Experimental Immigration Ethics

Experiments serve many functions in moral and political philosophy. One is to establish public opinion: experiments can establish whether certain policies are popular, or can be made popular when certain facts are made salient. In some contexts, this helps establish what policymakers ought morally to do. Experiments can further establish whether encouraging individuals to try and follow certain moral principles results in individuals expressing wrongful biases against certain groups, sometimes creating reasons for individuals to avoid trying to follow these principles. We present an example of an experiment we conducted which fulfils the above two functions. The experiment aimed to establish whether the public supports immigration policies consistent with a principle of liability, de ned as a principle which holds that enforcement against migrants is wrong when they either pose no threat or are not responsible for the threat they pose. We demonstrate that the public in both the US and UK is sensitive to this principle, and generally avoids any bias in the application of the principle. This, in turn, has implications for what policymakers ought to do, and what individuals ought to try to follow.