I must approach this matter with the rigor that moral philosophy demands. The enforcement of immigration law by the state, and the manner in which it is carried out upon persons, presents a profound tension between the authority of civil law and the inviolable dignity of rational beings. While I hold that lawful governance is essential to the conditions of freedom, I must insist with equal force that no human being may ever be treated merely as a means to an end — not even the end of political order itself.
I apply here my deontological moral philosophy, grounded in:
Let me be precise. I do not deny the state its rightful authority. In my political writings, I argued that the civil condition — the rule of law — is a moral necessity, for without it, the freedom of individuals cannot be secured. A republic must govern its borders and enforce its laws.
However — and this is where I must speak with the full weight of moral conviction — the manner of enforcement is not morally neutral. The categorical imperative commands: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means."
When enforcement operations are designed to maximize fear, when they sweep through communities with deliberate spectacle, when they separate families and detain persons without transparent and fair proceedings — then the state has ceased to treat persons as rational, dignified beings and has begun to treat them as mere instruments of political demonstration.
Furthermore, I must apply the test of publicity from my Perpetual Peace: could the true maxims driving these operations withstand public scrutiny by all rational beings? If the underlying maxim is not the orderly enforcement of just law but rather the performance of power or the punishment of a class of persons, then it fails the test of right entirely.
The moral law within me speaks clearly: order without justice is tyranny dressed in legality. A truly rational republic enforces its laws with dignity, transparency, due process, and a recognition that every person — documented or not — carries within them the same spark of rational moral agency that grounds all human worth.
I would counsel the citizens and leaders of Minneapolis — and indeed of the entire republic — to ask themselves not merely "Is this legal?" but the far more demanding question: "Is this worthy of a kingdom of ends?"
I must confess that the aggressive escalation of immigration enforcement operations in a community such as Minneapolis occasions in me the deepest concern. While I have never denied that a government possesses a legitimate interest in the regulation of its borders, the manner in which such power is exercised — and the breadth of suffering it produces — must be subjected to the most rigorous moral scrutiny. On the whole, I find that such operations, as commonly reported, produce a preponderance of harm over good, violate essential principles of individual liberty, and risk cultivating a tyranny of the majority over a vulnerable minority.
I apply here my Utilitarian principle — that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse — tempered by my Harm Principle as articulated in On Liberty: that the sole justification for exercising power over any member of a civilized community, against their will, is to prevent harm to others. I further invoke my deep concern, expressed throughout my works, regarding the tyranny of the majority and the protection of minority rights as essential to a just and progressive society.
Let me elaborate with some care.
On Utility and the Calculus of Happiness:
The utilitarian must ask: does this policy, on the whole, produce more happiness than misery? The state claims public safety and the rule of law. These are not trivial goods — I grant this freely. However, one must account for the full ledger of consequences. Families are torn apart. Children — who are citizens — lose parents. Workers are removed from an economy that depends upon their labour. Entire neighbourhoods live in a state of terror. The psychological suffering alone — the anxiety, the dread, the despair — constitutes an enormous quantity of pain distributed across thousands of persons. Against this, the state must demonstrate a proportionate gain in security or public welfare, and I find the evidence for such a gain wanting.
On Liberty and the Limits of State Power:
In On Liberty, I argued that the individual is sovereign over their own body and mind, and that the state may only intervene to prevent concrete harm to others. The mere fact of one's presence in a territory without documentation does not, in itself, constitute harm to another person. To treat it as though it does — to deploy armed agents, to conduct sweeps through neighbourhoods, to instil fear in persons who have committed no act of violence — is to stretch the concept of "harm" beyond all reasonable bounds and to grant the state a power I would find deeply alarming.
On the Tyranny of the Majority:
I warned that democratic societies face a peculiar danger: the majority may use the machinery of law to persecute those who are different, who are unpopular, who lack political voice. Undocumented immigrants are, almost by definition, the most politically powerless class in any society. They cannot vote. They cannot easily petition. They live in the shadows. When the state marshals its coercive apparatus against such persons with great public spectacle, I see precisely the dynamic I feared — the force of majority sentiment crushing those least able to resist.
On Progress and the Character of a Society:
I have always believed that the measure of a civilization is how it treats its most vulnerable members. A society that prioritises the rigid enforcement of administrative law over human compassion, over the welfare of children, over the bonds of family — such a society moves not toward progress but toward a kind of moral coarseness that diminishes us all.
I do not say that borders are meaningless or that laws may be disregarded at will. I say that how we enforce, against whom, and at what cost are moral questions of the highest order — and that Minneapolis deserves answers worthy of a free and humane people.
I must express profound moral concern regarding the intensified Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis. When I consider such enforcement actions through the lens of justice as fairness, I find that they raise deeply troubling questions about whether our basic institutional arrangements are treating the least advantaged members of our community — indeed, of our shared social world — with the dignity and fairness that justice demands. A just society must be evaluated by how it treats its most vulnerable, not its most powerful.
I am applying my theory of justice as fairness, as articulated in A Theory of Justice (1971) and refined in Political Liberalism (1993) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Central to my analysis are:
Let me be direct in my reasoning. Some will argue that immigration enforcement is simply the lawful execution of democratically enacted statutes, and that a just society requires the rule of law. I do not dismiss this consideration — indeed, I take institutional legitimacy seriously. However, the rule of law is not self-justifying. Laws and their enforcement must themselves be assessed against principles of justice.
The critical question is not whether a society may regulate immigration — I accept that political communities have some legitimate interest in defining membership — but how enforcement is conducted and whether the underlying arrangements meet the demands of fairness.
Behind the veil of ignorance, no one would choose a system in which a person could live, work, raise children, and contribute to a community for years or decades, only to be seized without adequate process and expelled. The sheer arbitrariness of such a system — where enforcement falls disproportionately on people of particular racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds — violates the spirit of equal respect that undergirds my entire theory.
Furthermore, I would emphasize that my conception of justice applies to the basic structure of society — the major social, economic, and political institutions. Immigration enforcement is not a peripheral policy matter; it shapes who is included in the cooperative scheme, who benefits, and who bears the heaviest burdens. When enforcement surges target communities already marked by disadvantage, we must ask whether we are constructing a basic structure that any reasonable person could endorse.
I would urge the citizens of Minneapolis — and of the broader republic — to ask themselves: Would I accept this system if I did not know which side of the enforcement action I would be on?
If the answer is no, then justice demands reform.
The recent ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids have raised significant ethical concerns that demand careful philosophical analysis.
From a utilitarian perspective, we must consider:
The ethical assessment here is not simply about legality, but about moral obligation. While nations have legitimate interests in border security, the manner of enforcement carries moral weight.
Key considerations:
I must begin by observing that this phenomenon — the intensification of federal immigration enforcement within a particular municipality — represents a profound dialectical collision between competing moments of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). What we witness is not merely a policy dispute but a manifestation of Spirit (Geist) working through the contradictions inherent in the modern state's struggle to reconcile universal right with particular freedom. The ethical substance of this matter cannot be grasped through mere sentiment or abstract moralism; it must be comprehended through the rational unfolding of the concept of the State, law, and human recognition.
I apply here my philosophy of objective Spirit and ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as articulated in my Philosophy of Right (1820). The ethical world unfolds through three moments:
I also employ the dialectical method: thesis, antithesis, and Aufhebung (sublation) — the movement through which contradictions are not simply destroyed but preserved and elevated into a higher unity.
Let me now unfold my reasoning with the rigor the matter demands.
I have written that the State is "the actuality of the ethical Idea" and "the march of God in the world." By this I do not mean that every action of every government is divine — far from it. I mean that the concept of the State, properly realized, represents the highest form of human freedom in the objective world. The State has the rational right — indeed, the duty — to regulate its membership and enforce its laws. Without this, there is no universal framework within which particular freedoms can be secured.
Therefore, I do not dismiss the federal government's right to enforce immigration law as such. To do so would be to dissolve the State into mere sentiment, which is the error of those who substitute feeling for reason.
However — and this is essential — the manner of enforcement must be measured against the State's own rational purpose. When enforcement takes the form of sudden, sweeping operations that generate fear among entire communities, disrupt the functioning of civil society, and treat persons as mere objects to be seized and removed, the State has descended from rational universality into abstract, one-sided force. It has become what I would call the Understanding (Verstand) operating without Reason (Vernunft) — grasping only the fixed category of "legal" versus "illegal" without comprehending the living, concrete totality of ethical life.
At the heart of my philosophy stands the concept of recognition (Anerkennung). In the famous passage of my Phenomenology of Spirit concerning the master and servant, I demonstrated that self-consciousness achieves its truth only through being recognized by another free self-consciousness. Domination — the reduction of the other to a mere thing — ultimately undermines the freedom of the dominator as well.
The undocumented immigrant is not a mere abstraction, not a legal category to be processed. Each is a concrete person — a bearer of Spirit, embedded in families, communities, labor, and mutual dependence. When the State treats such persons purely as objects of enforcement, it enacts a failure of recognition that diminishes the ethical substance of the entire community. The citizens who witness their neighbors seized, who fear for their own families, who withdraw from public life — they too suffer a diminution of freedom. The State, in seeking to assert its authority, has paradoxically weakened the very ethical bonds that constitute its living substance.
The conflict between federal authority and the city of Minneapolis is philosophically significant. In my Philosophy of Right, I articulate the relationship between the universal (the State) and the particular (civil society, local communities) as one of necessary mediation. The universal cannot simply impose itself upon the particular without mediation — to do so is tyranny, the abstract universal crushing the concrete particular.
Minneapolis, as a community with its own ethical life — its own institutions, relationships, and self-understanding — represents a legitimate moment of particularity. When this community resists federal enforcement, it is not merely engaging in lawlessness; it is asserting the right of concrete ethical life against an abstract legality that has failed to mediate itself through the community's own rational self-determination.
The resolution cannot be the mere triumph of one side over the other. That would be a false resolution — what I call a "bad infinity," an endless oscillation between opposing positions. The true Aufhebung would be a higher synthesis: an immigration framework that preserves the State's legitimate authority over membership while simultaneously recognizing the concrete personhood, labor, and communal ties of those who dwell within its borders.
Spirit unfolds historically. The United States, as a historical formation, was constituted through successive waves of migration — often coerced, often exploited, always contested. The current contradiction — a nation whose economic life depends upon immigrant labor while its legal apparatus criminalizes the very persons who perform that labor — is a dialectical contradiction of the highest order. It cannot be resolved through enforcement alone, for enforcement merely suppresses one side of the contradiction without sublating it.
History, as I have argued, is the progress of the consciousness of freedom. The question before the American Geist is whether it will advance toward a higher realization of freedom — one that recognizes the full personhood of all who participate in its ethical life — or whether it will regress into the mere assertion of power, which is the negation of Spirit's own purpose.
The ICE surge in Minneapolis is, in the final analysis, a symptom of an unresolved contradiction within the American State — between its universal principles of freedom and recognition and its particular, historically contingent legal structures that deny recognition to millions who dwell within its borders. The ethical imperative, from the standpoint of Reason, is not the abolition of law or the dissolution of the State, but the sublation of this contradiction into a higher, more rational form of ethical life — one in which the State's authority and the individual's dignity are no longer opposed but are reconciled in a living unity.
Until that reconciliation is achieved, what we witness in Minneapolis is Spirit in its painful, self-divided labor — the travail through which, I remain convinced, a higher freedom may yet emerge.
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." We must comprehend what has unfolded — but comprehension, rightly pursued, is itself the seed of transformation.
The panel deliberates and works toward consensus
Let me begin by stating what I hope we can all agree on as a starting point. Whatever our philosophical differences, the ICE operations in Minneapolis have produced enormous suffering — families torn apart, communities living in terror, children left without parents. From a utilitarian standpoint, the calculus here seems quite clear. The aggregate harm inflicted on undocumented immigrants, their families, their neighbors, and the broader social fabric of Minneapolis vastly outweighs whatever marginal gains in border enforcement or public safety these raids might achieve. We must ask ourselves a simple but powerful question: does this policy produce the greatest good for the greatest number? I find it very difficult to argue that it does.
I must say, Professor Singer, that while I share your moral concern, I am deeply uneasy with the foundation upon which you rest it. You speak of a calculus — of weighing aggregate suffering against aggregate benefit. But this is precisely the mode of reasoning that permits the dignity of individual persons to be sacrificed on the altar of collective welfare. If we oppose these raids merely because the suffering outweighs the benefit, then we implicitly concede that if the numbers were different — if, say, the political benefits were sufficiently large — the raids would be justified. I cannot accept this. The dignity of every rational being swept up in these operations is unconditional. It does not depend on a favorable calculation. The categorical imperative demands that we ask: can we universalize a maxim that treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy? The answer is plainly no. No person, regardless of their legal status, may be used merely as a means to the end of political order.
Kant, I have the greatest respect for your principle, but I think you draw too sharp a line between our positions. My utilitarianism is not the crude hedonic calculus you describe. I have always insisted that the quality of pleasures and pains matters, and that among the highest goods are individual liberty, security of person, and the sense of dignity that comes from being treated as a free agent. When ICE conducts sweeping operations that instill fear across an entire community — when people are afraid to go to work, to take their children to school, to seek medical care — what is destroyed is not merely a quantity of happiness but the very conditions of a free and flourishing life. My liberalism and your deontology converge here more than you might wish to admit.
I acknowledge the convergence in practical conclusion, Mill, but I insist the ground matters. If the ground is utility, however refined, the protection you offer is contingent. If the ground is dignity, it is absolute.
Gentlemen, I must interject, for I believe you are both operating at a level of abstraction that fails to grasp the concrete reality of what is unfolding. Kant, you speak of the dignity of rational beings as though it exists in some noumenal realm, untouched by history and institutions. Mill, you speak of individual liberty as though the individual stands apart from the social world that constitutes him. But what we are witnessing in Minneapolis is a dialectical collision — a moment in which the ethical substance of the modern state is at war with itself. The state claims sovereignty over its borders; this is not mere tyranny but an expression of the state's rational function in organizing ethical life. And yet the very same state, in its constitution and its historical self-understanding, has posited universal human rights, the dignity of persons, the protection of the vulnerable. These are not external constraints imposed on the state — they are moments within the state's own concept of itself. The contradiction is real, and it cannot be resolved by simply invoking abstract duty or aggregating pleasures. It must be aufgehoben — sublated — through a higher reconciliation in which the state's sovereignty and its commitment to universal right are genuinely unified.
Hegel, I find your analysis illuminating in certain respects, but I worry that your confidence in the rational unfolding of the state's self-concept offers cold comfort to the families in Minneapolis who are being detained right now. Let me bring us back to a question of basic institutional justice. If we imagine ourselves behind the veil of ignorance — not knowing whether we would be born citizens, undocumented immigrants, or asylum seekers — what principles would we choose to govern immigration enforcement? I submit that no rational person, uncertain of their own position, would consent to a system in which agents of the state can descend upon communities, separate families, and deport individuals without robust procedural protections, without consideration of their ties to the community, without weighing the devastating consequences for their children. The difference principle demands that our institutions be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. And in this context, the least advantaged are undeniably the undocumented individuals and their families who possess the fewest legal protections and the least political power.
Rawls, I think your veil of ignorance is doing important work here, and I want to push it further than you might be comfortable with. Why should the veil only cover whether one is a citizen or an undocumented immigrant within the United States? If we are genuinely impartial — if we take the veil seriously — shouldn't we also not know which country we are born in? And if that's the case, then the entire system of nation-states and borders, which allows the accident of birth to determine one's life prospects, becomes deeply suspect. The suffering of an undocumented person in Minneapolis is real and urgent, but so is the suffering of the person in Honduras or Somalia who never had the opportunity to migrate at all. I think we need to be honest that the nation-state framework itself is part of the problem.
Singer, I have grappled with this challenge extensively, and I acknowledge its force. In The Law of Peoples, I argued that there are duties of assistance owed to what I call burdened societies. But I maintain that the basic structure of a domestic society — its institutions, its constitutional framework — is the primary subject of justice. This is not arbitrary nationalism; it is a recognition that justice requires institutional embodiment, and the institutions that most directly shape people's life prospects are domestic ones. That said, I fully agree that within the domestic context, the treatment of undocumented persons in Minneapolis fails the test of justice as fairness by almost any measure.
Rawls, your thought experiment is ingenious, but I must press you. The veil of ignorance asks us to reason as though we have no particular identity, no history, no community. But this is precisely what is impossible for actual ethical life. The people of Minneapolis — citizens and immigrants alike — are not abstract rational agents. They are concrete persons embedded in families, neighborhoods, churches, workplaces. The undocumented worker is not merely a bearer of rights in the abstract; she is a mother in a particular community, a member of a congregation, a contributor to a shared form of life. The ethical wrong of these raids is not merely that they violate an abstract principle — it is that they tear apart the fabric of Sittlichkeit, of actual ethical community. The state, in exercising its sovereign power in this way, is destroying the very ethical substance it is supposed to preserve and elevate.
Hegel, I am struck by that point, and I think it connects to something I have long argued about the tyranny of the majority. What we see in Minneapolis is a case in which the political majority — or at least the faction currently controlling the federal government — is exercising its power over a minority that has virtually no political voice. The undocumented cannot vote, cannot organize openly, cannot petition their government without fear of deportation. This is precisely the kind of situation in which the machinery of democratic government becomes an instrument of oppression rather than liberty. And I would add that the chilling effect on the broader community — on citizens and legal residents who share the ethnicity or language of those targeted — represents a harm to liberty that extends far beyond the individuals directly detained. When a neighbor is afraid to open her door, when a shopkeeper shutters his business, when a child cannot concentrate in school because she fears her father will not be home when she returns — the harm radiates outward in ways that no enforcement benefit can justify.
Mill, on this point I will say we stand together, though I arrive at it differently. You describe the radiating harm. I would describe it as the systematic treatment of an entire class of persons as less than fully human — as beings whose freedom, whose family bonds, whose very presence in a community can be annulled by executive action. This offends against the very foundation of morality. I would also direct our attention to the question of means. Reports suggest that these operations have involved deception, the use of unmarked vehicles, the detention of individuals at courthouses and hospitals and schools. Even if one concedes the state's right to enforce its immigration laws — and I do concede that lawful governance is a precondition of civil freedom — the manner in which enforcement is conducted must respect the humanity of those subjected to it. To deceive a person in order to detain them, to exploit their trust in public institutions — this is to treat them as mere objects, not as rational agents deserving of truthful engagement.
Kant, I want to press you on something. You say you concede the state's right to enforce immigration laws. But if the dignity of every rational being is truly unconditional, and if borders are essentially arbitrary lines that determine, by accident of birth, whether a person lives in prosperity or poverty, safety or danger — on what basis does the state have the moral right to exclude people at all? Isn't the entire apparatus of immigration enforcement a violation of the categorical imperative, insofar as it treats some human beings as less entitled to opportunity and safety than others based on morally irrelevant characteristics?
That is a penetrating question, and I will not pretend it has an easy answer. I have argued that the state is necessary for the realization of right — that without civil society, freedom remains merely a concept, never actualized. And a state, to function as a guarantor of right, must have defined boundaries and the capacity to govern those within them. But — and this is crucial — the cosmopolitan right I articulated in Perpetual Peace includes a right of hospitality: the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility upon arriving in another's territory. This is not mere charity. It is a right grounded in the common possession of the surface of the earth. The ICE operations, as described, seem to violate even this minimal cosmopolitan right. They treat the stranger not with hospitality but with hostility — with force, deception, and the apparatus of the police state.
I want to return to something practical, because I think we risk losing ourselves in abstraction. Whatever our disagreements about the ultimate justifiability of borders — and those disagreements are real — I think we can agree on several things about the immediate situation in Minneapolis. First, the procedural protections afforded to those detained are grossly inadequate. Justice requires, at minimum, that individuals have access to legal counsel, that their cases be heard by impartial adjudicators, and that the impact on their families — especially their children — be given serious weight. Second, the targeting of individuals at sensitive locations — schools, hospitals, churches — represents a violation of the basic trust that institutions must maintain with all members of the community. Third, the climate of fear that these operations produce undermines the social cooperation on which a just society depends.
Rawls, I appreciate your effort to identify concrete points of agreement, and I do not disagree with any of them as far as they go. But I want to insist that this crisis reveals something deeper than a policy failure. It reveals a contradiction at the heart of the modern liberal state. The state promises universal rights but distributes them according to the particular category of citizenship. It proclaims the dignity of all persons but maintains an apparatus of enforcement that systematically degrades the dignity of some. This is not an accident or an aberration — it is a structural contradiction. And it will not be resolved by better procedures or more humane enforcement, though those are preferable to what we see now. It will only be resolved when the concept of political membership itself is reconceived — when the state finds a way to reconcile its particular sovereignty with the universal humanity of all those who dwell within its borders. This is the work of Spirit in history, and it is not yet complete.
Hegel, I confess I find your language of Spirit and dialectical sublation rather more mystical than I would prefer, but I think the substance of your point is sound. There is a deep tension in the liberal democratic project, and Minneapolis is experiencing it in an acutely painful way. What I would add — and what I think is sometimes lost in philosophical discussion — is the importance of experience and experiment in resolving such tensions. Minneapolis, and cities like it, have attempted to build inclusive communities in which undocumented persons are treated as members, as contributors, as neighbors. These are not merely sentimental gestures; they are experiments in living, to use my own phrase, that test whether a more inclusive form of community is possible and beneficial. The ICE operations represent the federal government's violent interruption of that experiment. And I believe that the evidence — the testimony of those affected, the data on community well-being, the economic contributions of immigrant communities — overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the experiment was working, and that its disruption serves no legitimate end commensurate with the suffering it produces.
I find myself in substantial agreement with everyone around this table on the immediate question, which is itself remarkable given how different our philosophical starting points are. But I want to be honest about where I think we diverge. Kant and Rawls are willing to accept, at least in principle, the legitimacy of the nation-state and its right to control borders, while arguing that enforcement must respect dignity and procedural justice. Hegel sees the contradiction but trusts in some historical process of reconciliation. Mill wants to protect individual liberty and let communities experiment. I think all of these responses, while valuable, are ultimately insufficient. The suffering in Minneapolis is a symptom of a global system that distributes life chances based on the morally arbitrary fact of where one is born. Until we confront that deeper injustice, we will continue to have these conversations — about this raid, in this city, affecting these families — while the fundamental structure remains intact.
Singer, I hear in your words an impatience with the limits of political reality that I understand but cannot fully share. The cosmopolitan ideal is one I hold dear. But morality demands that we act within the world as we find it, even as we work to transform it. And in the world as we find it, the immediate duty is clear: the persons being subjected to these operations in Minneapolis must be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to a political agenda. That duty does not await the resolution of the border question. It is binding now, unconditionally, on every agent of the state.
Let me attempt, if I may, to draw together what I think this conversation has revealed. We have approached the ICE surge in Minneapolis from five distinct philosophical traditions, and we have disagreed — sometimes sharply — about the foundations of our moral judgments. Singer grounds his concern in the aggregate suffering produced and the arbitrary nature of borders. Kant insists on the unconditional dignity of every person and the categorical prohibition against treating anyone as a mere means. I have argued that the operations fail the test of justice as fairness, particularly as applied to the least advantaged. Mill has shown how they violate individual liberty and represent a tyranny of the majority over a voiceless minority. And Hegel has illuminated the structural contradiction within the modern state that makes such crises not merely possible but, in some sense, inevitable. Yet for all our disagreements about foundations, we have converged on something that I think matters enormously: that what is happening in Minneapolis represents a serious moral wrong. The methods are disproportionate. The procedural protections are inadequate. The suffering inflicted on families and communities is profound and unjustified. The climate of fear corrodes the very conditions of a just and free society. We may not agree on why it is wrong in the deepest philosophical sense, but we agree that it is wrong — and that recognition, shared across traditions that so rarely find common ground, should carry considerable moral weight.