I'm not going to disagree on any legal basis but it's a side show. I want the UK to help for moral reasons not for legal ones (it's good design if the law agrees)

I don't think we can just ignore the ethical problem of who to help. If you were donating money directly you would have to choose between numerous extremely good causes that require it and which you could help based on their need. Ethically, I find this a very tough question, one we've tackled many times here. Its something to do with proximity that both makes us care more about some problems and make prioritizing local problems to some degree a better way of moving the world forward.

Well we can argue that a state has an ethical duty to dispense it's legal obligations. What's interesting, given your previous denouncement of utilitarianism, is that you are making utilitarian arguments in favour of accepting refugee's as opposed to acting out of a sense of duty or even legal obligation.

For what it's worth I agree but I also accept that the actions of states are constrained by law not ethics so when discussing the grounds on which a state should accept refugees their legal obligation is the best place to start.

I'm not ignoring the ethical problem of who to help, what I am saying is that given some research deciding who to help is less of a problem. Organisations such as GiveWell do the work and so I can outsource the majority of the effort. I don't subscribe to the idea that proximity is important at the level I can help, what matters to me is maximising the utility derived from my contributions subject to certain constraints and preferences.

We could but some legal obligations can be extremely bad. If we had a legal objection to report refugees so they could be shot it wouldn't make it right.

Utilitarianism is a great subject. My condemnation has much history but it's not all bad. Mostly I argue against the weird sort of fetish of ignoring the problem in favour of some meaningless calculations and the fallacy that sins of omission equal sins of commission.

I'm a hedonist - I claim so is everybody else even if they don't realise it. I want us to help the refugees because it satisfies me more than not helping them. If I was presented with a clear alternative that helped some other group in a potentially better way then I would consider what split satisfied me most (which would involve some utilitarian aspect).


Sure, no disagreement there.

I would probably argue that your preferences and constraints are a function of proximity (not just physical distance btw)

I'll assume you meant if we had a legal obligation to deport refugees, sure that would be a bad obligation but then we should apply pressure to have those treaties changed or remove our signatures from them. However we generally don't create such outrageously bad obligations and all I am saying is that we start from the legal obligations, we ensure we satisfy those as a minimal contribution towards our ethical responsibilities.

Hedonism is an incomplete ethical theory, it is a theory only of the good not the right. The distinction is important, the good tells us what we should value, in the case of hedonists this roughly is the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. It does not tell us how to achieve this and as you correctly suggest deciding how to help or who to help generally relies on a consequentialist/utilitarian calculation, that is your theory of the good, your hedonism, needs a theory of the right and utilitarianism is for me the most plausible conclusion.

The majority of the money I donate goes to direct cash transfers to extremely poor people, proximity is not a factor. If you want to elaborate on your definition of proximity I may be able to offer a better answer.

Hedonism based on satisfaction incorporates what's right. It's not just about simplistic pain/pleasure because we have very strong feelings about justice and fairness as well as empathy for others. We often rely on some sort of utilitarian calculation to make decisions because it's satisfying but it can't fully determine our preference and it's our preference that decides what we do.

For the same reason that the USA taking in massive numbers of immigrants made it only the most powerful and rich country in the world.

It is horrible to be in first place.

Argument from legality rarely convinces.

Because the argument was that we should help (i.e. welcome) ALL the refugees who make it to Europe. Why? Because they're in our face. We clearly have no interest in giving the same assistance to ALL (or any large percentage of) the millions of refugees who are still scattered around the Middle East, the same way we have no interest in (take no action to) helping ALL (or any large percentage of) people living in awful conditions who aren't Syrian refugees. The level of assistance people are arguing for for that group of people exists solely because they're in our face.

Let's pretend we had a Maxwell's demon that would only let people through who didn't have any significant criminal past and weren't planning to be terrorists or anything of the sort. Would you support fully open borders where anybody could come in and we'd welcome them as citizens and do nothing to stop them from coming? I'm going to assume of course not and assume it's because our standard of living would go to total **** in a hurry. So you're an "ours and theirs" guy too, despite your protestations (or if you think open borders at this point in time is actually a good idea, I'm not sure we have enough common ground to discuss anything further). Once you admit it, we can discuss the question as the set of tradeoffs that it is (and I clearly think the rewards are a lot lower than you think they are).

"There is a horrible war" is "in your face," but it is "in your face" for a good reason.

Emphasizing that you are only flailing about because of the bees seems a bit silly.

I'm a work towards open borders kinda guy. In favour of EU open borders and welcoming Turkey (though that opportunity has probably been squandered) with an eye to further enlargement. Can we talk?

I don't deny trade offs btw. Welcoming as many refugees as possible is my view - I don't know what the max is but we and the rest of the rich countries can manage a lot.

I am willing to pay you to take the whole lot. I will need financing though, if it isn't too much trouble.

Of course we should take them. The question is, how many? Probably everyone would be willing to take 1000 and no one could manage taking 100 million. So for each country there is a number somewhere between 1000 and 100 million that would be right for them. And if the sum of those numbers is less than the total coming there's the problem with how to manage the overflow.

It would be nice if things got settled expeditiously in their homeland so they could go back to their lives there.

As Colin Powel nearly said, we ****ed them now we have to marry them.


PairTheBoard

Bingo. In my book DUCY I postulated a scenario where a paramedic comes upon three badly injured in a car accident. He determines that the drugs he has available are enough to give two out of the three a good chance to survive. Without it they die. But the one with the least chance is the only one conscious. And he is pleading for help. What proportion of paramedics will refuse him?

This doesn't contradict anything I've said but it seems less clear.

Hedonism is a theory about what is good, it can be presented as an egoist theory something that rational self interest should try to maximise but to be an ethical theory it needs to account for the happiness/pain/pleasure of others. Concepts such as justice and fairness for the true hedonist will merely be instruments to increasing pleasure. In evaluating whether an act is good the ethical hedonist just asks what did this act contribute towards total or average pleasure/happiness/desire/preference satisfaction. In deciding what to do the ethical hedonist ask what the likely outcomes of some act are and whether it will increase total/average pleasure/pain etc.

No it wasn't, the argument was and is that countries should satisfy their obligations, under international conventions, to refugees. That these obligations to refugees do not require the refugee provide a net economic benefit to the receiving country.

To which you replied

For this to be true then there should be no evidence of people in the west acting to the aid of the worst off unless the worst off happen to be in our face and this is not the case. There are numerous cases of individuals, organisations and states acting out of concern for people worse off than themselves. Now I'll admit that the west does too little but to state that the west does nothing is wrong.

This is a forum on the internet I'm beyond trying to convince anyone. I'll state some pretty obvious stuff when it seems it is being overlooked, like the fact our obligations to refugees don't entail they provide an economic benefit, but I'm not concerned if people still don't want to get it.

What about the concern about terrorists slipping in?

It doesn't bother you if your arguments won't change any thinking person's mind?

It doesn't bother me if I am talking to non thinking persons, even thinking peoples minds can be hard to change. The goal I think posters should aim for is the quality of their own beliefs not others, where that's a goal at all of course it's also alright to just point and laugh or use the forum to entertain oneself how one sees fit. Subject to not being a too much of a dick.

I meant more that it rarely convinces because it is a poor argument.

You shouldn't commit murder because it is against the law.

Hedonism does take account of the pain/pleasure/happiness of others and it directly explains why we are ethical.

Everything we want is about what we want but often the things we want are about what others want. That's because we're a moral creature which can be explained by evolution - selfish gene type stuff or by god if that's our bag. This works via empathy (I use the word more generally than others ) and empathy is a function of proximity*

This all easily explains everything (he says boldly) in a trivial manner including the stuff DS put in DUCY.

*we could just define proximity in terms of empathy. Its a measure of how much empathy we have for other people, which in the sense I use the word empathy, is how much good/bad feeling we experience because of concern for them. Typically this is much stronger for family, people we know, people who are alive, people we have seen pictures of etc etc

Meh. It wasn't intended as the entire argument it was intended to clarify what states obligations to refugees are and to demonstrate these are not dependent on the refugee providing an economic benefit to the receiving country.

However countries that are signatories to a convention have an ethical obligation to that convention just as signatories to a contract are bound by contract law to honour the contract. Being in breach of contract is a reason to not breach a contract in among the others like not being a dick etc.

Hedonism takes account of the happiness of others when it is an ethical theory not when it is a theory of rational self interest, it is available both to the ethical theorist and the egoist. However the ethical theorist needs something more, she needs a method on how to calculate the average/total happiness, whatever she prefers, this is what a simple ethical theory of hedonism lacks and it is this that the utilitarian answers by judging acts by their consequences.

The money I donate goes to people I've never seen in countries I've never visited. I still don't think my decisions are determined by proximity. If you are going to define proximity as caring about then it becomes circular.

Our rational self interest is ethical because we are moral creatures by design or by evolution. Ethics is an integral part of the self we are being rationally self-interested about.

Ethical theories are very important stuff to the rational self-interest.


It doesn't become circular. If we could measure this stuff directly we could write down a huge (boring) table of how much empathy we experience for different people about different things. We could then invert the table if we wanted to but that's not making it circular.

I'm not suggesting your donations aren't rational self-interest or wrong in any way. A lot of us will find that when purely considering donating money directly to charity we are most satisfied with giving it to those who are most in need. It's only a part of what we do for other though.