We propose that people judge immoral acts as more offensive and moral acts as more virtuous when the acts are psychologically distant than near. This is because people construe more distant situations in terms of moral principles, rather than attenuating situation-specific considerations. Results of four studies support these predictions. Study 1 shows that more temporally distant transgressions (e.g., eating one’s dead dog) are construed in terms of moral principles rather than contextual information. Studies 2 and 3 further show that morally offensive actions are judged more severely when imagined from a more distant temporal (Study 2) or social (Study 3) perspective. Finally, Study 4 shows that moral acts (e.g., adopting a disabled child) are judged more positively from temporal distance. The findings suggest that people more readily apply their moral principles to distant rather than proximal behaviors.

It is far from obvious that inviting them en masse to the rich world provides greater overall utility than teaching them to create their own rich world (which has worked out quite well in East Asia over the last half century). If there was some reason that absolutely prevented them from creating a rich world locally, common sense stipulates that the same reason, ceteris paribus, would cause importation of them to (i) lower the well-being of your neighbors, and (ii) plausibly lower reasonable measures of global utility (look at the asymptotics of the situation, not just the immediate first derivative).

Open borders advocates will constantly run into “hindering neighbors” for the foreseeable future, for the very good reason that they have never satisfactorily addressed the concerns above. Their disinterest in increasing their home’s culture’s ability to assimilate — the one thing most likely to break the ceteris paribus assumption above and make 3rd world immigration a win-win — is particularly damning.

And how do you know this starry eyed college student, whoever he or she is, plans to only do brief and scanty research of such situations? Also I hear Burma has some lovely temples…