed his mind, he may take a liking to the Jews inhabiting his neighbourhood, he may be there to take action against someone in a different location (i.e., not against Jews nearby). Etc, etc. So the situation is not as clear cut as a gun to the head. Obviously, if there is proof that the Arab has taken active part in the Hamas raid, he should be prosecuted accordingly. But that should be based on action actually taken by him, not on any intended action.
I am talking of individual rights. If there is someone living close to me who I have good reason to believe will try to kill me, I am entitled to use force against him to prevent him from doing so. Do you disagree? That does not require any state to exist.
It will be difficult for a single individual to prevent someone who wants to kill him from doing so, which is an argument for allying with lots of other people he wants to kill to prevent it, but that does not require the existence of a state or a belief that states are justified.
I agree, and I think I said, that application of the principle is hard. All I am trying to establish is that there is not a conclusive moral argument against restrictions on migration in either the case of Gazans immigrating to Israel in the future or of Jews immigrating to Palestine in the past. In both cases the moral argument depends on facts.
No, I do not disagree that you are entitled to use force against, say, your Hamas neighbour to prevent him from killing you, although I would have to qualify that. Can I use barbed wire and broken glass on the fence facing the neighbour, and/or hire with a security company to guard me and my property? Yes. Can I burn his house down as a preemptive measure? No.
When you write that the Israelis have a legitimate right to restrict, to some degree, the settlement in Israel of those presently living in Gaza or the West Bank, it is not clear to me how you suggest this can be done in practice without violating the rights of the Palestinians. Without state intervention it is surely up to the individual Jew whether he/she would want to let or sell a residential property to a member of Hamas?
I agree with your premise that you have a right to knock a gun out of the hand of someone threatening you with it, or even killing the person doing it. However, that is an extreme threat and I am not sure that the mere presence of a Hamas member in your vicinity qualifies as being equally extreme.
You have proved your point that there is no conclusive moral argument against restricting migration in the current conflict as it depends on the extremity of the threat. However, I would be interested to hear what tangible, specific immigration restrictions you think might be applied without violating the moral rights of a large number of people.
Like you say, it is a hard question, but I believe you like hard questions. :-)
Your summary of history is correct as far as it goes, but Israel and the neighboring countries have been contested territory for much, much longer than that. The Jews took it from the Caananites in about the 15th century BC. (The date the Jews use is somewhat earlier; my estimate is based on the inference that most of the miracles depicted in "The Ten Commandments" were effects of the Thera volcano, which destroyed the Minoan civilization then.) Basically, the Jews owned what is now Israel and its territories until the Romans invaded them beginning in 36 BC. The Romans and then the Byzantines ruled there until the Muslims conquered Arabia and started pushing north into the empire shortly after their founding in the 7th century. From that point it changed hands many times until the Muslims had pretty much finished ethnically cleansing it of Jews in the 19th century.
Thus those who claim the Muslims were there first are using a lookback period convenient to them, while the Jews simply use a longer period. The same can be said of lots of other disputed areas; eastern Germany/western Poland and the Balkans being two more with centuries of conflict behind them.
I don't think it is productive to try to settle a land dispute as long-lasting as those by simply choosing a convenient lookback period and using it because one is about as supportable as the other. If the contesting tribes can't stand to live near each other, I think it would make more sense for one to pay the other off, like your description of the Coase theorem.
But that requires that the sides be able to trust each other. In Islam's case they don't consider it wrong to cheat unbelievers. Biden seems to operate on the same principle in Ukraine. When you have an opponent like that, you simply have to fight until your opponents are either all dead or reduced enough that you think you can deter them.
I always find the “contested land” trope bizarre in this case. This part of the Levant doesn’t have a strikingly unusual history of political contestation compared to its neighbors. The rest of the Levant and Egypt had quite similar trajectories prior to modern Zionism. Anatolia had an even more dramatic change that occurred much more recently. I think the Greek claim to Anatolia is distinctly stronger than was the Zionist claim to Israel (still mostly ridiculous, but better). Maybe Persia had less ethnic contestation (if you discount the impact of greater linguistic distance from Arabic).
All of which is beside the point, since the most recent *Jewish* contestation of the area was by the Hasmonean Kingdom, which you may note failed literally more than two thousand years ago. There’s no particular reason to think the Ashkenazim or Sephardim are substantially descended from people who lived in the area at the time of the Arab conquest. Certainly neither ethnic group at the time had any satisfactory reason to believe so. I don’t think expanding the lookback period actually helps the Jewish claim here.
I am not arguing on the basis of ethnic land claims but of individual land claims. The Greek claim to Anatolia, from my standpoint, would have to depend on demonstrating that present-day Greeks were the heirs of land-owners displaced by later conquerors, Persian or Islamic. I think it quite unlikely that most of the heirs of the people who lived in Anatolia when it was Greek currently live in Greece — I expect that most of them currently live in Turkey. Conquest rarely moves populations — there is a reason why the inhabitants of that area were referred to as "Romans" centuries after the Byzantines lost it.
I do think it likely that the current Ashkenazi and Sephardim contain a sizable fraction of the descendants of the Jews who lived in Israel when the Romans conquered it, although surely not all. But I don't think that has much relevance to the current situation.
Thank you for the reply. My critique here was directed against RatMan29 rather than your post. I agree that most of the descendants of Greeks from upland Anatolia were presumably assimilated into the “Turk” identity. I also would expect that Ashkenazim and Sephardim have substantial (if I had to place a bet in ignorance, I would guess dominant) ancestry from people who lived in the region at the time of the *Roman* conquest, and also that this doesn’t (well, shouldn’t) have much bearing on anything. I wouldn’t be too overly shocked if they had substantial ancestry from people who lived there at the time of the *Arab* conquest either, I just don’t think it’s likely that they knew that or had any compelling reason to believe that during 19th or early 20th century (although if this is false, I invite correction).
Just spitballing here: What if the MultiNational Force of (and?) Observers, now in charge of keeping the neutral zones on the Sinai Peninsula free from both Federation and Romulan warships, extended their duties over the Gaza Strip? For that matter, the MFO might extend West, as well, encompassing the entire Peninsula. Could colonial and imperial powers imposing peace from outside do any worse than the locals?
Strangely, the Sinai showed up in photos from Earth orbit -- Gemini missions, LandSat, others -- as desert before 1967, increasingly green pastures from 1967 until about 1982, when the desert yellow sands started to dominate the photos, all over again. Climate change, I suppose.
Interesting post.
Your contention that a polity has the right to exclude potential immigrants who want to cause harm, even if only in the far future at the ballot box comes up a lot in the discussion of (normally) Muslim immigration to the UK (and probably other western countries). To what extent does / should this right actually hold, particularly in the case of 'quietist' authoritarian groups who campaign for illiberal ends within a democratic structure?
Some examples:
Those planning violence - excluding them seems clearly justified.
'Quietist' authoritarians - would appear to be excludable under your arguments? This seems very hard in practice and is certainly not current policy.
Proselytisers / ideas - If it is wrong to exercise the right of free movement to harm other people or deprive them of their rights, is it not wrong to exercise the right of free speech to encourage others to do the same? And if we would compromise on free movement in the above cases, why would we not also compromise on free expression (for citizens, not just potential immigrants)?
It seems hard to arrive at a practical policy that does not entail placing potential immigrants into 'risk buckets' with different restrictions for different groups, however this also seems deeply illiberal.
I agree that the principle I am arguing for is hard to apply in practice, and likely to be used to justify bad policies. But I think it's clearly true in the simple case, knocking the gun out of the hand of the person trying to shoot me, so it can't be entirely false.
Part of the problem at present is that almost everyone believes in democracy. So immigrants with bad views don't have to plan to kill anyone to be a threat, they can just vote to have the government kill or otherwise oppress people. That makes anyone whose moral views substantially differ from yours a potential threat.
My own view is that such arguments do not justify immigration restrictions in any case less extreme than Hamas members wanting to come into Israel. But I don't like to claim to have compelling arguments when I don't, so thought I needed to point out a hole in the moral argument for open borders.
There are both practical and moral concerns wrapped up in all of this.
I think for both practical and moral reasons that a polity should be able to exclude whoever they want from their country.
Morally I think they should be able to exclude those who disagree with the cultural understanding of the receiving country, especially if the potential immigrants would be against the very rules that allowed them to come in and take over (free immigration, right to vote, freedom of expression, etc.).
Practically, I think they should be able to exclude anyone they want for whatever reasons. Unfortunately, much of the world doesn't get along well with the rest of the world, and the most stable configurations appear to be where these groups are separated by what we call national boundaries. These boundaries can be effectively locked down so as to prevent the intermingling of groups.
In the cases where these boundaries are not enforced, it gets a lot more complicated. I don't think it's morally acceptable (or usually practically possible) to retroactively deny admittance to a group that's already there. There are variations, and someone who snuck in a week ago is definitely different from someone allowed to come in 50 years ago. At some point, though, it's not possible to remove them.
I consider myself fairly libertarian, but not when it comes to immigration. The free movement of people is fine when they have shared cultures and values, but definitely doesn't work when they don't. It should be up to the receiving group to decide if the values are similar enough.
"whoever they want" assumes that polities want things. Part of the point of my previous point was that they don't, that that's a metaphor and a misleading one.
Can I translate your point into "it is a good thing if some people, those who disagree with the cultural understanding of the receiving country, especially if the potential immigrants would be against the very rules that allowed them to come in and take over (free immigration, right to vote, freedom of expression, etc.) are excluded from a country"? That avoids what I see as the misleading implication of treating a polity as if it was a person and wanted things.
Doesn’t that just kick the can down the road? If it is incorrect to talk about a polity “wanting things” why is it not equally incorrect to talk about “the cultural understanding of the receiving country”?
Whenever Ilhan Omar opens her mouth, it seems to me that admitting a ton of Somalis was a right stupid idea. But the Somalis who are here now would probably disagree. And like it or not, their input must now be considered part of “the cultural understanding of the receiving country”.
Liberalism worked fine between first world countries but doesn't work for the low IQ Global South.
Just admit it and move on. Harder for Israel because they are in the middle of the global south.
You think that the countries of South America have a low average IQ? I don't know what the evidence is, but I wouldn't expect it.
So far as Africa is concerned, have you read and do you think you can rebut the arguments offered by Chanda Chisala? I discussed them and provided links in a post some time ago:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/race-gender-and-iq
His arguments provide reason to be skeptical of published claims about national IQ such as those at https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country/
That site does not seem to provide any explanation of how they get their numbers, on that or other things, which strikes me as a reason not to rely on them. Their climate change page takes current orthodoxy about what policies are good or bad for granted.
The Web seems to have a consensus that South American countries have average IQs between 80 and 90. This might all come from one flawed source (e.g. Suriname seems to always be at the top with 90) but it might also be consistent because it’s true. I’d be interested to hear what evidence you would accept, given that even making such a claim these days is so fraught with peril.
I think I would want a link to an article that described clearly how its numbers were calculated. That still wouldn't make me sure it was right, but it would shift my view.
My impression, from following discussions of these issues, is that the evidence on average IQ of different racial groups in the US is pretty solid, but I'm much less confident on international comparisons. It's too easy for a "fact" to be based on one article by a researcher who knows what result he wants. I've seen quite a lot of that in the climate context, have been working on an article I expect to post in another week or two about an important example, where a fact many people in that argument take for granted is due to a simplifying assumption that badly biases the result in a predictable direction. I've emailed the lead author and will see if I am missing something.
In the IQ case, the political pressure makes it hard to know what is true. Not only is it unpopular to produce evidence for IQ differences, it is unpopular to seriously argue about the subject, so we don't get much good critical examination of arguments for racial differences as well as arguments against.
Part of what I like about Chisala, who is arguing against claims of low African IQ, is that he does take the other side seriously and as a result can do a more persuasive job of arguing against it than I had seen in the past from more orthodox critics.
David,
This IQ argument made by forumposter123 is very easy to dismiss. There is no evidence that the group IQs mean anything at all. For example India has average IQ of 76 and yet, Indians in USA tend to be highest IQ people who are very liberal and very productive members of society.
Also, there is no link between IQ and Liberalism either. Is Russia with its 90+ average IQ more liberal and more freedom loving India with average IQ of 76 ? I do not think so.
Also low IQ parents can produce high IQ children. A lot of people including your own grandparents weren't particularly intellectuals and yet their arrival in USA produced some fine minds from which we have benefited.
I think the real problem here is Islamic ideology. It is indeed an ideology that competes with and against western values.
One interpretation of the examples you cite is that the group IQ figures are wrong, which is what Chisala argues. A different one is that they are correct but group IQ does not predict the things you mention. For your Indian example the obvious explanation is that Indians in the US are a very non-random selection from Indians in India.
Low IQ parents can produce high IQ children but they are much less likely to than high IQ parents, as demonstrated by the two generations of my family for which we have relevant data. For all I know my grandparents had high IQ's as well, but not in an environment which led them to be intellectuals.
Having property claims go back decades is at best debatable. At least in Anglo-American law, we have the principle of adverse possession, under which, if I act for a number of years as if something were my property, it becomes (in some measure) my property: If, for example, I walk across your yard to get to the road, eventually I acquire an easement that permits me to go on walking across your yard in perpetuity. This is probably a good legal principle, if we want to avoid ongoing conflicts.
If we aren't trying to achieve some Platonic ideal of justice under which all wrongs are set right (and, for example, any survivors of the Canaanites have claims against both the Jews and the Arabs), but simply to settle current conflicts and get on with our lives, at some point we need to be ready to stop entertaining old claims.
I thought that the principle of adverse possession required the person whose property you're walking across to not do anything to try and prevent you from doing it? Am I mistaken there?
The legal specifics of adverse possession may not apply exactly in this case. But I think the broader legal principle that some rights are established by time needs to be considered.
I'm not sure which claims William is talking about. The Jews have a very ancient claim to the land, but even aside from adverse possession it isn't clear how that translates to individual claims.
My guess is that he is thinking of the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 and had their land seized, and that doesn't fit the legal category of adverse possession at all — robbery doesn't establish title, with very limited exceptions (stolen goods sold in a public market in daylight at one point in English law).
There might be a practical problem in determining who owned what plot of land and who the heirs are — I don't know whether the necessary records survive. In the worst case you could auction off the land to convert it to money, then divide the money evenly among the descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1948. You can probably do better than that.
Maybe I misunderstood your arguments, but I think some of your arguments seems to me still see moral issues in terms of group rights.
You wrote: “Hence it is not a rights violation to keep a Palestinian Arab known to want to kill Jews, for example one who was part of the October 7th Hamas raid, far from areas inhabited by Jews.”
But WHO is the (natural or legal) person having rights to keep a Palestinian out of Israel if an Israeli citizen is willing to sell or rent his land to that Palestinian? Any unwilling Israeli citizen who is suspicious of the trustworthiness of a Palestinian definitely has the moral right to refuse to sell or rent him any land. So, is it the Israeli government that, like any government that forbids free trade, has the moral right to ban any free trade of lands in Israel between a willing Israeli citizen and a Palestinian willing to immigrate?
It seems that you meant the WHO is the government – an “agent” of a group, whether it’s a democracy or a dictatorship -- as you wrote in the following:
“It follows from this argument that the Israelis have a legitimate right to restrict, to some degree, the settlement in Israel of those presently living in Gaza or the West Bank.” “The same argument that implies that Israelis have some right to restrict immigration of Palestinians to Israel also implies that the Palestinians had some right to restrict immigration of Jews to Palestine.”
This, it seems to me, is an argument through the viewpoint of group rights, perhaps for practical reasons but not as a principle. I can, in practice, approve of it. (Taiwan, the place I live, as a group faces a similar situation w.r.t. China and the government has very strict restrictions over the immigration or even visits by mainlander Chinese, a measure of which I approve given the possible military threats from China.) But I think this is only a practical argument and cannot be in principle reconciled with the Libertarian view of individual rights.
My comments are all about individual rights. Of course, if I have a right to do something, for example to keep a Hamas terrorist far from me, I also have a right to organize a bunch of people to do so, but that's still an individual right not a group right. It doesn't depend on whether a majority of Israelis or the politicians they have elected agree with me. If you are my neighbor and want to sell some land to someone who wants to murder me and let him live on it I have an individual right to use force to prevent him from getting close enough to kill me.
There might also be some other unusual property about the externalities that could be generated from free immigration from Gaza or the West Bank. And this may allow us to cast doubt on even the legitimacy of some “self-defense” actions in the near certainty case (that is, whether the social net benefit of using forthright force is positive in that case). This leads to my concern about the general implication of your argument on the stability of Anarcho-Capitalism.
If there is anything unusual about the possible externalities from the Palestinian immigration, then, I suspect more or less speculatively that it has something to do with status competition, group/collective identity, and the endowment effect as often seen in an ethnic conflict. I take the following three assumptions as known facts shaped by evolutionary selection: 1) People care about not only absolute/real resources they own but also their relative status in the society in order to (maybe not self-consciously) compete for mating opportunities and hence reproductive success. 2) Human is good at dividing the world into Us v. Them and identifying himself with or being altruistic towards some particular ethnic or cultural groups as if that helps his genes spreading. 3) Human tends to fight harder, as a commitment strategy hard-wired into human brains, for the property he views as his endowment/territory than for the one he senses as originally others’. (You have, I believe, discussed them all in your Machinery or Economics and Evolutionary Psychology.)
Being sensitive to Us v. Them, with “Us” being good and smart and “Them” evil and stupid, it may be cost-effective for people to apply statistical discrimination in making decision regarding social interactions. Competition for status at the individual level thus could be influenced by the stereotype labeled to one’s group. So while status competition is usually confined to being local in terms of social networks or geographic vicinity, group identity might make an individual feel that his group’s competition against a rival group for relative collective status or collective dignity has some “local” effects for him even if he personally does not closely interact with any individual members of the rival group. Now adding in the endowment/territory effects: If many individual members of both groups involved in the conflict honestly regard lands in dispute as “their” (the group’s) territory, and they have strong group identity so commit themselves to guarding this endowment, then can using pre-emptive force at the individual level by any one side deter future hawk/hawk interactions? While a commitment to fighting hard by one side against the intruders will raise the absolute level of the expected cost of invasion by the other side, it could also raise the expected relative status of those “intruders” if they, feeling endowment-deprived and treated unfairly, also commit to fighting to recover their “lost territory” (Keeping fighting may prove either that you are superior if you win or that you are tough to play with even if you lose). So it is possible that committing to fighting by one side will not deter the counter-attack from the other side just by raising their expected cost of attacking, but might instead also raise their expected net benefit (i.e., lower their expected net cost) of counter-attack (The raise of collective relative status could be a benefit to an individual fighter). So while a hawk/hawk interaction is costly to both sides, can there be any agreement to legal rules reached in the long run? Could Anarcho-Capitalism be free from oscillation between violent conflicts and ad hoc or strategic bargaining/“peace treaty”? As this sort of competition is basically zero-sum, it is not clear to me that using pre-emptive force at the individual level by any one side will make the status quo territorial control become a Schelling point, or will direct the intermittent hawk/hawk conflicts to converge to a long term equilibrium (whether it’s efficient or not). Of course, even if what I said is plausible, I don’t know whether, compared to a society with a government and a state, a stateless society will be worse or less stable with respect to the problems I mentioned. And, as I understand it, welfare economics is about the trade-off between two alternatives and the betterness of a choice.
A side remark: I think the recent Hamas attack has posed a dilemma to Israel (in terms of a group). On the one hand, for the interest of its majority, Israel needs to fight hard against Hamas to signal its commitment to defending itself in order to deter any future attempt like the Oct 7th one. On the other hand, Israeli’s attacks on Gaza risk intensifying ethnic identity of all Palestinians, Arabs, and even the Muslims around the world, and leading to a possible endless (at least in the “short run”) hawk/hawk game of mutual threat.
This might be a late response, and I divide it into two posts since it is a bit too long.
By using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case to test the individualistic moral system that you hold, you “point out a hole in the moral argument for open borders.”
As I understand that your “post wasn't from the standpoint of either political practicality or utilitarianism, and probably didn't maximize for either,” I think your individualistic argument might have some general implications beyond the open border issue on the efficiency and stability of Anarcho-Capitalism, about which I’ve some thoughts as follows.
First concerning the efficiency problem. You believe that an individual has moral rights of using pre-emptive force against anybody who is living next door who the individual has “good reason” to believe is life-threatening to him. Then, in a world with many uncertainties, it’s possible that if we want to guard our property with high certainty, we would have to adopt a strategy of group profiling, e.g., to keep out a man by force from our neighborhood based on his ethnic group. We are, it seems, relying on a unilaterally (and privately) enforced inalienability rule to protect our own interests. How likely can the strategy of using force against others by statistical discrimination be not only private-interest serving but also socially efficient (as a clear-cut self-defense action probably is in a near certainty situation)? Assuming the probability of an immigrant intending to expel or kill me is 60%, the benefit of my pre-emptively killing an ill-intentioned immigrant is B (= my willingness to pay for my life + savings from not having to fight in the future by deterring any future similarly intentioned immigrants), the cost of my killing an immigrant (his WTP for his life) is C, and the benefit of killing an innocent immigrant is zero (because he was not dangerous so killing him gets no benefits from my avoiding being killed). Then the expected net benefit of killing a random immigrant in a pre-emptive fashion is 0.6(B-C) + 0.4(0-C). That is, the social expected net benefit is positive if and only if B>1.67C.
If we are indiscriminately concerned with potentially high-damaging neighborhood activities, then it seems that we might also use such force against many those other than the potentially hostile immigrants. A chemical factory nearby (or, “in my backyard”), for example, could have some probability of causing deadly explosion incidents. So, may I or should I burn the factory down as a pre-emptive measure if the factory fails to show me a reputable safety record or if I think it’s the cheapest way for me to prevent any such possible damages (a question similar to one raised by Nicolai)? Suppose the probability that that chemical factory will cause a life-threatening incident is 1%, then the expected net benefit of my burning down a random chemical factory in a pre-emptive fashion is 0.01(B-C) + 0.99(0-C). That is, the social expected net benefit is positive if and only if B>100C. [B: the benefit of burning the factory down when it’s dangerous; C: the cost of burning it down (= loss of the gains from trade between the chemical factory and its customers, i.e., loss of “consumer surplus + producer surplus” from the chemicals trade). The benefit of burning the chemical factory down when it is not life-threatening is zero.]
If the hypothetical numbers given above are not too unrealistic for the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and for a typical chemical factory, then using pre-emptive force seems to be comparatively more legitimate in the case of Palestinian immigrants than for the chemical factory, at least if we take the approximately utilitarian criterion (the efficiency criterion) as an important ethical principle. However, the low requirement of B>1.67C for having positive social net benefits from killing a random immigrant or, equivalently, a 40% probability of killing an innocent person, may be still too callous to be acceptable for many people’s moral intuition (a viewpoint that may be consistent with the observation of most people’s willingness to pay for motor vehicle safety in real life). A much smaller probability such as 1/10,000 of mistakenly killing an innocent may be more consistent with our daily risk-taking behavior, and with this the social expected net benefit of killing a random immigrant is positive as long as B is approximately greater than C -- a condition almost the same as that for self-defense in the certainty case. But I do not know how close this small chance is to the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian case.
Besides using naked force, however, we have options of bribing the immigrants to leave, moving away ourselves, or allying with other individuals to buy and own a lot of lands to make sure that they are not sold or rent out to any potentially hostile immigrants (admittedly, allying for preventing the externalities can be a public good). While these options may produce ambiguous efficiency performance for the immigration case, the above numerical examples have shown that, for many “ordinary” externalities like the chemical factory, it’s probably more efficient to adopt the property rule or liability rule that allows for free contracting between the polluters and the pollutees than to use a unilaterally enforced inalienability rule. In spite of this, why should I, in an stateless society with private law, agree to either of these rule instead of just using naked force (by myself or allied with a bunch of talented gangsters) if I believe that it’s cheaper or more productive for me to resolve the quarrel between you and me on a property or an externality (just as any talented mugger or robber does)? So even if there exist some equilibria, some of them might be on a path dominated by a few criminal cartels with increasing returns to specialization and scale in using force, where everybody at his optimum recognizes the special rights of the criminal gangsters and the ordinary people drop their commitment to claiming some particular rights against the gangsters. (While I believe you have discussed to a certain extent about the problem like this in your Machinery, I still bring it to attention because I think this problem is of fundamental importance for Anarcho-Capitalism and the individualistic moral system you propose.)
Or one may argue that the "practical" consideration for forbidding free immigration can be justified on the ground that some possible externalities (e.g., violent attacks) may be generated by way of free exchange of lands between individual Israelis and Palestinians. And this consideration may not contradict individual rights.
The West has an idea about how to handle forced land acquisition, for future cases (being against it, forcefully). Nobody seems to have a good plan for dealing with already successful land grabs. Looking at Crimea, I think we've decided that it was justified enough, and too hard to reverse - both practical instead of moral concerns. The Russian controlled vote afterward to justify being annexed by Russia was a fig-leaf that met the accepted standards but really only confirmed what everyone already knew - that the Russians had successfully taken it and would not give it back. Russians appear to be a true majority in Crimea, and with the naval base and other major installations, it was significantly controlled by Russia already.
My best guess is that what actually happens is a combination of "Might makes right" and a term that used to be very common in European diplomacy but would be considered morally wrong now - "fait accompli." That could be translated "something that's already done" and was used to signify when some group/country took an action that changed the political landscape and would be difficult to reverse, especially without sparking a major war. Russia taking Crimea was definitely an example of this. The problem with the fait accompli approach is that the counter is to believably signal that you will use disproportionate force, typically go to total war, if they attempt it. I would say that this was one of the causes of WWI, and was definitely a direct cause of WWII (the Allies clearly signaled to Hitler what would happen if he kept invading countries, drawing the line at Poland).
I think WWII and the US/Western European response to Communist uprisings supported by the USSR is the reason that we don't talk about fait accompli like we used to. We are absolutely signaling that such takeovers are not going to be allowed. But they still totally work. What Israel is doing in the West Bank with settlements is absolutely the same idea. When one side wants something and diplomacy isn't working, it's often quite effective to just do it anyway, when one side has the power to do so. It's quite dangerous though. Russia played with fire again with the more recent invasion, and Israel likely is as well.
My post wasn't from the standpoint of either political practicality or utilitarianism, and probably didn't maximize for either. I was trying to work through the implications of my individualist moral system in a complicated situation where it isn't what the relevant actors are actually following.
My prediction is that the Israelis will never compensate the Palestinians whose land they seized — from their standpoint, why should they? They, like many other people, are doing morality in terms of groups not individuals. The Palestinians' group had been killing members of their group, had invaded with the objective of killing or driving out all members of their group, so after defeating them it was just to take their land.
Israel actually offered some compensation in 1949 and compensation have been on the table during later talks also.
I haven't found any reference to Israel offering compensation yet — can you point me at some? But in looking for that I came across “The United Nations and Palestinian Refugee Property Compensation” by Michael R. Fischbach, Journal of Palestine Studies , Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2002), pp. 34-50. It has a fascinating account of attempts by UN people to calculate the value of land seized in 1948. Most of it was aimed at a total figure, but at least some of the data needed to figure out what Arab refugee was owed how much apparently still exists, which I didn't expect. Of course, the original land owners are almost all dead by now, so one would also need data on the identity of their heirs to do what I argued, in terms of individual rights, should be done.
Another interesting point is that one of the things blocking agreement shortly after the war was that the Israeli representatives wanted the value of Jewish land seized by Arab countries, in particular in the West Bank, which at that point was controlled by Jordan, set off against the value of Arab land seized by Israel. That made sense in terms of group rights but not in terms of individual rights.
You wrote 'On the other hand, a considerable majority of the Arab population of what is now Israel was forced out by the 1948 war and kept out thereafter. '. Most of those people have subsequently died of old age; 1948 was 75 years ago, and most of them weren't infants. Yes, their heirs deserve compensation for lost property, but you're discussing inherited rights to residency or citizenship. Can you provide an expanded argument for that -- with pros and cons?
As I hoped would be clear from my previous post — of course there is no guarantee that someone who read this one also read that — I don't believe that groups, including governments, have rights, so don't think there are rights to citizenship. In terms of my argument a random citizen of Sweden or India has the same right to buy land in Israel from a willing seller and live on it as a citizen of Israel does and nobody has a right to vote, since I don't think there is a moral (as opposed to a pragmatic) case for democracy.
> any more than it is wrong to shoot back at someone shooting at me from behind a hostage
That's an interesting issue, because if the police hit you while aiming for a hostage taker, you may *indeed* feel entitled to compensation from the police. If you die, there's no way to render compensation to you, and as a result I am not sure how else to categorize it than as a wrong, an involuntary one at that.
Hostage situations have a long and well-thought-through theory and practice, since it is such a common thing for criminal operations to do. Here are a couple examples of hostage situations where the police found themselves subject to public censure after accidentally shooting hostages while aiming for the hostage takers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attica_Prison_riot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
The first one came up in Dog Day Afternoon, a movie which addresses hostage situations in a serious way. Perhaps it's role is as the moral counterweight to Die Hard.
Here's another hostage situation which ended very badly, this time through a more forgivable failure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
Like you said, none of this is relevant; the parties involved are not thinking according to hostage ethics. The fact that they declared war is very meaningful because terrorism is handled under enhanced criminal law, but war is carried out under the Geneva conventions. The break from hostage situation thinking was very explicit and I am with you in questioning it.
I disagree that this is a question of individual rights vs 'government' rights, a false dichotomy. In a modern democracy, the government is composed of the citizens, all of them. Government is the crude mechanism we use to manage a country composed of individuals, who have individual rights.
I have a right to exclude a violent intruder from my home. I also have the right to exclude a non-violent intruder, if he is unwelcome. A government has a similar right to exclude non-citizens, as an extension of the individual right to exclude unwelcome intruders, if the citizens agree. The entire nation is, in extension, my home.
Some years back I wrote a lengthy post on this topic, is anyone is interested.
https://hubpages.com/politics/Libertarian-Libertarians-why-open-borders-wrong-private-property-rights
Your argument breaks down if you also take into account the rights of your neighbors who want to sell or rent their property to a foreigner you consider unwelcomed, and / or to have him as a neighbor.
No, it doesn't. Property ownership is not one, single thing. Perhaps you have heard of the 'bundle of rights' to property? It's quite possible to own, for example, the surface rights to build a home, without owning the subsurface rights to mine for minerals which are owned by someone else. Basic real estate law here.
The US government is the collective owner of certain rights, granted to it by a charter, voted on by the states and inhabitants at the time the charter was written. Citizens voluntarily gave up certain things in order to gain certain things. All real estate property sold since then in the US is subject to those limitations.
It's one thing to talk about philosophy and ideal worlds. Our world has a history which includes agreements made many generations ago, with everything since then built on top of them.
"Citizens voluntarily gave up certain things in order to gain certain things."
This is factually incorrect, this never happened. What actually happened is that a long time ago, a small group of long dead men, declared that every property owner in a half of a continent has to pay them and obey them. And can vote once in awhile if they want in a popularity contest of wannabe criminals who will violate their property rights in the next term. And so on ad infinitum.
But even if your neighbors voluntarily gave up some rights to the government (which they never did), how exactly and why you acquired a right to exclude people you consider unwelcomed from your neighbors property and not vice versa? If you have such a right, why hasn't your neighbor who welcomes people you consider unwelcomed, and maybe considers that the people you welcome are unwelcomed?
If you are in Europe, Asia or Africa, you are basically correct. But in the US, we are the descendants of the conquerors, or voluntary migrants into this system. (Excluding Natives and Blacks, obviously). The governing structures were designed by the people on the ground at that time. There is no ancient warlord class in the US unless you consider the entire White population as such.
As for your second paragraph, it's all part of a contractual system that has ongoing force. You appear to be arguing from an 'anti-contractarian' standpoint. Or, perhaps since there was not 100% signed and co-signed buy-in, the contract is not valid? Yes, I have read Lysander Spooner. Sadly, we live in a fallen world, with limited resources, time, and knowledge, and we have to start somewhere. For me, speaking of the US and the constitution, that seems like a convenient place to start.
A quick philosophical question.
Does the immoral value of the massacres between Hamas and Israel stem from the intention or the consequences?
Hamas entered Israel with the intention of killing Jews, and is firing thousands of rockets with the intention of killing Jews. The intentions are abominable, but the consequences are weak. There were "only" 1,300 Jewish deaths in the October 7 attack, and very few deaths from rockets, since they were all neutralized by the Iron Dome.
Israel intends to neutralize the Hamas terrorists, which may be morally acceptable. But to do so, Israel has bombed the Gaza Strip, with gigantic consequences, since there are thousands and thousands of civilian victims.
If immorality comes from consequences, as utilitarian morality assumes, then Hamas is less immoral than Israel.
If immorality comes from intentions, as Kantian morality assumes, then Hamas is more immoral than Israel.
It's curious that the left, which is quicker to defend Hamas, uses utilitarian morality.
This is a very balanced take on the subject. Rights are a funny issue, where in general the two prong of "recognizes" / "is enforced" comes into play - I think people think of all rights as 'natural rights', or that a right they feel strongly about must be 'natural', but natural right is supposed to imply that nature itself, whether it be physics or the nature of the Earth or men, enforces it, in which case it's important to recognize it, like the natural right-of-way of large, heavy vehicles in considerable motion. Most other rights seem to be declared and enforced above nature, some being customary and so instantly or reflexively enforced by people (i.e. property against theft) while others being more or less just the explicit declarations of political powers, and therefore all the more whimsically enforced. In this case, I think 'group rights' make about as much sense as individual rights in general, although specifically the 'right' of a defeated people to have their land back isn't a natural right (the closest we get to natural is 'uti possidetis' of trad international law.) - in that case, it might be a right granted by some power, such as the US-in-fact (instead of the US-de-jure of the Constitution.) However, this also suggests that bombing Gaza and telling people to evacuate is pretty much a certain campaign of execution, since in Uti Possidetis unless some stipulation gives them that land back, they're not leaving it, on threat of bombs or not, given that originally those who stayed rather than left and survived were the only ones that got anything.
In this post I was using rights as a moral category, a description of what I think is morally right or wrong. For an explanation of my view of morals see http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/An%20Argument%20I%20Lost.htm
It is also useful to think of rights as a description of human behavior, which I think is what you are doing. My version of that was, among other things, an earlier post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/a-positive-account-of-rights
yes, historically "rights" do get confused with morals, although they are distinct. I think English is not the only language where there is confluence. The idea of rights is that these are the things that are enforced because they are right to enforce. With natural rights, I think there is more confusion here, because there becomes a confusion about who actually enforces them, and whether they are 'right' in the moral sense if they are in practice unenforceable. But that's Carlyle ("before we consider the rights of man, we must consider the mights of man" I think was his phrasing.)
Because of this, I would tend to ignore the moral part of rights, since in our world there are so many different systems of justice that it's not possible to intuitively grasp the morality of things others may consider right or 'rights', instead one has to look at people's behavior; whether they do enforce them, or more generally, whether they are enforced or not.
One needs to look at the moral category in order to decide how to act, what acts you might take are right or wrong. If you don't believe that people have a right to their property there is no reason not to steal it if you are reasonably sure of getting away with doing so.
People disagree, of course, about what rights people have, more generally about moral questions, but almost everyone actually believes in the general idea that some acts are right and some wrong. Those who do not believe that we describe as psychopaths.
To be honest, I'm not sure it would be correct to describe such a person as a psychopath - a psychopath (the older term for anti-social personality disorder?) refers to someone lacking certain innate empathic traits that are necessary to read or understand other people's emotions. Emotion can play a role in morality (esp. moral feeling, but contra Hume feeling isn't morality) but is unrelated to your ability to make moral decisions (i.e. be a moral agent.) So while a psychopath would be nigh-impossible to emotionally manipulate into moral action, their lack of empathy doesn't make moral agency impossible (or even improbable;) nor does it therefore excuse them from social expectations towards morays. While I used to say that such a person (who doesn't believe in right and wrong) is 'evil', I think that isn't correct either. I do not think a person's judgments towards action (in Aristotle's sense) happen without morality; "this is right"/"this is good" can have shades of utility or necessity, but the will does not move towards anything but the good. Thus the more likely case in the world in general is that evil people have a distorted formation of right and wrong, where most categories fall into different places, one reason why it is easy for someone who is anti-social to be evil (because we adjudge about half of morality to pertain to interpersonal relations) -- they are unlikely to be taught by anyone, especially in our society, what is right and wrong, but are expected to pick it up, or in the case of classic cases of serial killers, actively taught by their parents a kind of anti-morality (through rounds of neglect and punishment) where the only thing that is right is what makes you feel powerful. If however, an anti-social person can still be loyal, they can still be good, since all good flows from obedience to a good person, and loyalty to them indeed calls them to obedience if they are able. (Lewis plays with this concept in That Hideous Strength.)
I do think there is a tendency of some people to call those whose map of right and wrong differ extremely 'evil' without first examining that map, or if we're to get into spirituality, whether indeed such a person has a conscience. In my view, a person who does not believe some acts are right and others are wrong is harmless (except towards themselves?) because their will will remain unmoved, except perhaps towards mere bodily urges. Perhaps the worst such a person could become is someone like Gollum - the worst danger you might have is getting between him and some little thing he wants in his hand or belly.
If I understand the history of land purchases correctly, the British never allowed high-value land sales (by anyone to anyone) because of glaring inconsistencies in (and general messiness of) the Ottoman land registry resulting in rampant fraud (sellers not having proper title, not disclosing long-term tenants, etc.). This actually made the situation worse, because it created a black market for land, with sales contracts not registered anywhere, resulting in even more fraud.
“If someone decides to play Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at my head instead of his, one chance in six of firing, I still get to knock it out of his hand. On the other hand, anyone who flies an airplane anywhere close to me is imposing a very small probability of crashing through my roof and killing me; that does not give me a right to forbid airplane flights. I do not claim to be able to prove moral claims; both of those are reports of moral intuitions, I suspect widely shared.”
It is not necessary to moralise these claims. One can explain them first and foremost as objective consequences of applying libertarianism. The tacit theory of liberty that libertarianism presupposes, or entails, can be explicitly stated as “the absence of interpersonal initiated constraints on preference satisfaction” (more handily, but less precisely, “the absence of initiated imposed costs”). But put aside the explanation of that theory for a moment.
When perfect liberty is not possible, we have to weigh any clashing constraints. Playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s head is a huge initiated constraint on the victim’s preferences as regards what is done with respect to his head. Not allowing such behaviour is a relatively tiny constraint on the would-be perpetrator. Allowing aeroplane overflights is a tiny constraint on the preference for safety of the people it overflies. Disallowing all aeroplane overflights would be a huge initiated constraint on all of the people who prefer to fly.
But is this not doing an interpersonal comparison between initiated constraints in terms of the disutility they cause? (Interpersonal utility comparisons of any sort being something that economists generally try to avoid if possible, as being unscientific and subjective.) That can, at least largely and in principle, be avoided by doing a type of intrapersonal comparison instead. Throughout your lifetime you will find yourself on different sides of clashes of initiated imposed costs (such as aeroplane overflights). The question that you then ask yourself is: which relevant general rule is likely to least initiate an imposed cost on me over my lifetime? Apart from some lunatics or any empirically misinformed people (although that could occasionally be a majority) the answer is likely to be very close to the same for everyone. (For a more detailed philosophical explanation and defence of this theory, see https://jclester.substack.com/p/eleutheric-conjectural-libertarianism and https://jclester.substack.com/p/avoiding-interpersonal-utility-comparisons.)
You write 'Hence it is not a rights violation to keep a Palestinian Arab known to want to kill Jews, for example one who was part of the October 7th Hamas raid, far from areas inhabited by Jews.'
Who is going to keep the murderous Arab far away from areas inhabited by Jews? The state of Israel? If so, I think it could be argued that legitimising such actions - any actions - of that state is in itself a violation of individual rights, albeit different ones such as taxation.
Also, what if the Arab lives close to the state border where Jews live close to the Israeli side of the border (such as is the case with Gaza and Jerusalem, where Jews and violent Arabs live in close proximity to each other, only separated by a state border). Is the Israeli state justified in taking extra-territorial action to move the murderous Arab further away from the border?
My own view is that there is neither justification for the existence of the state of Israel (nor of any other state, for that matter), nor justification for pre-emptive action such as having a state move the Arab far away. As for the gun-to-the-head metaphor, I think the threat of merely having an anti-Jewish person living next door to is not quite enough to warrant it as there are too many uncertainties: The Arab may have changed his mind, he may take a liking to the Jews inhabiting his neighbourhood, he may be there to take action against someone in a different location (i.e., not against Jews nearby). Etc, etc. So the situation is not as clear cut as a gun to the head. Obviously, if there is proof that the Arab has taken active part in the Hamas raid, he should be prosecuted accordingly. But that should be based on action actually taken by him, not on any intended action.
I am talking of individual rights. If there is someone living close to me who I have good reason to believe will try to kill me, I am entitled to use force against him to prevent him from doing so. Do you disagree? That does not require any state to exist.
It will be difficult for a single individual to prevent someone who wants to kill him from doing so, which is an argument for allying with lots of other people he wants to kill to prevent it, but that does not require the existence of a state or a belief that states are justified.
I agree, and I think I said, that application of the principle is hard. All I am trying to establish is that there is not a conclusive moral argument against restrictions on migration in either the case of Gazans immigrating to Israel in the future or of Jews immigrating to Palestine in the past. In both cases the moral argument depends on facts.
Thank you for your reply.
No, I do not disagree that you are entitled to use force against, say, your Hamas neighbour to prevent him from killing you, although I would have to qualify that. Can I use barbed wire and broken glass on the fence facing the neighbour, and/or hire with a security company to guard me and my property? Yes. Can I burn his house down as a preemptive measure? No.
When you write that the Israelis have a legitimate right to restrict, to some degree, the settlement in Israel of those presently living in Gaza or the West Bank, it is not clear to me how you suggest this can be done in practice without violating the rights of the Palestinians. Without state intervention it is surely up to the individual Jew whether he/she would want to let or sell a residential property to a member of Hamas?
I agree with your premise that you have a right to knock a gun out of the hand of someone threatening you with it, or even killing the person doing it. However, that is an extreme threat and I am not sure that the mere presence of a Hamas member in your vicinity qualifies as being equally extreme.
You have proved your point that there is no conclusive moral argument against restricting migration in the current conflict as it depends on the extremity of the threat. However, I would be interested to hear what tangible, specific immigration restrictions you think might be applied without violating the moral rights of a large number of people.
Like you say, it is a hard question, but I believe you like hard questions. :-)
Your summary of history is correct as far as it goes, but Israel and the neighboring countries have been contested territory for much, much longer than that. The Jews took it from the Caananites in about the 15th century BC. (The date the Jews use is somewhat earlier; my estimate is based on the inference that most of the miracles depicted in "The Ten Commandments" were effects of the Thera volcano, which destroyed the Minoan civilization then.) Basically, the Jews owned what is now Israel and its territories until the Romans invaded them beginning in 36 BC. The Romans and then the Byzantines ruled there until the Muslims conquered Arabia and started pushing north into the empire shortly after their founding in the 7th century. From that point it changed hands many times until the Muslims had pretty much finished ethnically cleansing it of Jews in the 19th century.
Thus those who claim the Muslims were there first are using a lookback period convenient to them, while the Jews simply use a longer period. The same can be said of lots of other disputed areas; eastern Germany/western Poland and the Balkans being two more with centuries of conflict behind them.
I don't think it is productive to try to settle a land dispute as long-lasting as those by simply choosing a convenient lookback period and using it because one is about as supportable as the other. If the contesting tribes can't stand to live near each other, I think it would make more sense for one to pay the other off, like your description of the Coase theorem.
But that requires that the sides be able to trust each other. In Islam's case they don't consider it wrong to cheat unbelievers. Biden seems to operate on the same principle in Ukraine. When you have an opponent like that, you simply have to fight until your opponents are either all dead or reduced enough that you think you can deter them.
I always find the “contested land” trope bizarre in this case. This part of the Levant doesn’t have a strikingly unusual history of political contestation compared to its neighbors. The rest of the Levant and Egypt had quite similar trajectories prior to modern Zionism. Anatolia had an even more dramatic change that occurred much more recently. I think the Greek claim to Anatolia is distinctly stronger than was the Zionist claim to Israel (still mostly ridiculous, but better). Maybe Persia had less ethnic contestation (if you discount the impact of greater linguistic distance from Arabic).
All of which is beside the point, since the most recent *Jewish* contestation of the area was by the Hasmonean Kingdom, which you may note failed literally more than two thousand years ago. There’s no particular reason to think the Ashkenazim or Sephardim are substantially descended from people who lived in the area at the time of the Arab conquest. Certainly neither ethnic group at the time had any satisfactory reason to believe so. I don’t think expanding the lookback period actually helps the Jewish claim here.
I am not arguing on the basis of ethnic land claims but of individual land claims. The Greek claim to Anatolia, from my standpoint, would have to depend on demonstrating that present-day Greeks were the heirs of land-owners displaced by later conquerors, Persian or Islamic. I think it quite unlikely that most of the heirs of the people who lived in Anatolia when it was Greek currently live in Greece — I expect that most of them currently live in Turkey. Conquest rarely moves populations — there is a reason why the inhabitants of that area were referred to as "Romans" centuries after the Byzantines lost it.
I do think it likely that the current Ashkenazi and Sephardim contain a sizable fraction of the descendants of the Jews who lived in Israel when the Romans conquered it, although surely not all. But I don't think that has much relevance to the current situation.
Thank you for the reply. My critique here was directed against RatMan29 rather than your post. I agree that most of the descendants of Greeks from upland Anatolia were presumably assimilated into the “Turk” identity. I also would expect that Ashkenazim and Sephardim have substantial (if I had to place a bet in ignorance, I would guess dominant) ancestry from people who lived in the region at the time of the *Roman* conquest, and also that this doesn’t (well, shouldn’t) have much bearing on anything. I wouldn’t be too overly shocked if they had substantial ancestry from people who lived there at the time of the *Arab* conquest either, I just don’t think it’s likely that they knew that or had any compelling reason to believe that during 19th or early 20th century (although if this is false, I invite correction).
Just spitballing here: What if the MultiNational Force of (and?) Observers, now in charge of keeping the neutral zones on the Sinai Peninsula free from both Federation and Romulan warships, extended their duties over the Gaza Strip? For that matter, the MFO might extend West, as well, encompassing the entire Peninsula. Could colonial and imperial powers imposing peace from outside do any worse than the locals?
Strangely, the Sinai showed up in photos from Earth orbit -- Gemini missions, LandSat, others -- as desert before 1967, increasingly green pastures from 1967 until about 1982, when the desert yellow sands started to dominate the photos, all over again. Climate change, I suppose.