I want to focus on Arash Abizadeh’s argument against the special obligations challenge. He mounts this reply by attacking the premise that “compatriotic special obligations justify restricting immigration if immigration would harm the domestic poor.” (p. 107) He essentially investigates two questions: What grounds national obligations? And what force does it have to motivate more closed borders? The second question is an assessment of the first question, and it relies on a distinction made from the onset between “additive” and “prioritizing” special obligations. Here, I want to raise some subtleties with this central distinction, especially with “prioritizing” special obligations.

There are a lot of subtle (at times, implicit) premises loaded onto the additive-prioritizing distinction. Additive special obligations are the sorts of special obligations which require more sacrifice from you to your intimates. In contrast, prioritizing special obligations do not require any sacrifice from you; rather, it is about how you are required to weight moral decisions. He adds some further stipulations: he is open to the fact that special obligations can arise for non-instrumental reasons; also, special obligations (at least the additive special obligations) are couched in our general natural duties. He seems to allow additive special obligations in most cases – as he notes, the special obligations challenge needs the prioritizing special obligations. Let me now briefly suggest some of the more subtle baggage of the conception of prioritizing special obligations.

He seems to require that prioritizing special obligations must be considerably strong to outweigh the “duties of justice to the foreign poor.” (p. 109) Why is this important? It seems that when we have to make moral decisions, our reasons for picking out a particular choice must be significantly greater than the competing choices. This seems counterintuitive. Even a slight difference in weight would tip the scale to one side. Take for instance the rescue case: two people are drowning – one is a stranger, the other is a close intimate – and you can only rescue one. The author seems to think that we need significantly weightier reasons to save our intimate. These significantly weightier reasons seem present in this rescue case in virtue of the fact that they are a close intimate, but we can change this variable. Imagine again the two people drowning, however, this time one is a stranger and the other is a distant neighbor who you only exchange polite smiles with. Here, ceteris paribus, I have a slightly weightier reason to favor rescuing my neighbor over the stranger.

One more final, brief point about prioritizing special obligations: they seem, in principle, not to show equal respect to everybody. Again, this issue seems less problematic with additive special obligations because we may direct our beneficence to intimates without violating the equal respect for others. (p. 108) Clearly, when we prioritize intimates for the wrong reasons, we fail to show respect to non-intimates affected by our prioritizing. However, even when they are the right reasons, there is a sense in which we fail to show equal respect. I cannot go into the details of what “respect” precisely entails, so I will rely on just an intuitive conception. Going back to the rescue case, might say that our reasons to save our intimates is that we have some sort of relationship with them which he do not have with the stranger. We want to maintain that this move does not commit us to a disrespect of the stranger as a moral agent. Still, I think this is all too fast. We have residual feelings of compunction, and even if our actions were permissible, it does not mean that a wrong was not done.