The problem of (illegal) immigration / refugees seems to divide western societies in two groups:
1. The left
The left wants to allow foreigners (and even more so refugees) to enter the country. They argue with moral: why should a country be only owned by those who arrived there first? Why not to provide a new home for people who had to flee from horrible conditions in their countries. The moral nature of the argument makes helping to an imperative. Accordingly they blame the right for the lack of support for refugees.
But letting everybody into the country is unfortunately not in the interest of the population who already lives there: the immigrants are often poorly educated and significant cultural differences create frequently social friction.
The left try to ignore this fact and try to suppress such arguments by stressing the moral nature of their argument („If you don’t agree with us you are a bad person!“).
Many people feel very uneasy about this. Self preservation is a basic and very strong instinct. And trying to simply override it creates strong fears.
2. The right
The right wants to stop immigration (including most refugees) at the border. Their argument is the self preservation mentioned above: why should we allow something which is clearly against our interests?
Now interestingly the right also use a moral argument to support their view: the immigrants enter our country illegally, they therefore intentionally break our laws! We should therefore defend ourselves against such criminals.
The right ignore that the law has - of course - very little to do with moral. Laws can be (and often are) highly immoral. The laws allowing slavery in the US could serve as an example.
Similar to the left, the right try to suppress such arguments (e.g. by accusing the left of supporting criminality).
Again many people feel very uneasy about this. It simply does not feel like doing the right thing. We are deeply social creatures. We feel bad if we ignore if somebody needs our help.
Now interestingly both sides need a moral argument to defend their cause. It allows them to construct an imperative in spite of obvious inconsistencies and issues with their argumentation.
Humans seem to need moral when hard decisions need to be made. The left need moral to convince themselves that self interest must be ignored and the right need moral to convince themselves that it is totally ok not to help people in need.
We seem to use moral as a crutch to make it easier for us to resolve conflicts concerning our decisions. This is a very problematic behavior as it makes finding a creative solution for the problem almost impossible. If we have two more or less equally large groups which simply blame the other half for the problem, not much will change (each side is only trying to convince the other side of their moral argument and hoping for them to switch side).
And the two sides are even doomed to remain equally strong forever. The reason for this is, that both proposed solutions don’t work (because of their inherent issues mentioned above). As soon as one side has a majority which allows them to start implementing its ideas, the drawbacks resulting from the issues become apparent and many people, horrified from the results, switch side. Then the other side gets a chance for a while and the cycle repeats.
Therefore, like this the problem will never (!) be solved!
Now let’s think about what could happen if we could forsake moral. The result would be simple: the issues in each side’s argumentation would become hard to ignore and we all (i.e. left and right) would have to agree that we have a problem and that we don’t have a good solution for it yet.
This would admittedly be a bit scary! What shall we do now? If we have no solution for a problem we lose agency and this is not a good feeling. We would still have to muddle through somehow, knowing now exactly that our decisions are flawed. That in one way or the other, we lose anyway.
Yes, we would suffer then.
But: we would be highly incentivised now to find a solution for the problem together. Like children who learn to speak crazily fast because they suffer horribly in their communicative isolation. We will only start to work effectively on the problem if we can’t blame the other side anymore.
I believe that dropping moral arguments is a first important step to a solution. And I’m quite optimistic that a good solution for this problem can be found (and is maybe not even as difficult to find as we fear now).
Animated GIF „Justice“ by GUM
Image on top: © Shutterstock (Alessio Tricani)
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