A theory like utilitarianism is a serious attempt to get the right answer on issues like immigration. It says that the correct policy is the one that produces the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. And since illegal immigrants enjoy pleasure and suffer pain, their pleasure and pain counts just as much as the pleasure and pain of a US citizen.
Now maybe utilitarians are wrong, but it is one way to approach the issue.
It is important not to confuse the difficulty of finding an answer with the lack of moral truth. Difficult moral issues take work to think through, and not everyone is going to agree. But that doesn't mean that no one has it right, or that there is no "right" to be found.
1 comment:
Surely our predicament is not so much that it's difficult to find answers to moral questions, rather that it's easy to find many conflicting answers.
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