 Lauren Lamasky is the, I'm going to do the introductions first here, is the Corey Professor of Political Philosophy Policy and Law and the Director of the Political Philosophy Policy and Law Program at University of Virginia. He's best known for his work person's rights and moral community. For those of us who are in the public choice vein, Lauren also is famous for writing a book called Democracy and Decision which developed the notion of expressive voting in a serious way along with Jeff Brennan. Lauren, before teaching at University of Virginia, taught at Bowling Green University and before that at University of Minnesota Duluth. Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and he leads the Migration and Development Initiative. As many of you know, Michael's famous for identifying the trillion dollars line on the sidewalk and has been a major advocate for using migration as one of the great public policies for development and poverty alleviation that we haven't followed yet. And so we'll hear from Lauren and then we have Jesse Kirkpatrick who is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy here at George Mason. Before that, joining us here at George Mason, he was an assistant professor at Radford University and also a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Naval Academy. So with that, I will turn it over to Lauren and then you have 15 minutes to present and then we'll go across the board there and I guess since the way you're sitting, we'll go exactly the way that you see it there. Okay? All right, so let's get started. I probably shouldn't ask but what would you do if I took 17 minutes? Charge you. What are these sentences? Well, all right, good. Say, I wouldn't ask that if I were in my usual environment. I'm a philosopher, a unusual beast in this particular zoo but it's one that I always appreciate coming to. George Mason to me is one of the most interesting places that I ever get to visit. Of course, maybe if I had a life, it would be different but I will tell you that I'm quite sure that on my visits here, I always derive more benefits than I impart. Philosopher might say that's unjust. Your economists deal with it. So in order to make sure that this holds true and I do get more benefit than you do, I'm gonna try to be quite brief here. Normally if I stand up, I don't stop talking for 15 minutes but I will keep within the 15 today because you've scared me. I want to say a little bit about the project of this book. It's to offer a theory of global justice. Has it that been done before you might ask? And the answer is yes but my co-author, Fernando Tezon, who I'm sure he wishes that he could be here. He's in Florida and he's done talks in New Orleans and in Texas whereas I've gotten the northern part of the country. I'm not sure why it worked out that way but most of the literature in Fossum, and I can't speak to other fields, most of the literature on global justice has basically viewed the issue and well imagine a chessboard representing the countries of the world and on some you have a very high pile of gold coins. Let's make it gold in honor of the setting and then on other squares you have a low pile of maybe Tarnus Copper coins and in those places in which the wealth is piled high, people tend to live longer, healthier, happier lives in which their prospects that of their children etc is pretty enviable. On the others there are most people who are scrabbling for subsistence if lucky and often not even that. They die younger and sicker. Well I guess if you die you're equally sick with anybody else who dies. I mean that's dead but you understand what I mean along the way and I'm so close and their ability to partake of some of life's good is less than anybody in this room and they probably care for their children as much as your mom and dad cared for you but often are unable to provide for them what they would like. Isn't this unfair? Doesn't it almost leap out of saying something ought to be done about this and in the global justice literature what is done here what's advocated is you take some of the coins that are piled up high and comfortable and move them to those who have little. That is to say the issue of global justice or rather global injustice is one wrongful distribution so what's called for its redistribution. If this leads you to think about John Rawls's theory well yeah that's part of what theorists have brought up if it leads you to think of utilitarians like Peter Singer yeah that's another strand of that but basically the idea is from those who have much more to be taken to give to those who have little. Now I want to come back to this in a bit but let me just say that this book does not proceed with that as the starting point that's more like the concluding point. There's more to justice than just distributive or redistributive justice. We can talk about the difference if you'd like but in the tradition of with some air and to with some partial justice involves respect for individuals rights what kind of rights what my boss at UVA phrased it as to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness probably those of you in economics program wish he had just followed John Locke and said property instead but you know he didn't but he became president good luck for you trying to do that. So what we thought we ought to do is at least begin thinking about global justice in terms of whether individuals rise to the integrity of their their bodies their lungs their stuff is respected and if it isn't that's a signal injustice that is to say to provide a genuinely liberal theory of global justice. Now it might surprise you but I think that before we wrote this basically did not have a new in this particular letter but of course that's a philosophy literature and I've been learning in my short time here today that economists have said other things that that are really useful in this regard and that's part of what I mean by saying that I benefit more coming up here than I provide to others but that's a that's a digression. If it's the case that these vast disparities in well-being are due to genuine rights violations then there really is a strong case to be made that the uneven chessboard manifests great injustice across the globe. My co-author and I after examining this come to the conclusion yes that's right that the injustices of great disparities of wealth versus streams of poverty are unjust and that these injustices can be identical not simply in terms of these outcomes but the inputs to this what brings it about and that the works poor have been hard done by. Not however by the usual conference who are hauled out in millennium conferences and in the pages of the social justice theorists but overwhelmingly by their own governments and institutions if you if you do even a cursory examination of the really unfortunate environment the world. Overwhelmingly those who suffer these burdens are the are victimized by domestic forces some are obvious how could North Korea say not be on such a list but but even in countries that you know are not quite so horrific violations of liberty and life manifest. Now we can go into details of this later if you want but let me turn away from that to Alstu and by the way in this literature when the first person plural is used we have a duty always it means citizens or governments of wealthy Western countries especially of course the United States are we complicit in injustices done across borders and the answer I'm afraid is yes yes we are it is a gross mistake these are those that we are the primary perpetrators but we make bad situation worse that that the misery of the world's least well-off at the margin. I love being around place where I can say at the margin is enhanced by the policies of OECD countries and the like in this book we talk about several ways in which that's true let me just mention maybe three of them there are others that could go into also one concerns harms done by restrictive trade policies. We believe that capitalistic acts between consenting adults as Robert Nozick put in and his wonderful phrase involves a a just liberty of all people and that's true whether or not these acts cross borders and so restrictions on trade things like you know like quotas tariffs and so on are by the very nature unjust and so for example to the extent that that we hold of such barriers that yep this constitutes an injustice now of course as you know that's recently a pretty significant trade pact was realized well was agreed to whether it'll be signed off by all parties across the Pacific remains to be seen I thought at the time this was probably a good thing to do but then I saw that it was rejected by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and what are the chances that they could both be wrong about an important thing but before that happened my view was that this this is the sort of the sort of increase on others that we ought to be kind of the second talk about aid since the war and I mean since World War two large amounts of resources have been transferred from from global house to global have not and I understand that among the experts in the field there's a significant debate as to whether unbalanced this has done good some say yeah it really has others and no more harm than good well I'm not so interested in that but the fact that even you know with these very large sums and big pressure there's even a debate as to whether British value is the real salient point here note though that these sorts of transfers are not compassionate gifts from those who have to those who don't but they too are coercively extracted from some to others maybe coercive extraction to avert genuine harms and to really provide notable good stuff maybe it's justifiable but in cases where even whether I'm balanced it's a benefit this too is illiberal in the old-fashioned sense of this finally let me mention two of people moving not goods and services but their bodies across barriers restrictions on mobility it's one of you know the great injustices that liberals from Locke to Adam Smith to people in this room have criticized and yet we find that you know we take this routine that people crossing borders can be properly stopped by governmental officials from doing so based on their policy determination look we would think that's outrageous if when you wanted anybody come here today for Maryland no one oh that's pathetic I need another example anybody come here today well you got the idea if anybody here ever go to Maryland great all right when you cross that border do they stop you check your visa ask you if what business here about you know we would find we would find state border this is smaller state I guess of that are used in this way to stop people from going to school seeing the friends who've been taking a job we would find it intolerable while it becomes more tolerable across national borders kind of taken for granted or maybe not so much taken for granted but a promocation for demagoguery now normally that would be the case since this is now turning into a presidential year public figures are more measured and prudent in their statements and so would not dream of appealing to the basis to emotions of the citizenry but if they did they would did somebody really suggest a wall at the Mexican border would be a good idea or was that just Saturday night line skit yeah well you get the idea that that restrictions on the individual mobility are alive and well in our public discourse and this too is something that we take issue with I think events of recent weeks have fueled this issue what they get a special a of the latest massacre in Paris and unfortunately one has to say the latest massacre because you know the Charlie Hebdo one for a while seem to be pretty big stuff until until it got displaced by the events of what is it now three weeks ago but this has produced an enormous amount of merit versus comment and I think that well this would be an interesting thing to talk about let me say one thing about this one one eventually I find really negative is that it's very common now to distinguish between genuine asylum seekers refugees and mere economic migrants now maybe I'm pretty sure to the choir here but why economic migrant would be a pejorative strikes me as bizarre after a refugee you know you shouldn't feel sorry for refugees they're fleeing from something but an economic migrant is somebody who is moving to something to a valued outcome and that this should be a second class form of activity I think is pretty discouraging but I think I've got many many more things like to say but I think I'll stop here so I can listen to the commenters and to all of you thank you thanks a lot for being here Pete thanks a lot for the invitation it's an honor it's a nice to see a former colleague and audience so I study I'm an economist and I study migration and foreign aid among other things so I'm gonna focus on particular aspects of this book and you can understand everything I thought when reading this brilliant and really rich text by coming with me on a little journey to 1857 this woman is named Lucy she lived in Massachusetts the kid on the left is named John he lived in North Carolina and the question that the book begins with and explores from beginning to end is what does Lucy owe to John John is poor and far from Lucy in every social geographic sense not what would be virtuous if Lucy did for John but what would be things that would violate justice if Lucy did not do them for John what is she obligated to do for him and I'm going to walk through four proposed answers to this question among many that are in the book and Lomasca and Tesson discard one by one the first three that I'm going to talk about and and arrive at the fourth as one of the ones that they find legitimate so the first one that you could the first answer you might give is nothing Lucy owes nothing to John at all why because you might be one of a a subschool of followers of John Rawls and believe that justice is defined within groups of citizens and remember this is 1857 so just a few months ago the Supreme Court declared that John is not a citizen in fact they declared that all persons of African descent free or not we're not citizens so if that is indeed the defining criterion of the spheres within which justice happens then really nothing that Lucy does or doesn't do for for John could have any just or unjust content it would be an ill-posed question so Lomasca and Tesson attack that view to me completely convincingly and much more sophisticatedly than I could have I have never been able to accept the completely anti-cosmopolitan position for the for them for the more amateurish and simplistic reason that it can't account for acts of expatriation like this if we feel that there was anything unjust at all about Scott versus Sanford decision in 1857 or about the Republic of South Africa just declaring that people who lived in homelands like Baputaswana and Venda weren't citizens then there must be something about justice that extends beyond citizenry not necessarily at all uncompletely equal terms but certainly not zero so the the answer of nothing at all to John is not satisfactory a second answer that they propose that they explore at great length is that Lucy owes John large coerced transfers of money so the the answers that they the responses to that that they explore look Lucy's really rich John isn't isn't that unjust on its face and shouldn't there be redistribution from from her to him is first of all Lucy's not responsible for his poverty the main reason John is poor is that he's enslaved historians are pretty sure that in this photo he's enslaved at the time and Lucy historians among you might recognize that this Lucy is Lucy stone who is a well-known abolitionist so it would be hard to declare that she is personally responsible for the local political and economic institution that is principally responsible for John's poverty so as a form of restitution it's not easy to justify another problem is that suppose she were to be obliged to transfer money to the Thomas Bragg regime he was the governor of North Carolina at the time we can guess that he might not have used much of that money to benefit the population of North Carolina that was of African descent given that he went on to become the attorney general of the Confederacy we might have good reason to believe that transfers to the Bragg regime would strengthen the very local political and economic institutions that were keeping John poor if she could somehow get transfers in kind or in cash directly to John and bypass the regime many forms of lasting change that she could have done for him like trying to give him schooling would have been actively subverted by the local political and economic institutions the more education kids like John got the more threatened the local power structure was and we can reasonably assume that they would actively try to keep those schools either closed or ineffective so to me a profound contribution that the book makes is to make this link between questions of justice and questions of fact so I point out this extreme example just to hopefully accurately portray the case that if we believe and this is a factual claim that global poverty is primarily caused by local political and economic institutions then that has direct implications for the obligations that we have towards the distant global poor you don't necessarily have to accept the first premise to believe that that is a connection that that's an if then as a development economist and an economic historian I think that they get the literature exactly right so I'm talking about Darona Jamolu, Jim Robinson, Avner Greif, Stanley Engerman, Kenneth Sokoloff and it almost goes without saying the great recently lost Douglas North that there's really a close to a consensus among the leading economic scholars of this issue that local political and economic institutions are the principal determinant of long-term economic growth of power reduction now you could debate about the effects of outsiders on those local political and economic institutions it's certainly not zero Nathan Nunn at Harvard has documented a long-term effects of slavery in Africa it would be hard to argue that the activities of colonizers in the Belgian Congo were irrelevant to the local political and economic institutions that DR Congo has right now but it would likewise be difficult to argue that the extraordinary wealth and prosperity of Hong Kong has nothing to do with colonization either and of course there are countries like Ethiopia which is one of the poorest places in the world and was never colonized this is not a simple relationship at all and you could debate these factual claims but I think they make a very balanced assessment of the literature and certainly it is a defensible claim that there is the primacy of institutions and the ambiguity of the effect of foreign interventions on those institutions is such that there is not a clear responsibility of people in today's rich countries for that poverty across the board certainly not across the board now how about a third proposal Lucy owes it to John to forcibly prevent kids like him from coming to Massachusetts block them by the border maybe stop them from leaving she owes that to him um Lo mas cantes on go through a variety of arguments for why people could hypothetically believe that to be true and demolish all of them in a sometimes spectacular fashion um you could argue for example that Lucy owes it to her white neighbors to preserve their freedom of association because they prefer associating with white people in Massachusetts and I hope I don't even need to comment on that one but uh Lo mas cantes on do take these things very seriously and they point out among many other things that uh such an obligation would violate Lucy's right to associate with black people if she wants to and there are many many other reasons why uh her obligation to preserve others freedom of association is uh problematic at best another reason why you might think that Lucy owes it to kids like John to prevent people from like him from coming from North Carolina to Massachusetts is uh the fact that in 1852 massachusetts got compulsory public schooling so as of 1857 if a kid like him who certainly has zero schooling shows up in Massachusetts they're gonna get schooling and that's going to impose a cost on other people now Lo mas cantes on takes this very seriously they're very skeptical of coercive taxation um they make the uh core point that uh forcibly stopping people at the border is only one of many ways that you could address that fiscal problem um maybe I differ slightly with the range of policy tools that they talk about um for example they they discuss and pretty much rule out as unsustainable ways to have immigrants uh have a delayed period before which they can benefit from social services or mechanisms for them to to pay for social services themselves uh I wouldn't rule those out for the simple reason that we have such things right now and they work okay social security you cannot get any of it until you have paid into the system for 40 quarters so minimum 10 years probably longer unless you work every quarter uh that's a compromise it's saying um you know uh we understand that if you come at 63 and you don't work for 10 years you're not going to have any uh any public protection for your retirement and you might end up starving on the street but that's too bad because uh we uh we are making a compromise between the free riding problem and the accessibility problem and I think there's maybe more room for compromise than the than the book uh talks about the the book is is is much more skeptical of of the persistence of most kind of social services I would say but I think it's not the only answer you could come to um which doesn't change it doesn't affect at all the core point that that that's stopping john from coming to massachusetts is just one of a variety of ways you could address the issue of taking money from other massachusetts yens uh other base staters I should say uh to to school him finally um there's an entire chapter on brain drain that to me because I work on this is just worth the price of admission uh itself so a third reason that you could hypothetically say luci owes it to kids like john to trap kids like him in north carolina and not let them into massachusetts is that getting to the north is difficult it's costly you have to have a lot of smarts and drive and savvy in order to make it in the north particularly if you haven't had a good education and that means that some of the smartest most energetic kids are going to be the first ones to leave and that somehow black communities of north carolina at this time would lose from his uh his migration um now they go through a range of of answers to this proposal ultimately ruling it out I think it's just brilliant one of the things they talk about is well you could be concerned that uh if there was education that he received it was black communities who were paying for it themselves and the their investment is lost when he goes and I think that's not a serious objection uh I was I got primary schooling in sulic city utah and then left and it was not a financial investment that they made in the expectation of a cash return it was a uh that was paid for so that I could pursue my dreams wherever they took me and I was never asked to pay it back and I should never be asked to pay it back um they also talk about uh the idea that that's natural endowments not the expenditure on schooling but the natural smarts of kids like john could be lost to black communities of the south if they're allowed to leave they go through a uh a detailed treatment of the question you know do you own your natural talents do you own your brain um I would go even further uh than they go in the book and just just point out that if you actually believe that people should be blocked from leaving or or taxed because of their natural talents then uh it would be interesting to read a paper by Greg Mankiew where he proposes a tax on height uh that is actually enormous and uh for some of the people in this room would would mean tens of thousands of dollars a year going to the federal government due to the natural endowment of your height which has been shown by I think it's Ann Case uh and a co-author to affect your income among many other things for example being born in a rich country if you really believe that uh the the things you acquired at birth should be taxed away just because you have them like brains like height like uh your citizenship that you received at birth then you're signing up for a very large tax to be redistributed to the world um I would go even further than they do five more minutes is it okay um on uh on brain drain the the very phrase brain drain is a hobby horse of mine it was coined in 1963 by tabloid journalists in Great Britain to talk about the departure of British scientists for places like the US it's a pejorative term there's no way I could tell you that your country is experiencing a drain and have that be good news it's a pejorative little rhyme and it really embodies the assumption that uh the departure of skilled people uh does harm the harms development causes harm and what I've pointed out before that if if I say that the departure of skilled people from Haiti for example causes under development in Haiti that is synonymous with saying that stopping skilled migration by any means is sufficient not just necessary but sufficient to cause greater development because cause implies all else equal and all else equal in the case of departure includes my reasons for departure so if my reasons don't change and my activities do if my desire to give Pete my wallet doesn't change but he ends up with my wallet that's coercion so it is to say skilled migration causes under development is logically synonymous with saying that forcing me not to migrate as a skilled person is sufficient to cause development those are the same statement and when rephrased in that way uh sometimes just rephrasing a sentence can make it clearer like Carl Hempel and other philosophers of science like to do uh there's no evidence for that at all and I really mean none ever there is no poor neighborhood that has been shown to have been improved or developed by preventing smart people from leaving there there's no poor region of any country and there's certainly no nation that has ever been shown to get better medical care or conduct more innovation or have more entrepreneurship or have anything else good happening in it due to having coercively stopped smart people from leaving there so it's really entirely conjectural that that could even happen and maybe too conjectural to even use phrases like brain drain so I I tried to come up with a similarly rhyming cute little phrase and failed utterly uh my co-author Lance Pritchett proposed cortex vortex which I I think is just a a failed attempt uh with all due respect to land um I just call it uh skilled migration so how about uh a fourth and final proposal for what Lucy owes to John that Lucy owes John non interference that if John wants to go to Massachusetts she actually owes it to him not to stop him and if she does stop him she is uh she is doing something that is unjust and this to me is just uh beyond question in this case there were certainly cases where even the police department of of good old Boston uh stopped detained held runaway slaves forced them to go home and there were huge demonstrations and riots against this it was considered something gravely unjust retrospectively uh I think it's pretty obvious that it was unjust but even at the time it was recognized that this was uh terribly unjust and the the fundamental mental transformation that Lomas Quintesson invite us to on this particular point and I think it's just tectonic in its effect on your thinking is that migration barriers are active um not passive there's stopping somebody from moving is stopping them from moving uh people don't like to uh think about this but um here is a a two sentences from Adam Smith that made it clearer to me than uh than uh I I could say every man is much more deeply interested in whatever immediately concerns himself than in what concerns another man to hear perhaps of the death of another person with whom we have no particular connection will give us less concern will spoil our stomach or break our rest much less than a very significant disaster has befallen ourselves so certainly we place much less weight on people who are distant from us next sentence but though the ruin of our neighbor may affect us much less than a very small misfortune of our own we must not ruin him to prevent that small misfortune nor even to prevent our own ruin that is there's something fundamentally asymmetrical that does not require anything like uh starry eyed uh full cosmopolitanism of equally of Lucy equally caring about John with her own sister to believe that she has a responsibility not to stop him from escaping something that causes his poverty that is to ruin him not even to prevent her own ruin who is who is doing the act is critical and um there's something that puzzles me always about how people talk about migration and its phrases like this Donald Trump Donald Trump's companies have sought visas to import workers notice the transitive verb import has a direct object it's something that somebody does to some somebody else rich states told to stop poaching doctors again transitive verb direct object michigan wants visas to bring immigrants to Detroit transitive verb this book from university of minnesota press migrants for export export transitive verb direct object this is a fantasy it's actually objectively wrong and if you it's it's like a woman going to work at a firm full of men and saying well what happened there well the the men brought her in if you doubt that i'm sure there are many people from other countries in this room after the talk just ask them what was it like when the us brought you here um what happened tell me about what the united states did to you in order for you to be here they'll probably be kind of puzzled and say well i i did that it's not a it's not an accurate representation of that event to call it something that a country did to somebody so why would people do this well it certainly changes the ethical calculus completely i should say it changes the calculus of justice completely in that if i've had people say to me many times well what's my responsibility to solve the poverty of the world why do i need to bring Haitians here well you don't need to bring Haitians here but that has nothing to do with migration migration is either you allow the Haitian to come or you actively stop them or hire somebody to do it with violence but there's no other option there was a time when we shackled up people and put them in ships and and sent them places but that doesn't happen anymore except in extremely limited cases you either block it or you don't and that's the the calculus of justice in this case it has nothing to do with this and this this fantasy might exist for the purpose of letting people uh make uh reach a different conclusion on what is just or unjust than the one that is uh brilliantly and uh i think richly defended in this book um with that i want to uh move on to other subjects and thanks a lot um well thanks to to um to mercadis and everyone who worked hard to make this event happen for the invitation to be here um thanks to the authors one in absentia the other president for writing a fabulous and extremely interesting book um it's a stipulated thanks because the book is so good that it's i struggle with finding things bad or critical to say about it but i'm going to do my best okay um so one caveat is that um is that you know so full outing is that um i'm not an economist i'm trained in political science and philosophy um so i am not well suited to critique the empirical literatures that were drawn upon um i really can't analyze the critically critically analyze the validity of the selection of cases that they use to draw general principles and precepts like those from singapore argentina um uh the the um although given my comparatively limited knowledge on the subject um from what i do know their focus on the badness or goodness of institutions and institutional actors seems to me to be correct it's the correct target of locus and concern and we we we just heard um i feel somewhat validated and and um and you know echoing the the sentiment that was just expressed so i want to with all of this is is to say that i want to limit my um i want to limit my my comments um to really two areas the first is a very very briefly situate the project and the current global justice scholarship in the literature and how it is we heard a little bit from lauren um where he's coming from and i'll sort of round that out a little bit i'll spend a little bit more time on discussing the wrinkles i see in the very long chapter on war um that is my area of expertise which is the ethics of peace and war peace and war um particularly humanitarian intervention and its relationship to um to the author's conception of the state but i want to begin by way of anecdote i think to to show what is the um the power of the core central thesis of the book so um i read a good bit of the book and and um prepared my comments over thanksgiving i have a nine-year-old son it allowed me to spend some time with him and um he has a pretty good sense of what my literary and scholarly tastes are usually when he asks me when i'm what i'm reading or writing about has to do with um war political violence famine you know really kind of uplifting subjects that he's he's really into but he saw the title right and um and justice at a distance so he asked me what's the book about and i and i said um what would you think it's about he said i think i have a good idea but i can tell you what i would want it to be about okay and he said um i really would like it to be about superheroes that see objects in the air and they can bring justice at a distance i said okay well what it is about is um it's justice at a distance is so you have another a co-author for your next thing but he said that justice is primary the second edition so but he says the sequel so he says that so i told him justice is primarily about leaving people alone right that's the key thesis in the you know page two and he says to me um well if justice is about leaving people alone then it's really unjust that you have to do a book report on thanksgiving and um not to make and then you know and i tried to say oh well it's voluntary and you know he he laughed after that it's like a parting shop but not to make too much of the exchange but i think it's demonstrative of the fact that the thesis resonates with common intuitions and principles right my son thought well you've sort of been you know and his teacher assigns him a book report and says read this give it to me in three days you know and and there's it's it's highly coercive right i mean it's a child so um but it resonated with him that he thought that it was sort of a bummer to be coerced especially during thanksgiving and that's so in short the principle of liberty is as non-interference i think can be persuasive and the authors have done a good job in and in showing that so the general contribution of the book to the global justice literature um is that i think that it adds a libertarian flavor to the vanilla ice cream of cosmopolitan scholarship so as we heard from lauren a moment a few minutes ago is that um the focus on global justice is generally on um positive assistance and massive redistributive schemes and that's what that's what the the the core of the literature calls for the author terms this is a regulatory focus right doubling down in institutions laws and coercive measures you know large-scale taxation um redistribution so in contrast to the regulatory emphasis the authors focus on the efficacy of institutions and the role they play in respecting individuals rights and this dovetails with the precept noted on page two which i mentioned a moment ago that my son really found resonating which is about leaving other people alone not interfering in them and that's what cosmopolitan justice requires is people have the freedom to pursue their personal projects and to wit this is a refreshing departure from the typical cosmopolitan approach so i wrote my dissertation on a cosmopolitan approach to warfare ethics and um i wish this book was around then it's a it's a refreshing compliment to that to that to the literature um more specifically i was heartened by the use of empirical social science literature so um speaking to a room full of primarily economists and and so you may or may not know that sort of the stock and trade of philosophers is often to try to elicit intuitions as part of the methodology elicit intuitions often by appealing to very cartoonish thought experiments and then from the intuitions are elicited from these outlandish thought experiments to draw general moral principles which are then taken as objective fact right this isn't the approach that was taken in this book okay so those are all the nice things that i'm going to say and now i want to turn and put on my the hat of a critical commentator so i want to focus here on the question of on the topic of war but first i want to unpack the book's conception and role of the state vis-a-vis the relationship between citizen compatriot right so co-citizens and distant others so my view of bears on the permissibility of humanitarian intervention so the end goal here is that i want to talk about humanitarian intervention we're going to take a little tour through the conception of the state and the individual as it's laid out the beginning of the book okay so the authors begin with a primacy putting a primacy on personal value and projects right a defense of the person of a personal value things that are primarily a value to the individual personal value in turn underpins the author's defense of personal partiality right you can because you because you can you can prioritize personal value that is that you're going to be partial to oneself and we heard this this quote from adam smith just a moment ago you can be partial to your projects commitments to one's family friends compatriots right but this is not sort of unbridled partiality this is constrained by rights such as life liberty the pursuit of happiness and a reciprocal respect for other's own partiality so you leave people alone let them do their thing and they will do the same for you now this connects with the twin importance of the primacy of liberty it is the conception of liberty as non-interference right i should be left alone to pursue my projects and personal prerogative via personal valuation i should be free to value my personal projects as i see fit right so if i want to go home and play nintendo and eat chips i should be free to do so if i want to pursue philosophy and have an interesting conversation like the one that's about to to ensue i should be free to do that as well and i should be free to prioritize that project within reasonable constraints okay now this is in part supported by appeal to smith and sigewick's observations on associative what philosophers call associated preferences that's the individuals are partial to themselves and they're close associates right this is the what we just heard from from smith and from the quote from smith and that since each is master of her own personal valuations then she has the prerogative to order her priorities accordingly okay so this is justified so in terms we have the beginning we all have these personal projects that were partial to yeah no big surprise there and it's justified by a rights theory of blocky and liberalism right we find this on page 56 so despite or perhaps because of this moral sentimentalism right the fact that we have these deep attachments to our own projects and those that are close to us we are motivated to prefer those close to us but also to effectuate our duty of non-interference interference for compatriots and foreigners alike now the authors argue that this theory of rights is pre-political and universal that means it's cosmopolitan right it's it's effectively a natural right this sort of lock in sense so what this does is it both delineates the limits of our duties for compatriots and foreigners beginning of the book talks about the guy who prefers to spend his four dollars on a skim vanilla to you that prefers the coffee the four dollars on the latte as the coffee drinker in the my deductive powers so it's not it's not unjust to prefer the four dollar on the on the latte you're not violating the rights of the poor okay but it also is calling for reciprocation right yours and other right to non-interference must be respected too to two-way street okay fine but if the main principle of justice is to leave people alone and we can prioritize our own projects and those of our associates and if the rights are universal how do we navigate the very great needs of those less fortunate like those living under tyranny whose rights are being violated who are being interfered with on a daily basis so what do we do when they're right not to be interfered with is violated and that's the core question here okay so how do we tame the potential for cosmopolitan mission creep right this cosmopolitanism that is interfering in all of our lives put in another way how do we ensure that individuals can pursue their personal projects while respecting the cosmopolitan rights of distant others but not owing onerous positive assistance and you should be free to buy your latte and not have to contribute that four dollars to the jar for unicef every day okay but so how do we how do we have these sort of this this tension if we think it's a tension so here the authors make an interesting move which is they rely on the fiduciary duty of the state to its citizens and drawing the distinction between a duty to interfere in domestic freedom deniers and so if you're living in a state then the police or the government has a has a co-citizens have an obligate have a duty to interfere when you're interfered with right this is we talks about content all this and so and there is a mere permission to do so when considering foreigners so we have a duty that is entailed in the domestic situation and it is a mere permission when when thinking about foreigners now we have a quote here on page 209 which says the reason for this is that the state owes a fiduciary duty to its citizens the state has an obligation to protect its own citizens against one another but only a permission to protect strangers it's not a duty right that's why you can drink your latte and spend your four bucks while while not donating that money to those that are being interfered with in distant lands okay so the criticism that I have is that this conclusion is made via fiat and not argument I'm sure you'll find it persuasive I find the intuition persuasive and to be fair the authors do note previously published works where they address topics such as this one but at risk of trotting out a likely familiar objection which I'm going to do anyways this libertarian view of the state is challenged for example Alan Buchanan writes in his piece the internal legitimacy of humanitarian intervention he says that the view is afflicted by a deep incoherence if not an outright inconsistency it justifies the state as a coercive apparatus by appeal to the need to protect universal interests while at the same time limiting the right of the state to use its coercive power to the protection of a particular group of persons identified by the purely contingent characteristic of happening to be members of the same political society end quote so if the triumph rate of rights that is life liberty property and the pursuit of happiness and universal what's the moral basis for protecting only those who possess the contingent property of being members of the same political community now I don't necessarily hold this view the one that I just articulated it is an incoherent position and the authors obviously reject it but fully addressing such a critique such a critique would have strengthened the chapter in my view now let's assume argument that the state does have a fiduciary duty and it is limited to said citizens okay here's where I want to turn to the topic of just war in particularly humanitarian intervention I lost my where am I in terms of time because I can sort of I'm good okay yeah I could go on and on but I'm not going to you know I want to okay I don't want to steal anyone's time so on this subject the author's state five minutes perfect and I'm quoting a government has a fiduciary duty towards its subjects fair enough this includes the obligation to respect human rights at home but because morality is universal and all persons have rights a good government also has an obligation to respect human rights abroad okay so don't interfere in others others projects abroad and from this the authors derive and I'm quoting obligation to not cooperate with tyranny all right I'm in agreement so far then they go on to then they go on to note that quote this purely negative obligation can be reinforced by adding a softer obligation to promote human rights globally provided of course that this can be done at a reasonable cost that the government can in theory tax citizens for such a purpose is to fulfill this soft obligation I'm you know done quoting here so if such taxation is legitimate then a government couldn't theory tax for humanitarian intervention according to the authors there is no difference with respect to taxation between taxing for funds for your human rights court or for a humanitarian intervention the two are the same they said those are two analogous cases so consequently the authors conclude and I quote sometimes taxing people for war is justified I agree and this includes sometimes humanitarian intervention and quote the question I have is why so if the state does have an obligation to protect its own citizens against one another but only a permission to protect strangers then where does the softer obligation to promote rights globally come from right this moral permission to effectuate the soft obligation through coercive measure of taxation right so where does the soft obligation come from if we have a limited state that only that's only duty is fiduciary responsibilities to its citizens where does the softer obligation to say being taxed to to provide for humanitarian wars where does this extra sort of bit of coercion come into and it's and I couldn't find it in the in the in the chapter so I was looking for it okay so taxation for some oh all right so all right so to sum up here in this point is that my view is that this tension between the fiduciary model of the state to act solely in citizens interest right those the authors words and the cosmopolitan tenant of universality of rights come into tension so it's one that the authors could have done a better a better job at attempting to resolve if it is all resolvable I don't know if it is all right so my last point is that taxation for some humanitarian interventions is permissible in the author's stated view all right but what about asking citizens to fight humanitarian wars on behalf of distant others all right so what my sister-in-law my brother-in-law is in the air force and he's had to go to afghanistan a bunch and I sort of was like hey how's afghanistan not a great you know sort of like a conversation stopper like how's he you know and and she said well I'm sick of my husband having to go to go and build nations abroad when you know when it is not what he signed up for right so that's the objection that that is trying to be answered here okay it's an end of one so you know but still so what about asking citizens to fight humanitarian wars on behalf of distance others the authors restrict the state's permission to two categories of people the first is volunteer soldiers that we have in the united states and mercenaries the mercenaries is an interesting one but I I was when thinking about it I ran out of time to get into it so we're going to go with just volunteers and this will be two more minutes so the author authors endorse the proposition that a volunteer member of the armed services could be required to fight a war of humanitarian intervention by asserting that the enlistee has contractually authorized the government to decide on the justice of the cause of particular wars and the contract between soldier and state cannot be read reasonably to circumscribe the scope of permissible wars to only wars of self-defense right so there's this sort of hypothetical contract between soldier and the state and it cannot be reasonably read to be limited only to wars of self-defense that's the argument here my question when reading this was well why not right can we not imagine a state that limits itself to only its fiduciary role right not the kind of softer obligation right so not the model of fiduciary duty plus softer obligation to promote human rights especially when the stakes are so high as to asking people to fight kill become maimed injured and possibly die so could we not imagine a model of armed forces that says something like join us footnote we will not engage in humanitarian intervention right it's only wars of self-defense um i have a few more points but i think i'm going to stop i'm going to stop there all this to say is that um i in fact and um i if i agree with the with the author's contention that humanitarian wars and taxation for humanitarian wars um could be justifiable um but i think it needed better support and consistency with the particular theory um so uh so with that i'll i'll stop but thank you warren we're just going to open it up because we have about 20 minutes of q and a so i will call on people and then you direct your question to the authorities that you would like to address it to any of the panelists so um hands solomon i guess this question is about the scope of the book so since you said a frame is being very much okay so you framed the book very much in being in this sort of contemporary global justice literature do you think it has anything to say to maybe people who have a slightly you know more classical like you know maybe communitarian view of what justice is i'm thinking you know there's the discussion in book two of the republic right of the just state and the interesting thing of course is he begins by saying well the just state is a bunch of people living happily in community and god kind of jacks okay that's a city of pigs he says ah you don't want a just state you want a luxurious state and if you have that view of justice do you have anything to say about that or would they inject that maybe you're just talking about the merely global luxurious state uh good question uh and as far as i'm concerned uh bigger the audience the better communitarians nine-year-olds doing well for a book and they're very hard to speak for you know who might find this of some interest but um it doesn't uh presuppose a certain party line i hope that doesn't at some places we say look we can't argue back the first principles on everything but um sure i think the communitarians are worth talking to thank you i can if i can exercise my prerogative here i have a question whether you know it goes to all three of you actually but uh so but um what if the if the empirical evidence cut a different way how would that impact your argument um in here so let's say that uh you know the way even uh so michael was was giving a very telling uh illustration right um but what if the consequences of the migration patterns were devastating to the the other group here would that change the argument or not and the reason why i ask that is because sometimes people make an argument about migration going that way and it does appear to be allow a debate over you know what happens with the cultural say like say that you're debating with uh borhouse or something right and and so it's not an issue of rights in that sense it's a sense of the consequences of what happens with the migration patterns i'd say so how would you deal with that if leaving people alone ended up with uh consequences that didn't cut in the way that we would want them to have it bad for you unless you'd like to uh so so one thing that i didn't mention uh which which to me was one of 50 fascinating things in the book is that it is not a case for open borders in the sense of completely unregulated movement of people in particular they uh express uh serious concern about the potential for entrance to commit violent acts and they argued that it is legitimate and just to restrict people who and on an individual basis are suspected to be a violent threat and not just that but that the standard that is applied should be lower than the the conservative court standard of innocent until proven guilty that the justice allows some latitude for individual exclusion on on on that margin i so so so that's the one thing i wanted to clarify and as for whenever one is talking about this issue the the the a slippery slope to god knows what disaster always comes up and as i was reading scott versus sanford 1857 preparing for this i found this delicious passage in which the the writer of the majority opinion is talking about the slippery slope of of what would happen if we gave citizenship to all of these people of african descent quote it would give two persons of the negro race the right to enter every state whenever they pleased to sojourn there as long as they pleased to go where they pleased the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens may speak to hold public meetings in political affairs and to keep and bear arms wherever they want obviously a horrifying scenario that pretty much describes what we have today and statements like that thousands of statements like that make me suspicious of the of the slippery slopes of the world when whenever a person in great britain talks to me about what might happen to their culture if people move there i asked them if they can read baowulf in the original which i can't it was written in the ninth century i can make out about a word per page but i can read chaucer about five four or five hundred years later and the only reason i can do that is because the language has been hopelessly corrupted by french by that time giving us a language i can understand giving us shakespeare etc i i i'm not sure how it is logically coherent for somebody who is such a beneficiary of cultural bastardization to be so suspicious of it and perhaps we should be we should be suspicious of those who assert that cultural change brings disaster just to push back on that i just so you know where i'm coming from i i'm basically an overborder person that's that's where my commitments are but i'm also interested in this empirical issue and there probably are people who care about preserving a culture which i think is fools erin but then there are people i think thomas sol is someone who is out of this opinion i'm not sure but there are cultural qualities that are conducive to the maintenance of liberal institutions and so could there be a rate an extent of migration of people with non-liberal values that could overwhelm and undermine the broader picture liberty that i think you're you want to maintain so not so much i mean when the french came in they enslaved the locals they killed a lot of them they took their land and they established feudalism and it was really bad for a lot of people for several hundred years so not so much that the language changed or that the literature changed but that there was real suffering by real individuals for a period of time so can you comment maybe from that point of view this is in the book so if you'd like to say this exact issue i wouldn't think that the normative values and it's a paradigm of libertarian politics and operation but let me bring it a little bit closer to to date of change of culture is i think pretty innocuous frankly because culture changes kind of pissed off that i can't use any of the apps my students use that cultures left me behind sometimes you know sometimes they don't mean they'll show me how to take selfies but then i see what it looks like and i think better left alone but you were talking about not just change of color but bad stuff happening and of course we you know we were all humiliated by the news that one of the what i was saying eight uh eight murderers who uh credit the carnage in in paris uh was a pseudo refugee from syria big news and so our candidates pontificated about the but much more interesting factor is what seven than one seven than one yeah but these are people who were settled in part of the and yet and yet um they made even william the conqueror's boy same gentleman comparison i think there's a real issue here these conditions for maintaining civility not reading bail off although i used to do when i was a nine-year-old doing book reports but uh but in terms of the conditions in which we get a piece of blade um i mean as far as i can how well it's going to go maybe the governments have worked out the model floor of this but this seems to me to be uh one of the great unsolved problems we keep working at it sometimes i think you don't make progress but i take an awful lot of regress too especially every four years unless you just uh briefly you know the the uniquely horrifying thing about hiv is that it attacks the very cells which make an immune response so there's something especially pernicious about it and i i i can imagine hypothetically legitimate migration restrictions in order for for for a liberal order to prevent its own destruction but given the i given that it is an extreme understatement to say that that case has been argued for countless groups including a group that tomasol belongs to you uh in the past economist uh yes actually they're already inside the gate in many departments in certain disciplines yes um uh and and and at least one other group and maybe more we we should really place we should place the burden of proof uh on you know the the way that this has escaped in in uh paul collier's book exodus is that he just says well you know migration is irreversible so we should stop it right now just in case that happens that is just uh giving up the entire tradition of marginal analysis in economics and and saying well if there might be a margin someday on which it happened and i think that's insufficient given the many many many many many times that insider groups have cried wolf uh and we should wait until their substantial evidence that our institutions are going away uh the the court in sanford uh in in in scottbrose sanford uh was was certain that the the the very institutions that underpin american society would be would be erased by allowing even a limited number of people of african descent to to to uh participate in it and that's uh that's uh that's so bizarre that we should demand much much more than um than the kind of uh vacuous fear mongering that uh collier and others engaging well actually i think it's one of the same lines where we say questioning clarification i think as a starting point this distinction or maybe there are a lot of a distinction between uh economic migrants and refugees right uh so it's not very clear what was your argument there and i'm asking you this question because years ago i have taken a class with you on lifeboat ethics bowing green university 20 years or so now that the lifeboat ethics class was exactly about profiles and typologies and there it uses in various moral and political circumstances creating lists creating priorities and setting up criteria that might be operational in different circumstances so i'm not very sure how your thought has evolved from that initial lifeboat ethics approach to this i'm not very sure lack of distinction between economic migrants and refugees including the moral and political implications of those lack of distinctions yeah i'm not sure how well you did in that class i'm going to test you just what was my position 20 years ago okay let me let me test you on that no i'm testing you on that let's go questioning clarification is he playing fair oh you're an economist now go ahead oh that's it uh well i'm uh not sure what i might have said under the pressure of uh very clever students in that class so i'm gonna punt on that but i'll tell you what i think now i think um that uh in my understanding of how the world should be the case for economic migrants is actually much stronger than uh refugees and it's much stronger because economic migration it was voluntary transactions among people say who want to work or study or rent places with others who want to do that etc etc the uh uh the case though with refugees is of course that typically if you're running away from Assad or or ISIS or son you know you're in a condition of desperation you may be a drain on the resources of others rather than contributing to that uh nonetheless of course i think you'd have to you know either uh uh be very heartless or uh have taken a lot of economics courses not to feel some sympathy for those who are fleeing for their lives and such um i would be entirely comfortable with support for uh refugees and the like being uh being prioritized i think there are enough decent people who would be willing to support others everything deep was done you know throughout so much of the history of this country and other places that accepted people coming in but uh i don't i don't know if that suits you is that what i said 20 years ago actually 20 years ago i think that your position was clear in terms of the criteria that we have to use in such circumstances who's the way when you said we i think we is the most uh tricky word in policy philosophical policy well let's say for the for the sake of this conversation the two of us the two of us private citizens yeah and you know so uh 20 years ago the idea was that in such circumstances that we have limited resources which is the lifeboat yes and we have a population that is larger than the carrying capacity of the lifeboat we have to make tough decisions and in order to make those decisions right we have to build opposite of criteria i learned to do that those criteria should be consistent so in other words and i'm creating two classes economic migrants and refugees i have to use right a consistent set of criterias in order to make a decision on a lifeboat situations now we may say that we are not in the lifeboat situation and then you continue conversation from there but if we use the extreme case of the lifeboat situation we'll be helping us to focus better the conversation now in your reply i'm not very sure if i got the point right you said that there are two types of criteria one of the price set of criteria is operating for the economic migrants and the other set of criteria is operating for the refugees the the people that are running from war and i agree with that we could have a conversation in that direction if you want but that was not the point right the point was to have a sort of unitary set of criteria for an extreme situation that will be helping us to get a better sense what is the set of moral principles or political principles or institutional design principles that we're using we're discussing a very conflict and apply issue like one of borders and migration good uh a i don't think a lifeboat metaphor is helpful in this i think it's positively misleading second i'm going to guess it was rave fraud my colleague bowling green who actually gave that course because i don't recall said what you said but third that's what criteria the primary one is non-interference if uh you want to hire somebody to to watch your children or mow your grass or or manage your stock portfolio i don't think anybody else is entitled to to intervene you know borrowing we can all do the negative externalities stars i mean you're economists you can you can figure out ways to tax height for goodness sake that was a good one today oh thank god it isn't taxing weight right but of course in the case of it goes beyond that it goes beyond simply non-interference but positively helping should we do it yeah but that took further step and i think that's probably all i have to say so a question for michael and maybe lauren wants to follow up is that uh justice at a distance seems to could be worked better in some societies than in others so it seems that one of the problems with some of the european economies with immigrants coming in is that they have such constrained labor markets and perhaps also invidious discrimination to a greater extent than elsewhere that you manage to in one society have people cut off from the majority in that society and so develop an external world view while being within this this society and that's where a lot of these problems come from so the question is what kind of institutions do we need when not at a distance in order to best take advantage of and best integrate and and best make justice at a distance possible you may with regard to individual mobility so if we have a lot of people coming in that means in order to live with that we're going to have to change internal institutions what kind of internal institutions are going to best allow us to achieve justice at a distance i think that was yeah so there's a fascinating part of the book that that relates to this where they discussed the welfare state and and does does the welfare state exacerbate nativism by giving people all kinds of reasons to exclude because they create a necessary link between inclusion and expropriation and as i mentioned i think there's some you could discuss all kind of policy remedies but there there is this core question of whether certain domestic institutions allow mobility or don't an analogy i often make is you know there were coercive institutions to prevent female labor force entry um not many people have ever heard the term marriage bar i had never heard of it before a few months ago but claudia golden documents that in the 1920s and 30s many white collar firms and school districts had explicit often written policies of either not hiring or firing married women um and you know uh it uh you could imagine that the entry of women into the labor force caused some non-zero harms you could probably find a workplace rape that occurred only because women were allowed to work that wouldn't have happened otherwise i i hope nobody in this room would think that's a reason to coerce women not to work you might think it's a reason for education about sexual harassment or education about self-defense or many other norms and institutions that would allow mobility into the labor force rather than using that as a pretext to ban it and i think it's very clear that the development of those institutions made that particular kind of mobility possible what what i don't know and what i would like to know from lauren is if this bears on on the question of justice that is are we because the question of the book is what do we owe to people who are poor in distance do we do we is it actually unjust to so a couple of fascinating papers by lennard in the journal of economic perspectives argues that the the minimum wage was in part created as an exclusionary mechanism for migrants do we owe it to the the distant poor of the world to dismantle uh institutions like that to the extent that they block mobility i i don't have an answer to that but i'll bet that lauren does well i'm not sure i'm qualified until two minutes ago on the marriage bar was where spouses went when they needed a drink after you know so um so this this is he see i told you that i benefit more when i come here than i provide but um um i you know my uh first answer on this and several other questions is the default position should be non-interference if you're suggesting that europe involved far more interference in labor market specifically and other stuff too than the u.s i think that's right um i think germany has done brilliantly in this regard by sigatiously managing to get its uh uh its population growth rate down to 1.5 or 1.6 per one so that there are plenty of room for uh bringing in i'm being sarcastic i realized one shouldn't rely on humor in a realm of economists but uh but basically leaving people alone ought to be the first thing and i thought we i think we agreed on that so like minimum wage do we who here really likes minimum wage you want to go along bring it up to 15 like uh price oh she's not personally yeah uh candidate clinton well you know where i'm afraid something of a minority use that kind of harm lots of people who can link stand time uh yeah it will is alive but it happened sure it will uh i could tell your story about expressive voting but i've taken too much time talking already okay we're actually unfortunately uh we're out of time here i want to thank each of the panelists and uh lauren for uh coming here today and sharing their ideas i'm sure that we have a lot of additional questions to ask i would love to talk to jesse about perwanda and bosnia and other kinds of things like that and you know what that entails in terms of when like for example roosevelt sent back people into holocaust europe rather than accepting them into the united states and what's the moral you know sort of lesson from that as it relates to where we are today um and i and you know and all these kind of questions so i hope that uh we continue this kind of conversation but uh please join me in uh you know thanking our panel