Equality, Moral Incentives, and Open Borders: An Attempt to Connect the Strands of Joseph Carens’s Utopian Thinking

The following study is an attempt to combine the two utopias Joseph Carens lays out in his work: first, a world with open borders, and second, an egalitarian state designed by the socialist principle: “From each according to ability, to each according to needs”. To test the compatibility of the two utopias, we examine four hypothetical scenarios. Each scenario represents a combination of open resp. closed borders and coexistent egalitarian resp. capitalist states, which are depicted along the lines of premises that Carens presents in various writings. It will be shown that combining the two utopias may under some circumstances raise difficulties for the stability of the egalitarian system. We therefore suggest that Carens’s global utopia might consist in a world of economically equal egalitarian states with open borders or in an egalitarian world state.