States Don't Have Special Obligations to their own Citizens

Also: something, something, free Palestine

The sovereign should care equally about the whole world (ignore that it’s a jester, lol).

Probably one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in much of political discourse is that the state has more reason to benefit its own citizens and less reason not to harm foreigners—if we don’t attack this country, they’ll hurt our citizens; if we let foreigners into our country, they’ll decrease the welfare of our people; we should be focusing on hospitals here before focusing on foreign aid. I think this is just completely and utterly wrong! It’s not morally permissible for a state to give favorable treatment to its own citizens, based on their being citizens.

A Walk in the Park

Let me set the scene for you: you are a German ambassador in Lithuania, who is taking a nice stroll through an average Lithuanian park. As fate would have it, there has recently been a decision by the city council to establish a trolley line through this park (I don’t like where this is going). As you reach the tracks, you see a trolley approaching. “Kein Problem” you think, but the author of this story would not let it be so simple. When you look at a fork in the tracks, you notice three people. On the track that the trolley heading towards there is an unlucky German tourist screaming “hilf mir, hilf mir! Jemand hat mir an die Schienen gebunden! Ich will nicht sterben!” On the alternate track there are two Lithuanians screaming “[I don’t know Lithuanian… Sorry]”. For some reason, however, the city planners have left it to the public’s discretion where the trolley goes, by leaving the lever to switch the tracks out in the open—bad for arriving on time, but good for moral dilemmas. And a moral dilemma it is! Whatever should you do? You only have two options: let one of your countrymen die, or sacrifice two people of a different nationality.¹

Well, I don’t actually think this is a dilemma at all. While it’s of course very regrettable that anyone should die, I think you clearly shouldn’t sacrifice the two to save the one, just because you share citizenship. In fact, even if there was just one Lithuanian on the tracks, you probably shouldn’t switch—it would at best be a tossup, I think. If you don’t share this intuition, it may persuade you more if we imagine that you know that you are going to change citizenship such that you will be Lithuanian in a month (or even some third thing, like Engl*sh 🤢). If you have strong reason to prefer people from your own nation, then you should switch now. But if you shift now, you will regret having switched in a month, once you become Lithuanian, since you will then have strong reason to prefer Lithuanians at that point. Additionally you know now that you will come to have this preference, and will regret having switched. Even so, you should now prefer switching—what the hell?!

But I take it that most of you will agree that you shouldn’t switch, at least in the case where there are two Lithuanians. Imagine now that you instead come across three people starving, the one is German, and the two are Lithuanian (und du bleibst deutsch). You have a spare sandwich in your pocket, that you are willing to give away. If you give it to the German, they will be fed, only if they eat the whole thing, and the Lithuanians will starve. If, on the other hand, you give it to the Lithuanians, they will both survive (maybe they are small or something), and the German will die. I hope that you will also agree that you should here opt to save the Lithuanians—a shared nationality simply gives little to no reason for special treatment.

Hoooold on a minute! This makes me have some disorderly—one may even say anti-establishment—thoughts. Remind me again how it is that states get their stuff done. If I’m not mistaken, this is done by individual people who perform individual actions. If a state, say, decides to offer medical treatment to its own citizens, but not non-citizens in the country, the only way this is going to happen is if a bunch of individual doctors decide that they are going to treat citizens over non-citizens—even when treating non-citizens could do more good overall. But if it is immoral to favor people based on citizenship, then that can only mean… *Gasp!* Could it really be immoral for a state to favor its own citizens?

You are probably screaming at your phone, computer, or smart fridge right now: “THOSE ARE NOT ANALOGOUS!” I think you are right, whoever you are. In the ambassador cases there are no other obligations pulling you, but a doctor has signed a contract that probably states that they shouldn’t waste their time and resources treating non-citizens. Likewise, a soldier would get in deep shit if they started defecting. This is true, but I just think that moves the immorality up another step.

We can put anyone from the chain of command of a government in the trolley or sandwich scenario. Maybe it’s the leader of some department of the government, or maybe it’s the prime minister, president, emperor, or supreme leader themselves. Nonetheless, it seems like whatever person we put there, it would be wrong to sacrifice two foreigners for one person from your state. And if it’s wrong to do something yourself, it’s wrong to coerce someone else to do it—it’s wrong for me to shoot someone, so it’s wrong for me to force you to shoot someone. Hence, if it’s wrong for anyone in government to sacrifice two foreigners for one person from their state, it’s wrong for them to make laws that coerce others to do the same.

There’s of course another glaring disanalogy in that citizens of the state pay money for certain services, which they are promised by the people in power. But if we go back to the trolley case, we can imagine that the German says “Ich werde dir etwas Geld zahlen, wenn du mir hilfst.” It seems very wrong to save the one in order to get the money. This would be especially odious if the Lithuanians made the same offer, but you simply didn’t consider it (I take it this is analogous to harsh immigration restrictions).

A closer analogy is of course that you already accepted the money, and now you’re simply making good on your promise to save the German. The problem here is that you shouldn’t have made the promise in the first place. If you are offered a deal that will require that you save the one in favor of the two at some point, you shouldn’t take it, all else being equal. If you’ve made some promises like that in the past, you should maybe make good on them, but you should stop making anymore. So ideally people in power should maybe do the sorts of things they promised during their election campaigns (in democracies) and then stop promising anything that discriminates in favor of the people in the country.

The obvious problem is that people will stop paying the government money and voting for the people in power, if they don’t personally get anything out of it—the only reason you can go around saving people on tracks is that the people saved are willing to give you money for it (staying in the analogy). But this is clearly a practical problem. My main thesis here, however, is purely normative: it’s not morally permissible for states (or the people making up states) to give more moral consideration to people from that state. Whether the morally permissible or best actions for a state will in fact appear to give special treatment to its citizens is a separate question, and it’s perfectly compatible with what I’m arguing here that they will.

In fact, often the best way to bring about some good is not by going the most direct route; the best way to make sure that your child will go to the dentist often is not to drag them, kicking and screaming, to the dentist and holding them down while the dentist does whatever dentists do—doing that would simply make the child hate going to the dentist. Likewise, the best way to make sure that states don’t favor their own citizens probably isn’t to just decide to send all tax money to the third world overnight, as you’ll be voted out and other countries will probably invade you.

But to infer from this that nothing should be changed would be way too hasty. Suppose—as I take it was the case in the past—that the people in your country really liked having slaves. This would mean that a politician abolishing slavery would lead to them not getting voted in at the next election and the new leader reinstating slavery. Furthermore, it might very well be that slaves are good for the economy, such that abolishing slavery would leave the country open to attack from other nations. Even so, there should obviously be done something to move towards freeing slaves, even if this cannot be done in one fell swoop. Remember when I said that coercing someone to do something wrong is itself wrong? Well, in democracies at least, it looks like the real coercers are the voters; it’s the voters that are the real problem when they egoistically vote for citizenist (yes, I did the Peter Singer²) policies, forcing any candidate to bow to this pressure by disproportionately favoring them. So I’m really just doing God’s work out here, trying to make the people (wherever you may be from) realize that we shouldn’t be so citizenist.

There are of course many potential complications, but I’m getting way out of my paygrade here anyway with all this practical stuff (my contract says I can sit in an armchair thinking all day). My mission isn’t to give a 3 step plan for making states never favor their own citizens again, ready to be put into action tomorrow—or even figure out what is the best way to minimize citizenship-snobbery. Rather, it’s just to convince the dear and well-respected readers of this blog of the normative theoretical point that it’s wrong for states to give special moral consideration to their own citizens. If I have done this, then I’ll die a happy man!

That’s of course not to say that this view shouldn’t have quite big implications for your views on other things. Let’s look at a few examples.

The Israel-Palestine War

I’ll just preface this by saying that I have very little expertise on the historical complexities, and I am far from the most knowledgeable person about the intricacies of the war. That being said, let me tell you exactly what you should think about it!(/s)

I take it that it’s pretty uncontroversial that Israel has killed many, many more Palestinian civilians than Israel civilians that have been killed in recent times by Palestinians (roughly 43000 to 1700). Furthermore, I take it as somewhat uncontroversial that even if Israel didn’t siege the Gaza Strip (or didn’t do it as aggressively) it would very probably not result in a comparable amount of Israeli casualties.

So how should we evaluate this? If what I argued above is correct, we are not allowed to take the citizenship of the people involved into account—whether what a state is doing to someone is permissible or not, is not directly influenced by whether that person is a citizen of the state or not. I think a good way to model this in a way where our citizenist intuitions aren’t triggered, is by imagining that every person in question is a citizen of the state in question:

Imagine that instead of it being people from another state who performed, say, the October 7 attacks, it was instead citizens of Israel. Furthermore these people formed a resistance group in an area of Israel where a large percentage of the population were sympathetic to the group and continued trying to kill Israeli citizens. Would the correct response from the government be to send the whole area into the stone age, killing large amounts of civilians in the process? I think not. In fact it seems like that would be a pretty horrific response to the situation.

Like, imagine if some terrorist organization that hated Germans was hiding in Hamburg (I don’t know why I am only using Germany as an example). It would be complete insanity if the German government decided to begin slaughtering the population of Hamburg, and cut the supply of basic utilities to the city. Even if we imagine that a large part of the city’s population were sympathetic to the terrorist organization, and that the terrorists had brutally killed several thousands of Germans, it would surely still not be okay for the German government explode over 40000 Hamburgers (lol)—around 14000 of which were children, who would certainly not be culpable for supporting the terrorists.

So to me at least, it looks like any justification for Israel’s actions will have to be blatantly citizenist—we are allowed to kill their citizens to protect our citizens. I’m sure that people who think that Israel is justified in the attacks will have many things to say, but at the very least I think this is a very useful framework for evaluating these conflicts, regardless of where you stand on this specific issue—if citizenship is part of your considerations (that is, if you would not think the same if everyone were citizens of the same country), then you are making a mistake.

Immigration

Another issue where anti-citizenism at least suggests a certain judgement is what it says in the title of this section. If what I have argued is correct, then when judging whether to allow a given to live, work, vote, etc. in a country, we are not allowed to take their citizenship itself into account (certain citizenships may of course be correlated with certain factors that are relevant). But it now looks very strange to be very reluctant to let immigrants live in your state—most reasons you could point to just seem like very bad justifications. Maybe it's because they don't have friends and family in the state, but surely you wouldn't stop one of your own citizens from coming into the country if they're too lonely and don’t have friends, or if they spend a lot of time online and have many friends in other countries. Maybe it's because they have a different culture, but you surely wouldn’t stop one of your own citizens because they subscribe to a certain religion, or don't watch the movies that are popular with the rest of the population.³ It seems like the actual reason will have something to do with whether they are already a citizen or not, but that's just not a morally relevant consideration if my thesis is right.

Furthermore, this also defangs the classic “they'll be stealing our work” argument. If we are not allowed to care about citizenship, then it shouldn’t matter whether someone steals the jobs of our citizens, since the people who get the jobs instead are just as worthy of moral consideration. So for this argument to work, immigrants coming to work would have to make everyone worse off, which I (not an expert in economics) take it is just not what happens—in fact the opposite happens, and the world as a whole is made more efficient.⁴

Again, there may be all sorts of other arguments against immigration that don’t rely on citizenism, but it is at least not as obvious what the problem is, and it seems like much of the intuitive reaction against immigration comes from specially considering natives over foreigners.

Foreign Aid

One final point I’ll touch on—and perhaps the most radical—is the duty to help far-away people. As a matter of fact, you can generally do a lot more good for the same amount of money, if you spend that money in developing countries than if you spend it in richer countries. An example I use in my post on the obligation to donate to charity is that for the cost of establishing one guide-dog partnership in the UK through Guide Dogs, you can provide 708 sight-restoring surgeries to people in developing countries through Cure Blindness Project. This is of course just a cherrypicked example, but generally the marginal dollar spent in richer countries will do a lot less good than the marginal dollar spent in poorer countries.

If we now remember the sandwich-case from all the way back in the beginning of this post, we may notice some similarities. If it’s wrong to let the two foreigners die to save the one native, then it seems like the same holds more broadly: for the cost of somewhat improving the quality of life for someone in your own country, you can drastically change the lives of several people in other countries for the better. The only obvious reason why we should not do the latter rather than the former is some sort of arbitrary bias towards people from your own state—i.e. citizenism.

Again, the standard practical stuff is applicable here too, like that people will not vote for someone who gives all the county’s tax-money away to foreigners. Apart from this, there is also the point that it’s more effective to do good in places that are close to you than places that are far away, all else being equal, meaning states should probably have some bias towards helping their own citizens—at least in an ideal-ish world where people in poor countries aren’t utility-monsters compared to those in richer countries.

What I have said here is probably not decisive about any of these issues, and there are many different complications with all of them. That being said, I hope the thesis I have been championing here at least gives a helpful lens through which to see these issues, and I think it can quickly become clear how much a citizenist bias plays into our judgements of international issues, even if we ultimately don’t change the conclusions we reach. And as I hope I’ve hammered home by now, my point is simply a normative point about moral consideration, and not a point about how to actually best follow this theory in the real world.

1. I have stolen this particular case from Jeff McMahan, though I obviously present it much better than him.

2. Well, really the Richard D. Ryder, but I think Singer’s more famous for it.

3. For example, in Denmark we have a test with random cultural questions that you need to pass to be able to get a permanent residence permit. But someone who was, say, born in a foreign country and has never been to Denmark, but one of whose parents is a Danish citizen (meaning the child is too), doesn’t need to pass any such test. That’s just blatantly citizenist: whether you’re a citizen can determine whether you’re allowed to stay permanently in the country, regardless of any other factors. If there should be any such test, everyone should be required to take it.

4. Maybe you think economic efficiency is not good since it harms the environment or something, but that is then a separate argument, and the problem is no longer that immigrants hurt the natives financially.