The Civic Conscience
Richard W. Crockett
We think in our hostility to immigration that when we declare immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries to be “illegals,” that we have occupied the moral high ground, because they “broke the law.” Well, it is way more complicated than that. The way we treat immigrants, one might argue, is morally dubious. The claim that they “broke the law” is a factualized moral choice. That is to say that it is a value choice (a moral choice or an immoral choice as the case might be) converted into a rule, represented as a fact by the law, designed to suit our convenience. How does this work?
There is interplay between fact and value, and each is in some sense grounded in the other. (This may seem dense, but stick with me.) In making public policy decisions we employ both fact and values. Value choices in making public policy may be justified by historical experience, and as such they are grounded in historical fact. Factual information—facts—likewise rests upon inferences. We see a thing and we infer that it is a particular thing. We see a person and infer that the object we see is a person. It is a process of recognition and naming. The factualness of our claim that it is a person rests upon what philosophers would call a “metaphysical judgment.” Metaphysical judgments are , among other things, the inferences in logic that we use to identify a fact and then name it.
The passing of a law is the blending of competing values and moral choices into a rule. At this point we have a socially created fact. Then we say to ourselves in a self-congratulatory way, that we stand upon the law. The law it is said is a fact, not a fact as an accident of nature. We then employ the “factualness” of the law to claim a moral high ground. We now make the pious assertion that some immigrants are factually “illegals.” We are now able to look down on their circumstances as legally insufficient and morally inferior.
But their circumstances are as much our own creation as it is theirs, especially if you look at the circumstances, not only of our logical gymnastics, but of how our history with Mexico has played out.