Best Evidence of the Greatness of This Country

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

The best evidence of the greatness of this country is that people are clamoring to get into it. Almost nobody—including self-loathing progressives—wants to leave it.

It is also the best evidence of the failure of Communism and those socio-political schemes that are ever on the slouch toward Communism.   They needed walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparsion of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

By the way, this lust for power by any means explains the fascination of leftists with Nietzsche, a fascination which would otherwise be difficult to explain given the German's social and political views.  Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis is that the world is the will to power.  Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!  And because reality at its base and core is blind will to power without rhyme or reason, whose only goal is its own expansion, there is no place for truth.  Truth gets reduced, and in consequence of the reduction eliminated, in favor of ever-shifting perspectives of ever-changing power centers.  Perspectivism, accordingly, is Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  It is of course incoherent and easily refuted.  But why should that matter to someone who does not care about truth in the first place?  Truth is a conservative notion since it points us to the way things ARE.  But progressives take their marching orders from Karl Marx: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the wotrld; but the point is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach.)  Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden  interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.

What in these two central Nietzschean doctrines is there for a leftist not to love?  He finds sanction in them  both for his pursuit of power unchecked by any moral standard ("The end justifies the means") and for his propaganda and deceitfulness.   If there is no truth there is no limit to what he can say and do in pursuit of his ends.

This also explains the leftist's  belief in the indefinite malleability of man and society. If there is no way things are, no rerum natura, then there is no limit on what is possible.  And if there is no moral world order, then there is no check on what it is morally permissible to do. And so the leftist, foolish idealist that he is, embarks upon schemes the upshot of which  are of the sort documented in the Black Book of Communism.  But if you break 100 million eggs and still have no omelet, then you need to go back and check your premises.  Or, to paraphrase Aristotle, a little error in the beginning leads to a big bloody one in the end.

 

Meditation: Three Baby Steps

First, drive out all useless thoughts.  Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts.  Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones.  Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper.  Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps.  You may not even make it to the threshhold.  But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.

The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises. 

Amphiboly

Amphiboly is syntactic ambiguity.  "The foolish fear that God is dead."  This sentence is amphibolous because its ambiguity does not have a semantic origin in the multiplicity of meaning of any constituent word, but derives from the ambiguous way the words are put together.  On one reading, the construction is a sentence: 'The foolish/ fear that God is dead.'  On the other reading, it is not a sentence, does not express a compete thought, but is a sentence-fragment: ' The foolish fear/that God is dead.'

A good writer avoids ambiguity except when he intends it.

I Finally Get My BlogRoll Rolling

I am lazy, a man of leisure, a slacker before slackers were so-called, but not particularly arrogant.  So don't take it as arrogance that I have until just recently expanded the blogroll of this, the third major incarnation of Maverick Philosopher, beyond one entry.  Well, maybe some arrogance is involved in consequence of an upsurge in readership:  who really and thoroughly knows the inner workings of his own psyche?  (But knowing the limits of self-knowledge is important self-knowledge.)

In any case, scroll down til near the end of the right-hand sidebar and you will find some links.  They are mostly links to the sites of friends I have made over the years via this wonderful medium.  Some I have had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh.  Some I hope to meet.  Those who appear in the 'sphere under their real names I list by their names.  Others I list by their weblog names. 

My friends in other disciplines should not feel slighted.  I'll get around to you eventually.

Patriotism and Jingoism

It is not uncommon to hear people confuse patriotism with jingoism. So let's spend a few moments this Fourth of July reflecting on the difference. 

Jingoism is well described by Robert Hendrickson as "bellicose chauvinism." But given the general level of culture, I am afraid I can't leave it at that, but must go on to explain 'chauvinism' and 'bellicose.' Chauvinism has nothing to do with sex or race. I have no objection to the phrases 'male chauvinism' or 'white chavinism,' the latter a term widely used in the 1950s in Communist Party USA circles; but the qualifiers are essential. Chauvinism, named after Nicholas Chauvin of Rochefort, an officer under Napoleon, is excessive nationalism. 'Bellicose' from the Latin word for war (bellum, belli) means warlike. So we get 'warlike excessive nationalism' as the definiens of 'jingoism.'

According to Henrickson, the term 'jingoism' originated from a refrain from the British music hall song "The Great MacDermott" (1878) urging Great Britain to fight the Russians and prevent them from taking Constantinople:

We don't want to fight, yet by Jingo if we do/ We've got the ships, we've got the men, and the money, too.

'By Jingo,' in turn, is a euphemism for 'by Jesus' that dates back to the later 17th century. (QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed. p. 395) So much for 'jingoism.' I think we are all going to agree that it is not a good thing. Patriotism, however, is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue it is a means between two extremes. In this case, one of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, within bounds. The patriot is neither a jingoist nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. To confuse a patriot with a jingoist is like confusing a dissenter with a traitor. No doubt sometimes a jingoist or chauvinist will hide beneath the mantle of patriotism, but just as often a traitor will hide beneath the mantle of dissent. The patriot is also not a xenophobe since ordinate love of one's country does not entail hattred or fear of other countries and their inhabitants. Is patriotism, defined as the ordinate love of, and loyalty to, one's country justified?

Although it does not entail xenophobia, patriotism does imply a certain partiality to one's own country precisely because it is one's own. Is this partiality toward one's own country justifiable?  If it is, then so is patriotism.  As Socrates explains in Plato's Crito, we are what we because of the laws.  Our country and its laws have overseen our nurturance, our education, and the forming of our characters. We owe a debt of gratitude to our country, its laws, those who have worked to maintain and defend it, and especially those who have died in its defense.

A Case for Open Immigration?

Spencer Case sent me a link to a short op-ed piece by Michael Huemer who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado.  Huemer's thesis is that

. . . U.S. immigration policy is fundamentally unjust. It disregards the rights and interests of other human beings, merely because those persons were born in another country. It coercively imposes clear and serious harms on some people, for the sake of relatively minor or dubious benefits for others who happened to have been born in the right geographical area.

Huemer's argument stripped to essentials and in his own words:

1. It is wrong to knowingly impose severe harms on others, by force, without having a good reason for doing so. This principle holds regardless of where one's victims were born or presently reside.

2. The U.S. government, in restricting immigration, knowingly and coercively imposes severe harms on millions of human beings.

3.  The U.S. government has no good reason for imposing such harms on potential immigrants.

——–

4. It follows that U.S. immigration policy is morally wrong.

Before addressing Huemer's argument, some preliminary points need to be made.

A. First, a difficult issue such as the one before us cannot be resolved via some quick little argument like the above.  Numerous considerations and counter-considerations come into play.

B. Here is a consideration in the light of which Huemer's argument has an aura of the fantastic.  The U. S. is a welfare state.  Now no welfare state can hope to survive and meet it commitments to provide all sorts of services at taxpayer expense if it opens its borders wide.  Without trying to estimate the tsunami of humanity that would flood into the country from all sides were immigration restrictions removed, it is clear that open borders is a wildly impractical proposal.  And note that this impracticality itself has moral ramifications: if bona fide citizens have been promised that they will be taken care of by some such system as Social Security into their old age, and the government reneges on its promises because of an empty treasury, then the rights of the retirees will have been violated — which is a moral issue.

If state functions were stripped down to 'night watchman' size as certain libertarians would advocate, then perhaps an open borders policy would be workable; but obviously such a rollback of governmental powers and functions  has no chance of occurring.  Let the quixotic rollback occur; THEN and ONLY THEN we can talk about open borders.  Meanwhile we do have border control, half-hearted as it is.  It is not obviously unjust to those who immigrate legally to allow others in illegally? 

C.  An open borders policy is impractical not only for the reason mentioned, but for many others besides. I catalog some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.

Now to Huemer's argument.

I see no reason to accept premise (2) according to which the U. S. government imposes severe harms on people by preventing them from immigrating.  Suppose you have foolishly gone into the desert without proper supplies.  You soon find yourself  in dire need of water.  Coming upon my camp, you enter it and try to take my water.  I prevent you from doing so.  Have I harmed you?  I have not inflicted any harm upon you;  I have merely prevented you from getting something you need for your well-being.  But you have no right to my water, even if I have more than enough.  If you steal my supplies, you violate my property rights; I am therefore morally justified in resisting the theft.  You are morally obliged to respect my property rights, but I am under no moral obligation to give you what you need, especially in light of the fact that you have freely put yourself in harm's way.

Similarly, the U. S. government does not harm those whom it does not allow to enter its territory, for they have no right to enter its territory in the first place, and in so doing violate the property rights of the U. S.

Once this is appreciated it will also be seen why (3) is false.  The U. S. does have a good moral reason to prevent foreigners from entering its territory, namely, to prevent them from violating the property rights of the U. S.

Now at this point I expect someone to object as follows.  "I grant you that illegal aliens are not justified in violating private property rights, but when they cross public lands, travel on public roads, use public facilities, etc. they are not violating any property rights.  The U. S. has no property rights; there are no public property rights that need to be respected." 

This objection is easily rebutted.  It is based on a false analogy with unowned resources. An incursion into an uninhabited region not in the jurisdiction of a state does not violate property rights. But the public lands of the U. S. are within the jurisdiction of the U.S.  These lands are managed and protected by the state which gets the werewithal of such management and protection, and in some instances, the money to pay for the  original acquisition, from coercive taxation.  Thus we taxpayers collectively own these lands.  It is not as if the land, roads, resources and the like of the U.S. which are not privately owned are somehow open to anyone in the world who wants to come here.  Just as an illegal alien violates property rights when he breaks into my house, he violates property rights when he breaks into my country.  For a country belongs collectively to its citizens, not to everyone in the world.

The fundamental point is that foreigners have no right to immigrate.  Since they have no such right, no moral wrong is done to them by preventing them from immigrating even though they would be better off were they to immigrate.  Furthermore, the U.S. government and every government has not only the right, but also the moral obligation, to control its border for the the good of its citizens.  After all, protection from foreign invasion is one of the legitimate functions of government.

 

Robert Oakes Weighs in on the God of the Philosophers

I got a phone call from philosopher of religion Robert Oakes yesterday.  In the course of a lengthy chat, I mentioned my recent post on Pascal and Buber and asked him what he thought of it.  Today I received the following from him by e-mail:

Very good to talk with you.  Short comment on that El Stupido notion of Buber-Pascal. The idea, presumably, is that the God of  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob  is a proper object of worship, while the God of the Philosophers is  a bloodless abstraction. But, of course, God (for the philosophical  theist) is that than which a greater is metaphysically impossible. So: is a being Who is worthy of worship greater (ceteris paribus) than one who is not? Of course. End of issue, No?

An admirable instance of  pithiness.  Bob's argument could be extended as follows.  A quintessentially philosophical definition of 'God' is the one that derives from Anselm of Canterbury:  God is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Borrowing the phrase 'great-making property' from Plantinga, we can say that God instantiates all great-making properties.  Now being worthy of worship is a great-making property. Because no concept, idea, or abstraction is worthy of worship, it follows from the philosophical definition alone, without appeal to any (putative) revelation or anything from religion, that the God of the philosophers cannot be a concept, idea, or abstraction. 

But not only that.  It also follows from the Anselmian definition that nothing short of a worship-worthy being could be God.  So a First Cause could not count as God for a philosophical theist who operates with the concept of God  in Judeo-Christian monotheism.  Within this tradition the God of philosophy is not different from the God of  religion.  It is the same God, but approached via discursive reason rather than via  faith in revelation.

 

Undocumented Democrats

Despite  the inaptness  of the phrase, liberals call illegal aliens 'undocumented workers.'  'Undocumented Democrats' is equally inapt but better expressive of why liberals are so tolerant of their presence.  If the invaders from the south were potential Republicans, liberal tolerance would morph into its opposite.

Still More on the God of the Philosophers Versus the God of Abraham, et al.

Ken e-mails and I respond in blue:

I turn on my computer and check out the Maverick Philosopher and suddenly half of my day is shot. First I have to look up the word 'pellucidity' and then I am stuck trying to figure out why your claim about the phrases 'God-P' and 'God-R' does not seem right to me.

It sounds like I'm doing something right!  You can look up a word without getting out of your chair.  Here's a tip that you may already be aware of:  type 'define: pellucidity' (without the inverted commas) into the Google search box and you will get a page of definitions, some of them from reputable sources.  (I don't consider Wikipedia a particularly reputable source.) Needless to say, this works for almost any word inserted after the colon and not just for 'pellucidity'!

I agree that the sentence [from Martin Buber], "What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea," is false but to state that that 'God-P' and 'God-R' have the same referent, if they have a referent, seems false to me as it carries an assumption of the monotheism of the 'God-R' that may not be present in 'God-P.' The idea that there is and can only be one God is one that does not have to be accepted in 'God-P' and I do not believe that it would be possible, except by defining 'God-P' ='God-R', for 'God-P' and 'God-R' to always have the same referent. Maybe you can point out where I am wrong and what I missed.

Well, every discussion occurs within a context, a context  which cannot be ignored or set aside, since the very meaning of the terms of the debate is influenced by the context.  The present immediate context is Pascal's exclamation, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars"  and Buber's comment thereon.  The Pascalian exclamation and the Buberian comment themselves fit  into a wider context, Judeo-Christian monotheism.  The question before us  is whether, within this Judeo-Christian monotheistic context, there is any merit to the notion that what philosophers qua philosophers talk about and argue for and against is numerically different from what religionists qua religionists talk about and try to relate themselves to. My answer is plain from my earlier posts: this notion has no merit whatsoever.

Your suggestion seems to be that the God(s) of the philosophers needn't be one, but could be many, even if the God of the religionists must be one.  My answer to you is very simple:  in the precise context I have specified, namely, the context of Judeo-Christian monotheism, both the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is one.  Polytheism is simply not a Jamesian live option within this tradition and certainly  was not for Pascal and Buber whose utterances provide the immediate context of my remarks.

Of course, there is nothing to stop you or anyone from shifting the context.  Philosophers are free to make a case for polytheism if they care to.   Within the community of polytheists, the question could arise whether the gods of the philosophers (the gods the polytheistic philosophers argue for) are the same as the gods of the religionists (the gods the polytheistic religionists invoke in prayer, etc.)  But that question is not my question.

Note that I am not merely stipulating that 'God-R' and 'God-P' have the same reference.  That would be arbitrary and unmotivated.  What I am doing is unpacking the concept of God what we already have and work with in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  My point is that within this tradition, pace Pascal and Buber and many others, it makes no sense to imagine that what the philosophers are talking about when they talk about God is numerically different from what the religionists talk about when they talk about God.

Finally, none of my discussion presupposes the existence of God.  As I said, I am unpacking the concept of God, and this concept is what it is whether or not it is instantiated.

More on the God of the Philosophers

Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, e-mails:

Your recent post discussing the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham and Isaac caught my interest. Having grown up in a religious home, I have always been of the opinion that arguments for theism argue for something different than what believers take themselves to believe in. After all, how many religious people take themselves to be praying to an unmoved mover or a-being-greater-than-which-cannot-be-conceived? For this reason, I have not felt that my atheism could be threatened by any of the arguments for theism, even if they turn out to be successful because they argue not for God but for God*.

No doubt it could be true that you could make an identification between the God of the philosophers and the God of the believers if you have established the existence of both. My point is none of the arguments for the existence of God even try to argue for the God of the believers.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Well, Spencer, it looks as if my earlier post, despite its pellucidity and penetration, made no impression on you.

Let's use 'God-P' to mean 'God of the philosophers' and 'God-R' to mean 'God of the religionists.'  Now my claim is that the two phrases, though the differ in sense, have the same referent, if they have a referent.  Thus I do not assume that they in fact have a common referent; my claim is that, if they have a referent, then they have a common referent.  You are undoubtedly familiar with Frege's distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung.  To use his old example, 'morning star' and 'evening star' have the same referent despite their difference in sense and in mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise).    One and the same celestial body — the planet Venus — is presented in two different ways.  Now in this case we know that the terms 'morning star' and 'evening star' have a common referent whereas in the God case we do not know this.  So my claim is merely that 'God-P' and 'God-R' refer to one and the same entity if they refer to anything.

It may help to distinguish between REFERENCE and REFERENT.  'Meinong's favorite impossible object' and 'the round square' both lack a referent; but they have the same REFERENCE despite their manifest difference in sense.

Therefore, I reject your assertion that one needs to establish the existence of a common referent of 'God-P' and 'God-R' as a condition of establishing that they refer to the same thing if they refer at all. 

Your main argument seems to be as follows:

1.  The philosophical arguments for God are arguments for the existence of God-P, not of God-R.

2.  Religious people qua religious people do not believe in or affirm the existence of God-P, but of God-R. (E.g. religious people who think about God or address God in prayer are not relating to an unmoved mover.)

3.  Atheism is the denial of the existence of God-R.  Therefore:

4.  The philosophical God arguments, even if sound, have no tendency to show that atheism is false.

A very interesting argument!  I reject the argument  by rejecting the assumption on which it is based, namely, that God-P is not identical to God-R.  To the contrary, I claim that they are the same God, albeit approached in different ways.  The philosopher qua philosopher approaches God via discursive reason unassisted by scriptural or other revelation, whereas the religionist approaches God via faith and revelation.  Now it may be (it is epistemically possible that) there is no God; but that does not alter the fact that the REFERENCE of the God-talk of philosophers and that of religionists is the same.

Think about it:  when Aquinas was working out his Five Ways, was he trying to establish the existence of a mere concept or abstract idea?  How could a mere concept create heaven and earth?  Was he trying to prove the existence of something numerically different from the God of the Bible?  Of course not.  Aquinas was a philosopher, a religionist, and a mystic.  It was the same God he was aiming at (and from his point of view, contacting) in his philosophical reasoning, his prayerful devotions, and his mystical experiences.

People get confused by the phrases 'God of the philosophers' and 'God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'  They think that because the phrases are different, and their senses also, that the phrases cannot have the same reference.  But the reference is the same even if there in is no God.  For the concept of God we are operating with is the concept of a being that satisfies both narrowly philosophical and narrowly religious exigencies.  And this is so whether or not the concept is instantiated.  The philosopher qua  philosopher wants an explanation of the existence and intelligibility of contingent beings and finds his explanation in God, who is the real-ground of existence and intelligibility.  The religionist qua religionist has a soteriological interest: he seeks a solution to our awful predicament in this life, and finds his solution is a relationship with a personal Being.  Now what needs to be understood is that that real-ground and this personal Being are the same.

Or do you think that God can't walk down the street and chew gum at the same time?

Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not suspectible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it yesterday when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of religion — to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or the judgments I make about it.  It too is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence. 

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority  delightfully transcendent.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.

Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Childs, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"

Varieties of Cyber-Linkage

The symmetrical linker links to every site that links to him. The asymmetrical linker links to no site that links to him. The nonsymmetrical linker may or may not link to a site that links to him.

The totally reflexive linker links to all and only those sites that are identical to his site. The totally reflexive linker is also known as a windowless monad. All his links are internal or on-site. The partially reflexive linker links to himself, but only on condition that some other site links to him. The irreflexive linker links to no site that is identical to his site. All of his links are external or off-site. The transitive linker links to every site that is the target of a link of every site to which he links, and to every site that is the target of the target of every site to which he links, and so on. That way lies madness.

The moderate cyber-onanist is a person with two or more sites all of which are weakly interlinked, where two or more sites are weakly interlinked if and only if each site is symmetrically linked to one of the others. The extreme cyber-onanist is a person with two or more sites, all of which are strongly interlinked, where two or more sites are strongly interlinked if and only if each site is symmetrically linked to each of the others. The solipsistic cyber-onanist is a cyber-onanist (whether extreme or moderate) all of whose links are internal. The incorrigible cyber-onanist is an extreme solipsistic cyber-onanist.

Are Illegal Aliens Acting Immorally?

Victor Reppert raises the question:

People like [Arizona's] Governor Brewer often say that we are a nation of laws, and that is why we must make a strong stand enforcing our immigration laws. Are people who insist on a strong stand against illegal immigration gratuitously assuming that persons who enter the country illegally are acting immorally?  If the only way to support your family was to enter another country illegally, wouldn't you have a moral obligation to break the law, since you have a moral obligation to support your family which trumps your obligation to obey the law?

As a conservative, I find it self-evident that the rule of law is a precious thing, that it must be upheld, and that part of upholding it is enforcing the nation's laws against illegal immigration.  Someone who takes this position, and insists on a strong stand against illegal immigration, needn't thereby assume that every illegal border-crosser is acting immorally.  I concede to Victor that there are circumstances in which the moral obligation to support and protect one's family trumps the moral obligation to respect the laws of another country.

But if it is morally permissible for some to enter illegally, it does not follow that the law making it illegal is without moral justification.  Indeed, the Federal and State authorities have a moral obligation to protect their citizens against the threats posed by border violators.  Juan may be morally justified in attempting to cross the Rio Grande, but border control agents are morally justified in preventing him from doing so and deporting him if he does.  The law cannot cater to each individual case.  In the eyes of the law one is an illegal alien whether one is a common criminal, a member of a criminal gang, a drug trafficker, a human trafficker, a terrorist, a carrier of a contagious disease, or, like Juan, just a poor man down on his luck trying to provide for his family.

The rule of law must be upheld despite the unfairness to some.  One of the reasons we are not not like Mexico, and why everybody and his monkey's uncle's brother wants to come here,  is precisely because we have hitherto maintained the rule of law.  Analogy: it is reasonable and just that felons not be allowed to vote or purchase firearms.  The fact that this is unfair to some felons is not a good reason to question the rightness of the law.  As I said, the law cannot cater to individual cases.  Examples like this can be generated ad libitum.  Consider laws regulating drinking age and driving age.  Fourteen year olds are not allowed to drive despite the fact that some drive better than forty year olds.