I think the boundaries of ethical concern is a really important topic, and I'm finding this discussion fascinating. So far, the focus here has been on national boundaries. Working on climate change, I find the question of temporal boundaries of concern - intergenerational justice - to also be of great interest.

A quick point about the Veil hypo: I think it's basically the Harvard political science department way of formulating the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Generally speaking most people find this to be a comprehensible and admirable moral precept, and most major religions to my knowledge include it as a central tenet.

Another key point I'd like to add to the current discussion about national boundaries is that I find it a bit ironic that the in the pushback to Eben's comments, the supposedly more deeply felt and "real" national community is being contrasted to "fake," more evanscent familial bonds descending from Mitochondrial Eve.

First, my understanding of Eben's point about mitochondria is that it is a biological reality which can be put to good use in ethical argument. I think it was a just a quick point of political rhetoric, not really an attempt at a general theory of ethics. I don't think the intended point was that, for example, if we discovered Australians had different mitochondria, we would suddenly cease to have ethical obligations to them.

But nationalism - the concept that the boundaries of our familial affection is somehow naturally limited to those within the territories of the same nation-state as us - is to my mind quite implausible as an ethical theory. The nation-state has its origins as a deliberate project by European states to establish more culturally cohesive populations amenable to centralized governing and winning wars. There is nothing natural about it, and certainly there is no inherent link between biological kinship and nationalism.

However, we might be able to make constructive use of nationalism nonetheless, now that we have it. Benedict Arnold's Imagined Communities made the argument, that, inter alia, nationalism can serve to expand one's boundary of concern beyond immediate kin. He worked on Indonesia, and Indonesia is an example of a case where a bunch of essentially separate island communities developed a common national identification in their struggle against their colonial occupiers and cooperated to throw them out.

Elsewhere, and if someone else knows the source for this, I'd be grateful, I read an interesting attempt to explain why the Scandinavian social democracies are so generous with foreign aid. The argument was that the tradition of social democracy there had caused people to expand their circle of concern outside themselves and their family, and that this expansion had continued to encompass people in other countries. Now, I know it's somewhat bad form to cite an argument without knowing the source, but I'm really hoping someone might recognize it and point me to it, and I think it's a thought-provoking hypothesis.

-- DevinMcDougall - 01 Mar 2010