Abstract
Many liberals take it for granted that reasoning about immigration should proceed from the assumption of a basic human right to free movement within and across state borders that outweighs most of the standard considerations against policies of open borders. Against this, communitarians typically argue that there is no freedom that does not arise out of constraints imposed by the norms of a particular community. Nowadays, the philosophical front between liberals and communitarians is not so clear anymore. On the liberal side, the line has been blurred by the idea of a division of moral labor, which is said to better fit our moral intuitions about special duties towards our fellow countrymen without degenerating into particularism. In this paper, I want to explore the remaining differences between such a liberal account and the communitarian approach with regard to the issue of migration, and defend the liberal approach against some communitarian concerns.
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- 1.
One of the differences between these two versions of liberalism lies in their stance toward consequentialist arguments, libertarianism being much less concerned with empirical consequences and prepared to accept social conditions which undermine even libertarian institutions.
- 2.
Which is far from clear, at least if it is supposed to mean that the losses of welfare are equal in both cases.
- 3.
Actually, there are many liberals who endorse communitarian or rather contextualist forms of argument, the most prominent among them, though not a political philosopher, being Richard Rorty. According to Rorty, justice not only presupposes a shared identity, it is identical with it (cf. Rorty 1997). By that, Rorty seems to deny any possibility of ethical objectivity. However, this is a general philosophical point we do not need to discuss here.
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Hiebaum, C. (2013). Migration and the Division of Moral Labor. In: Merle, JC. (eds) Spheres of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_26
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