No Borders, No Merit, No Justice: The Bizarre Philosophy of Our Intellectual Elite

“Is there any good principled reason not to have open borders?”

That is a quote from Harvard professor Michael Sandel in “Two of the World’s Leading Thinkers on How the Left Went Astray,” a New York Times article published on Jan 18. The piece promotes two stars in the progressive pantheon: Sandel and French economist Thomas Piketty, known for his lengthy bestseller on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013).

These two leading thinkers show just how far the nation’s intellectual elite are from mainstream reality. They are one-world internationalists; “no borders” is their default position. They believe inequality—any inequality—is bad. They don’t believe in the idea of just deserts, “a principle of punishment in the criminal justice system that seeks to assign a punishment that is proportionate to the severity of the crime committed in order to promote fairness, accountability, and deterrence” that is a rather contentious issue in legal and ethical theory, but which will seem to most to be a necessary part of any civilized value system. Political philosopher Sandel confuses bad luck with injustice.

Piketty is a socialist foe of inequality, and Sandel is a follower of moral philosopher John Rawls, whose difference principle asserts, “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.” In other words, if a rich person gets richer, the poorest should gain even more. The difference principle is, in effect, an engine for reducing income inequality.[1] Sandel is enthused: “Although the difference principle does not require an equal distribution of income and wealth, its underlying idea expresses a powerful, even inspiring vision of equality.”[2]

For both Sandel and Piketty worldwide equality is the ideal.

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Sandel’s moral philosophy is based on a category error: he equates bad luck with injustice. Injustice involves an agent; luck is just luck, and no one is responsible. But for Sandel and his ally behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, abilities, talents, and even the capacity to be conscientious and hard-working are the outcome of what he calls the “birthright lottery”—of luck. So success in life, even if it results from talent and industry, is accidental. This incongruity, equating effects that are the product of human agency, like hard work, with one’s genetic endowment, leads to absurdities. For Sandel, a person who succeeds because he is smart, conscientious, hard-working, etc. is just lucky and does not deserve his success any more than a person who thrives because of a rich inheritance:

There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.[3]

So, a rich layabout is on the same moral plane as a poor, hard-working genius. Meritocracy is unfair.[4]

It is hard to believe that leading intellectuals should promote these bizarre views and be taken seriously. But there is more.

Sandel, echoing Rawls, questions the whole idea of “just deserts” as a basis for actual justice, saying it is Rawls’ view that “strictly speaking, no one can be said to deserve anything.”[5] including the natural endowments that lead to success. To use “deserve” in this way is indeed a category error, which would be obvious if Sandel were to say, “Mount Everest does not deserve to be the world’s tallest mountain.” But if he were to say, “Taylor Swift does not deserve her talents,” most people would nod along. In fact, neither outcome, neither the height of Everest nor the skills of Taylor Swift, was the result of anybody’s conscious decision.  If an indulgent parent spoils one child at the expense of the other, we can reasonably say that the favored child doesn’t deserve his extra share. But if one child is prettier than the other, we can’t say that she deserves or doesn’t deserve her beauty since no one, neither she nor any human agent, was responsible for it.

Just deserts as an issue is more often discussed with respect to punishment rather than reward. Obviously, if one is not responsible for one’s nature, be it good or bad, then, according to Sandel, one doesn’t deserve to be rewarded for excellence or punished for bad behavior—so much for blame. Indeed, some legal scholars argue against the whole idea of blame. In her article “Beyond Blame,” Stanford legal philosopher Barbara Fried introduced her contribution to an interesting 2013 debate by stating that “the philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.”

Many commentators agreed with her.

Determinism is the chief counter-blame argument. If an individual’s constitution and personal history determine his every action, the criminal “couldn’t help himself”; his criminal behavior was inevitable. A Stanford biologist says: “Our growing knowledge about the brain makes the notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of the criminal justice system, deeply suspect.” Evidently, “science” casts doubt on the naïve claim that the criminal is responsible for his crime, even though the facts of science are neutral with respect to morality[6].

The legal arguments involve free will, determinism, and the never-ending conflict between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Free will is easily disposed of: it is not a scientific notion. It cannot be proved or disproved empirically. If you watch a bird in the wild, hopping about looking for food, it seems free, making up its own mind about where to hop next. How would you know it was not? “Well, that’s just a bird,” you might say. We can just ask a person: do you feel free? Most of the time, if he is not under duress, coerced, or restrained, he will say, “Yes.” But how conclusive is that? People can be indoctrinated, hypnotized, possess “false consciousness,” not be in full control of either their consciousness or behavior. You may fail to recall a name that you know perfectly well, yet in an hour or two, it pops up, and you don’t know why. You are not “free to recall” even familiar words. Free will is a feeling, not a scientifically provable fact.[7]

Free will may be unverifiable, but how convincing is the determinism argument? Suppose that there are laws — either physics or fate — that totally determine your behavior. Are you free or not? Some say yes (compatibilists), some not (incompatibilists). Compatibilists say blame and punishment are legitimate. But there are plenty of incompatibilists, people who argue that if behavior is determined, praise and blame are illegitimate.

This claim is precisely the opposite of the truth: blame is legitimate only if behavior is determined. Here is the argument. According to Fried, “For the metaphysician, the theoretical possibility that one could have acted otherwise in some alternative world may suffice to establish free will,” Never mind the elusive free-will idea, let’s just look at “could have acted otherwise.” as a criterion for punishment. What does “could have acted” actually mean? There is, in fact, a straightforward scientific answer.

A few years ago, I wrote apropos the legal issue:

Jurors have no need to puzzle through philosophical questions about intent or knowledge of right and wrong. Nor do they need to ask whether criminal behavior was determined by the defendant’s history. (The scientific answer will almost always be yes, because almost all behavior is determined.) History is not the point. The point is. Did the defendant know that his actions would have an illegal outcome? And if he had known in advance of the act that sure punishment would follow, would he still have acted as he did? If the criminal would have been deterred by the prospect of punishment, the social view says, then he should be punished. Did the Menendez brothers know that their actions would result in the death of their parents? Presumably yes. If they had known that those acts would result in severe punishment (life in prison or death), would they have acted nevertheless? Probably not. Verdict: Guilty. On the other hand, if the jury had reason to believe that the defendants’ history was so horrific that they would have murdered even in the face of certain punishment, then some other verdict (which might still involve removing these damaged men from society) would be appropriate.

In other words, “could have acted otherwise” means that reward and punishment can affect the accused’s behavior. The guilty are punished, then, not to reform them—although that may be part of the treatment they receive—but to maintain the rule of law that says that normal people, people normally moved by reward and punishment, will receive their just deserts. In this way, punishment deters criminal behavior, but only for “normal” people.  An insane person, like Daniel M’Naghten, who murdered Edward Drummond, secretary to British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, in 1843, was not sensitive to punishment in a normal way and blamed him inappropriately. He was put in an asylum but not otherwise punished. Blame is appropriate even, indeed, only if our behavior is affected by its consequences.[8]

[RELATED: Western Civilization May Not Survive—But Must Be Defended]

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In sum, America’s leading intellectuals, either directly or by implication, seem to follow an incoherent nihilistic philosophy in which both merit and criminality are accidents. Neither praise for good behavior nor punishment for bad behavior is justified. Borders should be open because, after all, it is not their fault that would-be immigrants were born in the wrong place, nor do native-born US citizens deserve their good luck. Professor Piketty adds the caveat that the government should pay the expenses for foreign students. Love of country is condemned as “nativism.”

Admittedly, there are minor contradictions. Apparently, Democrats should “break more explicitly with the neoliberal version of globalization.” Neoliberal globalization is bad, apparently, but is “no borders” good? Piketty wants a “balance” between these two world views when the real issue is not balance but order: who comes first, your own country or another?

For Sandel and Rawls, individual differences—to the extent that they exist; Sandel is not sure—are not just matters of luck but are unfair, hence unjust, so they must be remedied according to the difference principle. No one “deserves” anything. The smarter and more conscientious worker does not deserve a higher reward; criminals should not be blamed for their crimes, and borders should be open.

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In 2011, the Harvard Gazette reported:

Michael J. Sandel has been named the “most influential” foreign figure of the year in China. The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government was given the award by China Newsweek, a weekly magazine published by the China News Agency. Sandel’s online lectures on Justice have attracted millions of viewers in East Asia, and his teaching has inspired new courses and curricular reform in China and Japan.

Various reasons have been suggested for Sandel’s popularity in the PRC. He is a brilliant lecturer, skilled in guiding, perhaps manipulating, his audience; he writes well. It’s easy to see why students, even Chinese students, find him engaging. But why was the Chinese government so tolerant? Why did they not object to this powerful Western figure freely influencing their young people? Perhaps they saw the weakness of Sandel’s arguments; perhaps they expected that Chinese youth would soon be disillusioned. Perhaps they were confident that, soon enough, Sandel would be seen not as a symbol of Western power but as a signal of Western intellectual decadence.

Perhaps they saw the Harvard professor not as a threat but as an unexpected fillip to Xi Jinping’s regime. Perhaps they are right.

[1] John Rawls A Theory of Justice Revised Edition (1971/99).

[2] Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (p. 154). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[3] Justice (2009)

[4] Sandel, J. M. The Tyranny of Merit Macmillan (2020).

[5] Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and The Limits of Justice Cambridge U.P. 88 (1982).

[6] See Staddon, John (2024) Scientific Method: How science works, fails to work or pretends to work. (Second edition) Taylor and Francis, Chapter 1.

[7] See, for example, Staddon, John (2021) The New Behaviorism: Foundations of behavioral science, (3rd edition)  Routledge Press, Chapter 11.

[8] It is a curious coincidence that blameless Professor Barbara Fried is the mother of notorious fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

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