Comment on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 03:54:03 GMT

Probably but I'm not sure why that should be surprising; most moral standards we hold are inconsistent. So what would distinguish policy towards illegal immigration from other policies?

In a previous open thread, I brought up the theory of right-wing authoritarianism, which purports that conservative attitudes may be partially a defensive response to perception of threat. That offers one way of looking at policy towards illegal immigration: Maybe some people really do view immigrants as a threat to their way of living. So from that perspective they would not view them as harmless.

It may be simpler than that, though. Maybe 'rescue harmless people who are close to death' is not a strong value (or a value at all) for some. Certainly we know that psychopaths do not hold this as a value, and may even consider it an anti-value -- they would enjoy increasing the number of harmless people who are close to death. I'm sure this is not true for the majority of human beings, however.

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