It’s blindingly obvious that not all cultures are
equal. If forced to live somewhere, I’d wager that virtually all my readers
around the world would rather live in Switzerland than Somalia, or Norway
rather than North Korea.
If it’s blindingly obvious that cultures are unequal; and if it's blindingly obvious that not all societies are equally successful, flourishing, or desirable places to live; then it’s also blindingly obvious that the migration of cultures into other cultures is going to cause problems if the migrant cultures have values and attitudes that are unfriendly to the majority of the citizens of the cultures above them.
I can even show you this formally. Readers who weren’t reading my blogs back in 2013 might like to know about my two blogs on John Harsanyi’s amnesia principle (see here and here), because Harsanyi’s work is compelling, and speaks into so many ethical considerations. Harsanyi’s amnesia principle (which was later developed by John Rawls in his ‘veil of ignorance’) posits that a fair social choice requires decision-makers to choose society's rules as if they have complete amnesia about their own personal status, abilities, and position in life. By removing self-interest and knowledge of one's own identity, individuals rationally select policies that maximise the average utility across all members of society.
It’s strange, then, because virtually every citizen of the UK knows this is a problem in our own country, yet the majority of UK citizens are choosing to live as though it isn’t happening, or that it is happening but they don’t want to appear bigoted or racist by challenging it. Of course, as we are seeing with Piddington, the former group soon becomes incensed and galvanised when it happens to them - and that would likely be true of both groups if they became more directly affected by it.
So, think of this in terms of the proposition that not all cultures are equal. Imagine an equal probability of being anyone in the society’s population, where the utility of a model like this is the expected value of the outcomes - that is, the sum of probability of outcome times utility of outcome, meaning the utility of an equal probability of living any life in the society is the average utility of the society. Harsanyi contended that the best society is the one with the highest average utility - that is, a rational, impartial observer would prefer whichever social arrangement maximises this average utility, giving rise to average utilitarianism.
Therefore, an optimal immigration policy must also be a sensible benchmark for social progress, in that it must navigate between the errors of per capita utility and total utility models in who it encourages to come into the country, and which polices it enacts upon arrival (with people often arriving illegally).
If human flourishing is the ultimate measure of a society’s success, then we must accept that the cultural frameworks generating that flourishing are not interchangeable, because culture dictates the boundaries of social trust, civic cohesion, and economic success - and some cultures are better than others, and some individuals are better than others. An immigration framework that pretends all cultural systems yield equal social utility is not being compassionate - it is being wilfully blind to the mechanics of societal breakdown.
And I say all this as a global citizen who is tolerant and respectful of all human needs, from whichever country or culture. And I write this to show too that not all of these kinds of arguments are coming from what is lazily written off as the ‘far right’ (see my YouTube video on this here) - specifically to contend that a prudent immigration policy must acknowledge that welcoming those whose cultural norms undermine the very social capital that produced our prosperity does not expand utility - it comes with the danger of systematically diluting it.
