Would you mind closing html tags for the quoted text, ending in the penultimate par. Thanks.

Rather, the attitude that politicians have to research is to latch onto it when it supports the view they already hold and to ignore (or punish) it when it tells them something uncomfortable. Research that supports tighter border controls (or harsher drug laws) will have “impact” and research that favours more immigration or legalizing weed won’t. And the money will follow.

It’s true, and perhaps lamentable, that “politicians… latch onto research..when it supports the view they already hold”. Unfortunately this is a character flaw not exclusive to that “crafty animal”. No names, no pack drill.

Your working assumption is that political elites are eager to embrace xenophobic populism. Far from being frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries, most of the Euro political establishment are bought-and-paid-for cultural liberals. (eg the Swiss) Its the general public which is wary of these policies, or at least the free-for-all that they unleash.

Chris Bertram said:

researchers with one view would be more likely to benefit from the British government’s “impact” criterion

The political class already sponsor much research and advocacy for “more immigration” and “legalizing weed” (interesting that you link the two!).

Look at the case of Andrew Neather, speech writer for the Blair government . He more or less admitted that in 2000 the Blair government had commissioned research suggesting that it would be good politics for the BLP to open the floodgates of immigration. Its worth examining his admissions, which constitute a smoking gun for the existence of an academia-media-apparatchik complex dedicated to “electing a new people”, in greater detail. They are a testimony to “impact” selected research, of a certain kind:

I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit,Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank. The PIU’s reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy. Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case. But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

There is a reason that “populism” is feared by “elites”. The latter do not want their well-laid plans for making over the country and feathering their own nest to be upset by anything as smelly as “working class voters”, wallowing in the past out in the “provinces” or “sticks”.

Since your reference is to British tax payers who voted Livingstone in to several periods in office in London, and since your earlier remarks suggested strong support for the sovereignty of the electorate, maybe consistency isn’t your strong suit.

The “sovereignty of the electorate” is preferable to that of another party. But that does not mean that democracy works perfectly, particularly in local government. Bush got re-elected too, you know.

I would have thought such a professed humanitarian would be eager to curb spending on frivolities and dedicate it to necessities, cancer research and the like, no?

Chris Bertram said:

The “rest of us” presumably wouldn’t include you anyway, since you are posting your comments from Australia.

“No man is an island…”

Yes it did, thanks, since I’m aware that many of the riots listed were not, in fact, “race riots”.

But the rest of us are under no obligation to pay for these frivolities, still less invite the rest of the world in to our land, just to humour a few.

Since your reference is to British tax payers who voted Livingstone in to several periods in office in London, and since your earlier remarks suggested strong support for the sovereignty of the electorate, maybe consistency isn’t your strong suit. The “rest of us” presumably wouldn’t include you anyway, since you are posting your comments from Australia.

Also, you might give some thought to the impression you generate by remarks like

“the usual muti-culti formula of gaudy threads, spicy nosh and funky vibes”

On the contrary, I gave careful “thought to the impression” I might “generate by remarks” like that. Any philosophical defence of the nation state (and indeed any subsidiary institutional authority) rests on a settled preference for its established modal-culture, rather than a hankering for greener multi-cultures than might be cultivated over yonder. And I can never resist an opportunity to poke a politically correct shibboleth in the eye with a sharpened stick.

The routine celebration of exotic practices through Livingstonian “bread and circus” festivals is a transparent and tiresome attempt to propagate an agenda for interested parties at tax-payers expense. If some citizens want to live that way then good luck to them. But the rest of us are under no obligation to pay for these frivolities, still less invite the rest of the world in to our land, just to humour a few. There are overseas holidays, or even the internet, available to satisfy curiosities.

Being a conservative kill-joy I am more interested in the down-side of diversity, particularly of the Non-European Background type. This list of UK race riots repays study. For sure many of these troubles can be put down to the benighted ignorance and willful malice of assorted xenophobes.

But a sufficiently large residual remains that can be put down to aliens unwilling or unable to fit in. Intellectuals who are so infatuated with diversity should be encouraged to spend a season in the “dark and beastly provinces” to the North, which provide a real life exciting contrast to London’s subsidized spectacles.

It seems obvious, to me at least, that whatever the obligations of the citizens of rich nations to poorer ones are, the right answer can’t be “whatever the citizens of rich countries want them to be.” Yet that’s the answer that your prioritization of sovereignty and democracy generates.

Be wary of what “seems obvious to” yourself before you try to sell it the rest of the world. Any “right answer” that does not prioritize foundational practices such as “sovereignty and democracy” is suspect.

Rich citizens (or indeed any citizens) have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate who cannot help themselves wherever they are, within or without the border. But prospective immigrants are not the most likely candidates to fall into that category.

Your “global humanitarianism => open borders” argument rests on a gigantic non sequitur. Citizens of nation states may be an obligation to help foreign people in distress. But it does not follow that obligation extends to providing them a place to live in our midst. We have a foreign aid and refugee budget for such humanitarian purposes.

If the individual citizen of a nation state chooses to provide assistance or sanctuary to foreigners then this in the nature of an ex gratia payment. If the individual chooses to delegate that duty to his institutional agents then he must be a party to that decision through due process. In either case he is not bound to do it by apriori axiom, but does it out of the goodness of his heart.

More generally, inviolable rights and binding duties (or the more extravagant entitlements and less onerous obligations that we Baby Boomers have created for ourselves) typically evolve through civil evolution, sometimes facetiously known as the “social contract”. Aliens are not a material party to the national version of that contract, the case of externalities excepted. The long line of ancestors are, which is why constitutions should be made hard to change. And it seems reasonable to consider the interests of descendants in the bargain.

To put it bluntly, nation statists remind us that nation states have a history, a tradition built and bequeathed to us by our forefathers and which we bestow to our children. (Your philosophy is ahistorical, another warning sign of post-modernism.) Aliens do not share in that history and therefore have no presumptive rights to claim on the state, still less any abstract rights dreamt up ex nihilo by speculative philosophers.

Rights are the ideological superstructure, not anthropological foundation, of civil society.

Substitute “ontological” for “anthropological” in the above sentence and it makes more sense.

Nothing remotely “post-modern” about me Jack, liberal, in a certain sense, I’ll grant you.

I accept your good faith on that. The problem is that so many modern liberals, especially academics such as yourself, are unwittingly exposed to near lethal doses of the post-modern radiation in the course of every day life. Very often they are asymptomatic sufferers.

A telling sign of the dread disease is obsessive talk about rights to the exclusion of duties (“liberal, in a certain sense”?). Modernist liberalism is not a philosophy of individual (still less corporal) rights. Rights are the ideological superstructure, not anthropological foundation, of civil society.

Modernist iberalism is not even always about the freedom of the individual, who, as Rousseau plaintively observed, is “born free but always in chains”.

Modernist liberalism is an intellectual attempt to reconcile responsible individual autonomies to accountable institutional authorities. Whether the autonomies/authorities be children/households, shareholders/companies or citizen/states. This philosophy was emerged from the medieval marriage of principal/agent law and double entry accounting. Philosophy had little to do with it.

I dont see much talk of responsibility/accountability or rights/duties (which emerge by evolution of tradition rather than dictated by abstract reason) in your argument. Therefore j’accuse post-modernist liberalism.

One can also imagine a population claiming in good faith to acknowledge the legitimacy of a state, while not having been adequately educated concerning what that acknowledgment properly entails. So what? And in what specific way does your understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian situation impact on this topic (I’m asking not because I think it’s an interesting direction to pursue, but to mildly point out that you haven’t made your meaning clear)?

Anyway, on the impact stuff (do I get a ‘type 10’ citation?):

they also want to reward research which makes a difference to public policy. Of course, I’d love it to be the case that senior politicians and civil servants read work in political philosophy and theory and, convinced by good arguments, adjust their ideas accordingly. But the cynic in me says that this isn’t what happens. Rather, the attitude that politicians have to research is to latch onto it when it supports the view they already hold and to ignore (or punish) it when it tells them something uncomfortable.

But presumably politicians will not be making the assessments, so their influence is going to be indirect, and as a result less likely to contain such direct bias – first because it tends to be less than fully conscious or reflective, so is less likely to be transcribed into the guidelines, and second because it’s pretty difficult to build rules which will systematically favour one’s own views at a low (should that be high? I mean detailed) level of granularity without it being far too obvious that one is doing so.

Still the assessment regime is likely to reflect the interests of politicians in a general way – for example the standing interest in favouring fast returns (preferably within a single electoral cycle) will mean short-term impact gets rewarded. And along the same lines, more ‘applied’ or concrete research is preferred partly because of an aversion to uncertainty, but also because of sheer lack of interest in anything else.

The intellectual development of subsequent generations is beyond the horizon of politicians’ concerns; an implicit assumption in any case perhaps being that it need not be different from the politicians’ own. Underlying philosophical positions are likely to be fixed during adolescence and young adulthood, and subsequently regarded increasingly as self-evident or common sense. So the idea that there is an important and valuable process of gradual development of such positions, taking place over generational timescales, is likely to be largely invisible.

Philosophy is by its nature highly abstract – the more philosophically interesting and potentially influential, the more abstract and difficult to assess in terms other than an appreciation of philosophical importance, depth, originality. The timescale and intractable compexity of the processes whereby big philosophical ideas filter through to action on the ground makes a direct assessment or prediction of impact a pretty ludicrous idea, which means a positive assessment of such impact is unlikely to be made.

So the result is likely to be that political philosophy, for example, is going to be judged by its direct relevance in the context of current closely-circumscribed concerns and assumptions. Political philosophers end up either picking those topics and stances which will subserve or support currently prevalent thinking, so as to stand a chance of being appreciated, or moving into applied fields. It needn’t really be anything they consciously or even unconciously intend when they set up the assessment system, but the result is congenial to politicians, and derives in a logical enough way from their concerns. (Why would anyone want to spend money on updating the PPE curriculum? The old one was good enough for them.)

It’s hard to imagine that pure maths and theoretical, even speculative, physics would be subjected to the same kind of demands for instant and measurable impact. Ironically, if the above is right, part of the reason for that may be that they are actually less influential on politicians, or rather on their younger selves before they put away childish things like philosophy and got down to the serious business of navigating career paths, manipulating voters and raising funds.

Since the question I’m interested in as a researcher concerns the rights, if any, that states (generally) have to restrict migration, it isn’t obvious why British public opinion at a particular moment should have any more significance than, say, Somali public opinion at some other time. Public opinion, and the exigencies of political competitition, simply have no role to play in deciding what political philosophers should believe about a question like that.

As for what the British public believe, well they are more hostile to immigration at the moment than most populations of wealthy countries, but 90% + is, to put it mildly, somewhat on the high side. See, e.g.

http://www.gmfus.org/template/page.cfm?page_id=410

Incidentally, my original post did not aim to argue for a position on migration rights, but rather suggested that researchers with one view would be more likely to benefit from the British government’s “impact” criterion for funding than researchers with another view. But since you’re all so interested, I’ll prepare a post defending the view in my comment #66, above, in due course, together with another one arguing against the claim that the sovereign rights of states have conventionally and historically been understood as including an absolute right of refusal.

And I thought I was trying to make a decent argument that (reasonable) immigration restrictions are justifiable within moral and ethical reasoning. Well. A loss it shall be.