Friends, Family, and Strangers

In which I'm uncomfortably forced to admit that JD Vance is kinda right, and Scott Alexander is kinda wrong

Last week, Vice President J.D. Vance decided to dip his toes into the pool of moral theology, arguing that

There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

In response, a number of theologians have pushed back, arguing for a more cosmopolitan position according to which we should view all human beings as our equally worthy of love.

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex was equally unimpressed.

I’m not going to get into what Jesus said or meant, or what different Christian traditions have had to say on this matter. And I certainly don’t want to defend the nationalist political agenda which Vance has in mind in making this argument. Instead, I just want to make two simple interventions on the fundamental moral question at issue.

First, the idea that we owe more to friends and family than we do to strangers is obvious and commonplace among diverse moral traditions. You owe things to your child that you don’t owe to your neighbor’s child, like feeding them regularly or providing them with an education. And you probably owe things to your neighbor’s child that you don’t owe to a complete stranger, like watching after them when they’re playing in front of your house.

All of this is so obvious that one of the main objections to utilitarianism as a moral theory is that it seems on its face to be incompatible with such special obligations. (Utilitarians, for their part, typically scramble to show that no, actually if you just understand the theory correctly, you actually can get to the conclusion that it’s OK to sometimes spend money on your own family). In other words, the idea that we have special obligations to friends and family is one of the fixed judgments that we used to test whether a moral theory makes sense. It’s not controversial; it’s bedrock.

The second point is this: the fact that we owe more to friends and family than we do to strangers doesn’t imply that we owe nothing to strangers. It doesn’t imply, contra Scott Alexander, that we should simply let them die. X > Y does not imply that Y = 0.

This means that those of us with more cosmopolitan (or Effective Altruist) leanings don’t need to reject Vance’s basic point. It’s OK to save up tens of thousands of dollars to pay for your own children’s education, and not to do this for other people’s kids. It’s OK to buy your wife an anniversary present, and not to give anything at all to your neighbor’s wife.

But it doesn’t follow from this that it’s OK to keep out foreign immigrants in order to prevent a small decrease in wages for some domestic workers. Or that it’s OK to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a luxury car when that money could have been used to save many, many lives. Even if we’re not required to care as much for them as we do for us, at some point the benefits for us become so small, or the costs to them become so large, that the scales tip. Figuring out where exactly that point lies is tricky. But figuring out that it exists is not.