These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that nationalism is a cognitive bias (that is, a factor that systematically distorts judgements), let me explain why I believe it is a cognitive bias that heavily affects the ethics of migration.
There is a simple method to detect and weigh bias in philosophical debates about justice (Dumitru, 2023). It has three steps:
- Identify the principles of justice that philosophers frequently discuss or teach, whether they support or reject them.
- Examine how the principles are discussed with regard to different social groups (e.g., women, immigrants)
- Interpret the results:
a) If philosophers discuss various groups in roughly the same way –> almost no bias
b) If philosophers neglect some groups –> mild bias (to forget is human)
c) If regarding some groups, philosophers discuss not the usual principle but its opposite –> heavy bias
Example: The principle of equal opportunity ( as non-discrimination or affirmative action) is often debated – sometimes to support, other times to reject it
For women: the principle is not neglected. Philosophers do not discuss whether women should be discriminated against, instead they debate how non-discrimination or affirmative action should be applied. Therefore, political philosophy has (almost) no gender bias on this principle.
What about immigrants? Here, the principle discussed is often the opposite. The question often debated is whether exclusion is justified. Some says yes, other say no but discrimination (the opposite of equal opportunity) is the starting point. Another frequent question is whether hiring people born in some (poor) regions would harm other people either at place of birth (in the case of skilled migration) or at workplace (in the case of unskilled migration).
Even philosophers who are pro-migration and who teach equal opportunity on a regular basis do not discuss nondiscrimination of migrant workers (although it is a basic principle of European integration adopted since 1957). And to my knowledge, no one asks whether there should be preferential hiring for immigrants – if only to reject the idea on philosophical grounds. Yet, privileging foreigners over natives was a common idea in modern Europe (Dumitru, 2026)
I conclude that contemporary philosophy of immigration has a heavy bias that does not merely affect its conclusions; it constraints its creativity and the range of questions that philosophers imagine.
{ 11 comments }
Michael Huben 09.30.26 at 11:57 am
A keystone principle of liberalism is that justice MUST be administered by the state (to avoid self-dealing.). Other important premises are that the integrity of the state must be preserved, and that integrity is founded on the population. Then it follows that if the population changes too rapidly, the integrity of the state and thus justice for the original inhabitants is threatened. Immigration is one way the population can change. This has arguably happened: consider the founding of Israel and the resulting slow-moving genocide of the Palestinians as the regional population shifted due to Israeli immigrants.
Thus, the bias you complain of originates in the keystone principle of liberalism is that justice MUST be administered by the state. The question then becomes how much immigration can be tolerated. “Now that we know what you are, we are merely dickering over price.”
MisterMr 09.30.26 at 1:48 pm
Privileging foreigners over natives is still applied in Europe, as long as the foreigners have a lot of money.
For example Italy offers a favourable tax rate to immigrants who have high enough earnings, relative to native citizens with the same earnings.
engels 09.30.26 at 2:35 pm
If philosophers discuss various groups in roughly the same way –> almost no bias
b) If philosophers neglect some groups –> mild bias (to forget is human)
c) If regarding some groups, philosophers discuss not the usual principle but its opposite –> heavy bias
Apologies if I may have misunderstood but does this mean that if I can’t find any philosophy papers discussing the disadvantages suffered by curly-haired Brummies born in 1983 it shows that philosophy is mildly biased against curly-haired Brummies born in 1983?
Matt Lister 09.30.26 at 10:07 pm
My own views here are pretty similar to Beaton’s linked above, but maybe more strongly put. Two quick thoughts: 1) I think that the “nationalist” terminology here is unfortunate, as it suggests (or, sometimes I think, illicitly implies) “nationalism” in the political philosophy sense, when that would be contentious as a description for lots of work. It would be better to use “stateism” as a term. 2) The idea that “statdism” is then a “cognitive bias” seems about as plausible or useful to me as saying that there is a “cognitive bias” about bipedalism among podiatrists. (This is perhaps even more obvious for the supposed “sedentary bias” that Sager focuses on.) That is, you can describe things that way, but I don’t think it’s at all helpful or englightening.
(To my mind the bigger problem with lots of the migration literature is that it’s unintentionally parochial, in that it presents local manifestations of problems as if they were more universal than they are. I include some of my own work in this charge, though I’m trying to do better at it as it’s become more obvious to me over time. Looking at local problems is a fine thing to do, but it’s important to realize that that’s what they are, or distortion follows.)
engels 10.01.26 at 12:57 pm
Another problem: if S is a social group then it seems the complement of S is also a social group (women/men, disabled/able, migrant/native, etc).
Therefore, when a characteristic such as migrant status, disability or femaleness is neglected in philosophy 3b seems to imply that not only people with it but also those without it are mildly biased against: ie. philosophy is mildly bias against everybody.
Michael Huben 10.02.26 at 10:57 am
engels @ 4:
Your premise is bad. For example, if S is a group of dogs, then the complement of S could contain cats as well. First you would need to define the set that S and its complement are subsets of. Is it all dogs or all animals? You get different answers.
Speranta Dumitru 10.02.26 at 12:17 pm
Thank you for the insightful objections! My point is not to say that the absence of studies on a particular group is sufficient to claim the existence of a bias against them, but that if this is a bias, it is a mild bias. My actual point is that there is a heavy bias when a considerable amount of studies is written about migrants, but the principles discussed are never the ones usually debated in general when it comes to human beings (and migration is not explicitly reminded), but rather the opposite principles.
For example, whilst the principle of non-discrimination is regarded as too weak a version of equal opportunities, it is rarely applied to immigrants. It is the opposite (discrimination based on national and sometimes, social origin) that is most frequently upheld.
equalitus 10.03.26 at 7:06 am
I’m gonna have to bring examples of something that is similar methodologically, albeit a bit different still. If two persons [or more] are debating the death penalty [tribal murder might be binary reciprocal] then the material situation/social context matters, unless like in arithmetic we can use numbers & equations not based on observations like statistical data. Which means that the moral or logical arguments for or against death penalty can be as much in an isolated theoretical category of subjective opinions as well as in a modern political, industrial, institutional, legal context. Which means we can vote for parties for or against the death penalty, or directly like in Switzerland or every general election in the US on State level there can be a specific law on a ballot to be cast for or against something political.
The logic here is obvious for all of you probably who read this; swap *death penalty* with migration & you get the same [social level] dimensional differentiation.
Shall we or you debate or academically theorize about migration in hunter-gatherer society or agricultural economy or contemporary time frame? The last option means nation state culture.
But philosophers have theorized & debated death penalty without any social/material context, so why not also theorize about migration sometimes without the scientific observable fact that we live in nation states, the great majority of peoples on this earth?
J-D 10.03.26 at 9:10 am
I’m not clear on why it should matter what the keystone principles of liberalism are, but without discussing that the following points are clear to me:
Everybody should act justly, but what should be and what is are not the same thing and people don’t always act justly. There’s nothing that will guarantee that a person will act justly; in particular, the fact that somebody is acting as an agent of the state does not guarantee that they will act justly (nor, even more specifically, does it guarantee that they will refrain from self-dealing).
The population of any territory changes over time, and this process is, in itself, evaluatively neutral; sometimes a particular change may have good effects and sometimes it may have bad effects and, for that matter, sometimes it may have both good and bad effects. There’s no good reason to think that the speed of the change makes any difference to this.
D. S. Battistoli 10.05.26 at 12:05 pm
What a fascinating and elegant test!
I’ve been reading a lot of Henri Bergson lately, in preparation for some writing about his influence on African philosophy. And while the experience has definitely not made me a Bergsonist, I do find his theorizing about the diachronic moral opening of human societies to be relevant to nationalism and the role of the state as under question in the post and comments (especially the line of discussion opened by Michael Huben @1) here.
In Deux Sources, Bergson objects to the utilitarian argument that you can get from self-interest to a universal moral system via utilitarianism. He does not specifically mention utility monsters, or what Will MacAskill has memorably called “the train to crazy town” in an interview with Tyler Cowen as MacAskill defends staying onboard the utilitarian train as long as he can. But a sympathetic reading of Bergson very much would integrate these challenges.
Bergson instead posits a distinction between “closed societies” and “open societies” (which terms Karl Popper borrowed while completely changing their meaning), and argued that human history is, in significant part, a transition from small, closed societies toward open societies. Broadly speaking, an extended family is more open than a nuclear family; a village than a family; a tribal community than a village; and so on: each is a community whose sympathetic moral ambit extends further than the last. And in this sequent, nationalism is useful.
In this schema, nationalism’s value is historically contingent. In the late eighteenth century in the North Atlantic, it helped all the people subject to a single state willfully participate in a common moral project more just than that which existed when the state was under hereditary absolutist control (and we saw this in the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, as well as the British transition that took place over a couple of centuries starting perhaps with the Glorious Revolution).
But the goal is a moral project that, without utility monsters or trains to crazy town, gets us to a just humanitarian program inclusive of all persons. If, as per Michael Huben, a nation-state-based liberalism does so, great! Speranta‘s test is still useful. And if nation-state-based liberalism fails to do so, whether because of the lack of practical consideration given to women, or to engels @3‘s “curly-haired Brummies born in 1983,” or to immigrants, or to any other class of persons, then we can say, “gee, this nationalism thing got us here, and we’re super grateful, but it seems to be preventing us from getting farther, morally speaking.”
equalitus 10.09.26 at 4:30 am
The world is organized in nation states mostly, about 190-200 countries. That is a fact.
There is no inherent problem in debating migration outside of the current world of nation states and citizenship. All factors that are important must be mentioned in theorizing about migration. I myself am a utilitarian more than most other things easily described in philosophy.
The country I reside in, Spain, is much more open to migrants than the Nordic nations and including Norway which is my home country. The reasons are historical, material, and language because many [acceptable to Spanish authorities & citizens broadly] immigrants are vacating in Spain for a few months or many years but speak English at least. Many other migrants are from Latin America and speak Spanish fluently and take jobs many European Spanish citizens don’t want. Despite that, the unemployment levels in Spain are very high. While in Northern Europe the attitude is very or extremely different even in countries as different as the Nordics vs UK!
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