Dan King

Racism is a sign of low intelligence.

The Asymmetries of Moral Obligation: Birthrights, Children, and Immigration The prevailing explanation for why advanced societies owe opportunities, resources, and citizenship to foreigners begins with a bad explanation: that citizens of prosperous countries were simply lucky to be born in high-performing societies. From this flows claim that the “lucky” have a moral obligation to the “unlucky,” with little regard for the cultural ideas that produced the prosperity in the first place. Your primary duty is to your own children: to protect the non-coercive conditions under which their creativity and error correction can flourish. Those conditions were created and sustained by people making particular choices across generations. They are not randomly distributed. It is not luck that you were born into a society with traditions of open criticism, rule of law, scientific thinking, high-trust cooperation, and institutions that limit coercion. You exist because of a specific genealogical and cultural lineage—the cumulative decisions of ancestors who chose to build, innovate, cooperate under certain norms, and transmit the knowledge and institutions that yielded better outcomes. The hypothetical “How would you feel if you had been born in a different country?” erases the conditions that make you who you are. If you had been born there, you would have been raised in a different framework of knowledge and culture and you would be different. The geographic-lottery view erases agency and the role of better ideas being selected for through error correction over generations. Societies that developed and retained traditions of open criticism created compounding advantages precisely because those traditions allow ideas to be criticized and improved rather than protected from scrutiny. Children born into such societies inherit knowledge, institutions, and norms that make further progress more readily achievable. Future generations have a direct interest in its continuation. Progress is not automatic. The institutions and norms that enable it require active maintenance and continuous solving of new problems. Children enter conscious existence without prior consent. This is not inherently immoral, but the decision to bring a child into existence creates an asymmetry: the parents are responsible for the conditions in which that child learns. There is no fundamental distinction between children and adults in terms of how they grow their knowledge. Coercion impedes that process. The moral obligation arising from procreation is therefore to provide and protect the non-coercive conditions under which the child can function as a full, sovereign problem-solver. A society’s parallel duty is to safeguard the tradition of criticism itself, the practice that allows tolerance, science, morality, and institutions to advance through criticism rather than authority. There is no equivalent moral responsibility to foreigners as there is to one’s own children. But there is a lesser, qualitatively different moral obligation that dynamic societies have to foreigners born into impoverished or static societies: it consists primarily in refraining from interference that would block access to better explanations and, where feasible, in sharing the knowledge of how traditions of criticism generate progress, to the extent that people in those societies are interested in receiving it. There is no moral obligation to grant foreigners membership, political voice, or resources equivalent to those owed to one’s children or citizens. Even foreigners who have adopted our core values deserve no automatic right of entry. Admission remains a discretionary choice for the existing citizens. While this lack of moral obligation does not categorically preclude immigration, it does require that immigration be selective and beneficial to the continuation of that tradition of criticism. An open society can gain from inflows of people who have adopted its values and are net contributors. Borders and selection mechanisms exist precisely to make genuine tolerance and openness sustainable over time. Without criteria that favor compatibility, inflows risk importing deeper cultural ideas of authority, in-group coercion, violence, or rejection of open scrutiny that resist integration and necessitate greater top-down coercion to manage resulting conflicts. Birthright citizenship in the U.S. grants full membership by geography alone, which mistakes birthplace for birthright. Providing foreign humanitarian aid is not a moral obligation, but when freely chosen by individuals or countries, it can be an effective way to offer compassion to those in different countries. However, indiscriminate humanitarian aid frequently acts as an institutional subsidy for stagnation. By propping up corrupt rules, policies, and anti-rational systems, aid can protect dysfunctional rulers from the consequences of their bad ideas. It can artificially sustain the equilibrium of a static society, delaying the very crises that would otherwise pressure those systems to reform and adopt traditions of open criticism. There is a profound difference between one’s own children or citizens adopting mistaken ideas and the importation of adults carrying deeply incompatible cultural ideas. An American who goes to college and embraces anti-capitalism or other errors can still be engaged through criticism within a shared framework: common language, parenting norms, legal expectations, and the background understanding that ideas must survive scrutiny. By contrast, importing people whose childhood embedded deep anti-rational memes that disable critical faculties rather than withstand them can undermine the conditions for criticism itself. Moral obligations are asymmetric. They arise from the specific relationships and inherited traditions we are responsible for maintaining, most immediately with our children, and by extension with the citizens who create and sustain the framework that allows creativity, criticism, and progress to continue. The geographic-lottery explanation obscures these asymmetries and the agency that built the prosperity in question.

Mormons are not Christians, sorry.