Discussions of immigration policy often focus on the perceived conflicts between the interests of immigrants and low-wage native workers. This conflict may be more apparent than real; nevertheless, the potential conflict raises the question of how we weight the interests of poor immigrants and the interests of poor native workers. Economists, working in a utilitarian framework, tend to weight the interests of immigrants and native poor equally; this results in support for more immigration, and sometimes open borders. Pope Francis, arguing from the Christian imperative to universal fraternity, also supports an increased openness to immigration.
When economists evaluate policy proposals, whose interests count? Economists often assign equal weights to each person’s welfare in order to more easily discern potential Pareto improvements. Moreover, equal weighting appears to be consistent with Christianity’s call to universal charity: It excludes no one’s interests, and each person’s welfare receives equal weight. Individual persons and countries, however, do not typically apply equal weights to the interests of others when they act; they exclude the interests of some, and weight more heavily the interests of family, friends, community members, and fellow citizens.
This paper explores the challenges of equal weights on individual welfare in normative analysis when individuals and nations do not apply equal weights to the interests of those around them. To do this, it will draw analytical resources from Hittinger’s account of common goods in community and Aquinas’s analysis of the order of charity to attempt to reconcile local loves (of family, community, fellow citizens) and universal love. The analysis suggests that the blindness of economists to common goods makes them less able to appreciate local loves.
How might we model the order of charity? There are two dimensions to this challenge. The first challenge is to incorporate altruistic preferences which vary inversely in strength with social distance. The second challenge is to make social distance endogenous in the model, incorporating human agency in establishing communities and the shared goods which foster fraternity. The first challenge can draw on the existing altruism and fraternity literature. The second requires more creative and groundbreaking work.
Bibliographic sources
Aquinas, Thomas, Treatise on Charity.
Hittinger, Russell. “The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation.” In Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity can Work Together, eds Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati, 75-123. Rome: Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2008.
Zamagni, Stefano, ed. (1997). The Economics of Altruism (Elgar).
Bruni, Luigino, and Robert Sugden (2008). “Fraternity: Why the Market Need Not Be a Morally Free Zone.” Economics and Philosophy 24, no. 1: 35-64.