Will Wilkinson poses the question:
Let me hazard a response:
The difference between the right of owning a weapon and migrating to another society is that the latter is based on the natural impetus for self-preservation while the latter involves wanting to enter into a society that may have grown prosperous based on entirely different culture. The difference ultimately lies in distinctive notions of the bona vita, of the good life, that are not in play about discussions about the right to self-defense, which the right to bear arms is anchored on.
My moral point of view is idiosyncratic from a modern point of view, so I should explain myself a bit and I shall do so through the lens of two authors: Larry Arnhart and Hugo Grotius.
Mr. Arnhart provides a persuasive interpretation of natural right as being those conditions necessary to achieve human flourishing in human societies. As Mr. Arnhart points out in Darwinian Natural Right: “The moral opinions that drive political controversies are ultimate opinions about the best way of life for human beings, about how human beings must live to satisfy their natural desires” (p. 1). Natural rights are therefore those faculties that people tend to need, by virtue of the principles of human nature, to acquire a good life. Unlike the right to self-defense, whence philosophers and jurists have derived the right to own a firearm, the capability to migrate from one society to another is not an essential precondition for human flourishing across all cultural contexts and can therefore not be reasonable considered a right transcending all those cultural contexts.
Grotius then provides an understanding of rights as flowing from human sociability and from the fact that human beings are creatures who derive almost all their advantages from social intercourse. In The Rights of War and Peace, Grotius argues that all rights derive from sociability: “This Sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a manner conformable to the Light of human understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men” (pp. 85-6). Here, Grotius properly identifies human rights largely with commutative justice and abuses of rights as the taking of what is properly another’s. He makes that connection again in The Rights of War and Peace when he writes that “Justice… consists wholly in abstaining from that which is another Man’s” (p.120). Unlike the case of denying ownership of firearms, denying a would-be immigrant access to a nation is not a violation of commutative justice, and so can reasonably be said to not be a violation of right.
Let me dwell more on these themes: The most basic of all conditions for human flourishing is self-preservation. A dead or gravely wounded animal cannot be a flourishing one, and so it is reasonable, by any animal’s very nature, that they tend towards actions that preserve themselves. Self-preservation takes a significant role in Grotius’ system of jurisprudence. He described it as being “that Instinct whereby every Animal seeks its own Preservation, and loves its Condition, and whatever tends to maintain it” (p. 180). In order to guarantee that people are free to pursue virtue and the good life, laws must principally guarantee self-preservation; hence, across history, it is seen as the utmost of tyranny for rulers to arbitrarily deny people their self-preservation by unlawfully killing or imprisoning them. Grotius also testifies to the right of self-preservation as being antecedent to all other rights: “’tis the first Duty of every one to preserve himself in his nature State” (Ibid).
It is impossible to entirely separate the gun-ownership from concerns of self-preservation: Firearms, especially handguns, are great equalizers. Even at a great physical and training disadvantage, one human beings can still pose a mortal threat to another human being. The right to bear arms emerges out of a right to protect one’s property. George Orwell’s article “Don't let Colonel Blimp ruin the Home Guard” is most celebrated by gun-lovers for his observation that “that rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy.” However, I think he makes an even more worthwhile observation in “You and the atomic bomb,” when he observed that firearms are an inherently democratic weapon that give power to the people, so to speak:
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.
One may not agree with citizens having the right to own assault rifles or other military-grade firearms. Nevertheless, I think that it is unreasonable to argue that firearms have nothing to do with the impetus for self-preservation in society. After all, those who might not be able to fend of an attacker can have their minds put at ease by owning a pistol. Moreover, the right to own a pistol is essentially related to concerns of commutative justice: The question is whether a citizen can claim an object, in this case a firearm, as his own, and so the legal question is a question of right.
However one decides the issue of whether it is a right to bear arms, it is certainly a right that is directly related to the most animal, and therefore most fundamental, principle of human nature: The instinct for self-preservation.
This is not the case with immigration. While self-defense is natural to our animal nature, emigration derives from a desire to live in complex societies that have evolved through artificial means, including the civilizing process, and which take their character from the ideas of those that inhabit them. Nobody is migrating these days in order to go live in an otherwise uninhabited patch of land. Instead, immigrants are generally attracted to the opportunities that different societies can offer them. Those societies are organized entities that have, over generations, accumulated variations deriving from the ideas of those inhabitants. They are ultimately the products of human artifice and it is not unreasonable to assume that such artifice might include excluding outsiders. People’s desire to immigrate may be entirely natural and praiseworthy; however, that desire does not imply they can justly immigrate wherever they like because of the concern for preserving the ideas that have made a society so prosperous to begin with.
The reason is that it is entirely plausible for some people to think that any person’s pursuit of happiness might harm the general welfare of a society based on entirely different ideas. As Garett Jones has argued in “Do immigrants import their economic destinies?”: “Government policies don’t radiate from subterranean mineral deposits: they are in large part the product of its voting citizens. And in the long run, new citizens lead to new policies.” I would go even further and argue that the very customs, let alone government-policies, that make any society possible are the product of living citizens perpetuating the customs that previous citizens established. Edmund Burke eloquently expressed this idea when he wrote that society was a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.” Introducing new people with radically different ideas might lead to unintended consequences to that partnership that cannot be adequately foreseen and so policy-makers can be reasonable in a moderate desire to limit the introduction, via immigration, of ideas that might undermine that partnership.
A tragic aspect of the conversation about immigration is that so many people decide to leave their country because their own nations are no longer conducive to their own flourishing. However, I believe that most refugee-policy is a matter of beneficence, not justice.
After all, there is no violation of commutative justice that happens when one nation erects a wall against another, however unseemly that wall might be. No citizen of one nation can say that they own citizenship in another nation—and it needs to be emphasized ad nauseum that citizenship is an artificial construction of social evolution, not a universal impetus in human nature. Citizens in one nation can say, probably unreasonably in most situations but reasonably in some, to those wanting access to their own nation: Heal thy own nation. That is certainly a harsh statement, maybe unreasonably so from a beneficent point of view, but that is certainly not an unjust statement. After all, there is no violation of commutative justice going on, just a denial of access.
Ultimately, I think that the open-immigration debate terribly frames the practical question at hand by conjuring up a right and crying out: Justitia fiat, et pereat mundus! However, policy is never a binary; rather, it is a matter of decisions at the margins. Modern nations do not face the question of letting in everybody or nobody; instead, they let some people in and exclude others. The practical question is on the margins and deciding the marginal person who should be excluded. Should, say, Great Britain exclude known Wahhabists? I would say that it should. Should it exclude Christians, and for that matter many Muslims, fleeing persecution in Syria? I would say not.
Enshrining open immigration as a human right ex nihilo is a form of rational constructivism that we have reason to think might harm social order. Rather than treat the social partnerships we have inherited as carte blanche to remake in our own image, we should be happy, as the stewards of those partnerships, to improve policy at the margins.
Bibliography
Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Grotius. Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
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