Sixteen Volts

When I read the post "Okay, Let Me Explain Myself" by Glaivester and followed the links there, I was honestly puzzled of why his two very simple observations about the real reasons why the left wants open borders were considered false and offensive in the post "My first nerd fight!" and its comments. I really would have assumed that these people would counter Glaivester's claims with a hearty "You're right, that's exactly what we want, and so what, you fucking capitalist and racist?" instead of mockery and denial. But live and learn, I guess, since that's what the blogosphere is for, enabling everybody to understand his fellow man a little bit better.

This takes me to the topic of the post that I wanted to make eventually, and today is as good day for this job as any other. To begin, we should generally avoid false dilemmas in argumentation, since there are many sides to each story, all bristling with nuance and alternatives and subtlety and complexity and all that richness of the vast tapestry of life. However, whenever the given alternatives are logically complementary and mutually exclusive, you either have to choose one or admit that you don't know enough about the topic to make your choice just yet. But what you don't get to do while remaining intellectually honest is picking and choosing the suitable parts of both alternatives, depending on your rhetorical needs of the moment.

For example, I truly wish that everybody in the wide-open borders gang made it explicit which one of the following two mutually exclusive and logically complementary alternatives they support:

1. Everybody who wants to immigrate to this country must be allowed to come in, and the police and immigration officials have no right to send anybody back, except perhaps the worst criminal offenders.
2. This country should not let just anybody who wants in to come in, but democratically sets up some objective criteria that determines which potential immigrants are allowed in. Those who try to immigrate to this country even though they don't satisfy these criteria should be found and sent back, by force if necessary.

You can choose either option, but once you choose door #2 (as every serious person does in the end), you no longer get to complain about the existence of police and immigration officials, or the fact that they do their jobs by enforcing the democratically decided criteria for who is allowed to come in. You can certainly argue that these criteria are too strict and should be loosened, if you think that this is the case. But one thing you no longer get to do after choosing door #2 is to complain and act all smug when the police and immigration officials do their jobs and capture and send back the illegal immigrants who don't satisfy these criteria. You can complain if the pigs erroneously arrest and send back somebody who actually did satisfy these criteria, but you don't get to plead special mercy for some particular person who doesn't satisfy the criteria, because you consider him somehow a special person to whom the immigration laws should not apply even though you still want these laws to apply to the millions of essentially similar people whose only real difference to that one person is that they didn't succeed in sneaking in or didn't have the money or attitude to even attempt it.

In similar vein, it would also be nice if everybody just made it clear which one of the following two alternatives they believe:

1. There is room for many more people on Earth, and therefore all people everywhere should be allowed to have as many children as they want.
2. Overpopulation is a serious problem, so some people should be forced to have fewer children than they wanted to have.

Here you can choose either door, but again you do have to choose exactly one, and once you have made your choice, you also have to accept the unpleasant consequences that your choice logically entails. For example, it looks pretty silly when somebody who wants to totally close the borders then goes to argue for alternative #1 in this question. Or when somebody who believes that overpopulation is a serious problem for the ecosystem then opposes the enforcement of the one-child policy in China.

The third choice that I think that everybody should really make explicitly to clarify their other positions is between the following two logically complementary and mutually exclusive alternatives:

1. There are at least two people in the world who have a different worth.
2. All people everywhere have a worth that is exactly equal no matter who they are and what they do. This includes you, me, Adolf Hitler, a person with Down syndrome, a newborn baby, an old person lying in his deathbed, a convicted serial rapist, the victims of the said rapist etc.

Of the three choices presented in this post, this last one is probably the most difficult one for most people, since both alternatives have such very nasty logical consequences when you actually think about them. In this particular question, I am sure that it is a lot more fun to pick and choose the best parts of both so that you can bask in your moral superiority in any situation. But something being fun doesn't make it true, except for the intellectual hedonists.

(And just in case it wasn't obvious, my answers are #2, #2 and #1.)

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, April 24, 2006 at 11:38 AM