The previous two articles made a case for compassion as both a personal virtue and a public responsibility, and argued that acting on it requires more than good intentions – it requires genuine knowledge of other people’s situations and the discipline to communicate in ways that actually reach people who don’t already agree with us.
Now comes the harder question.
How far does compassion actually extend? And what does it look like when we try to extend it to people our society has made it easiest to ignore?
The Expanding Circle
Moral progress, across human history, has largely been the story of a circle getting larger.
The philosopher Peter Singer describes this as the expanding circle – the idea that moral concern moves outward from the self, like a ripple in water. From self to family. From family to community. From community to nation. From nation, eventually, to humanity.
That expansion has never been smooth or fast. Every significant extension of moral concern in American history – the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the recognition of disability rights – was resisted, sometimes violently, by people who believed the circle was already large enough. The arguments against each expansion followed a predictable pattern: it is too costly, it will disrupt the social order, those people are different from us in ways that justify different treatment, and anyway, they do not really want what they say they want.
Those arguments were wrong every time. And they are worth keeping in mind when we encounter their contemporary versions.
History strongly suggests that moral progress often requires expanding the circle of concern. The question for our moment is where that circle is still too narrow, and what it would take to move it.
Why the Circle Stops
Social psychology offers a consistent and somewhat uncomfortable answer.
Human beings are wired to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups – the people who are like us and the people who are not. This distinction is so deeply embedded that we make it automatically, often without awareness. We extend trust, generosity, and moral concern readily to in-group members. We extend it far more reluctantly, and sometimes not at all, to out-group members.
This is not a character flaw unique to bad people. It is evolutionary history shared by all of us. For most of human existence, the people in your immediate group were the ones whose wellbeing determined your survival. Extending resources beyond that group carried real risk. The instinct toward in-group loyalty was adaptive. It kept communities alive.
But we no longer live in that world. We live in a world where our collective decisions – the policies we support, the representatives we elect, the institutions we fund – affect millions of people we will never meet. And the suffering of people distant from us does not stay distant. It shows up in higher healthcare costs, reduced economic productivity, increased crime rates, and the instability that concentrations of inequality reliably produce.
The instincts that once protected us now limit us. And the cost of that limitation is not abstract – it is written into our public policy every day.
This is precisely what the Distal Test in the Public Dignity Standard is designed to address. It asks whether a policy accounts for people who are structurally easy to ignore – people whose suffering is invisible to the decision-makers, whose voices are absent from the room where policy is designed. The people most systematically excluded from that room are almost always out-group members. People who don’t look like the people making decisions. People who don’t vote in the same districts. People who, in some cases, cannot vote at all.
A Test Case: Immigration
Few issues better illustrate both the limits of our circle of compassion and the consequences of those limits than immigration. It is politically charged, emotionally loaded, and almost never discussed in ways that require us to genuinely imagine what it feels like to be an immigrant – what drives the decision, what the journey involves, and what life looks like on the other side of it.
So let us try.
Many people who come to the United States without legal authorization do so for reasons familiar throughout immigration history: to provide a better life for themselves and their families. This is not a political claim. It is history. For most of this country’s existence, immigration was largely open and immigrants were largely welcomed. The historical record is consistent on what changed over time – not the character of the people arriving, but the legal and political framework designed to receive or repel them.
The research on immigrants and crime is equally consistent. As a sociologist who has studied this area, I can say with confidence that immigrants – including undocumented immigrants – commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. This broader pattern has been found across multiple datasets, methodologies, and time periods. It is not a matter of political opinion. It is one of the most robust findings in criminology.
Understanding this does not require agreeing on immigration policy. Reasonable people hold different views about how many people should be admitted, through what process, and under what conditions. Those are legitimate debates. What is not a legitimate basis for policy is fear constructed from misinformation – and a significant portion of our current immigration debate rests on exactly that foundation.
Applying the Tests
The Golden Rule Test asks a specific question: would you support this policy if you did not know which position you would occupy?
Would you support an immigration system that treats people as criminals for the act of crossing a border to feed their children – if you did not know whether you would be born into comfort or into circumstances that made that journey feel like the only viable option?
Would you support border enforcement policies that separate parents from children – if you did not know whether you would be the enforcement officer, the policymaker, or the parent?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the literal application of the standard. And they are worth sitting with honestly rather than dismissing.
The Outcomes Test asks whether our current approach actually reduces harm better than available alternatives. The evidence is not encouraging. Decades of border militarization have not reduced the number of people attempting to cross – they have made the crossing more dangerous, driven more migrants into the hands of criminal smuggling networks, and produced enormous human suffering without producing the security outcomes used to justify it.
The Distal Test asks whose interests are absent from the room where these decisions are made. The answer is not difficult to identify.
The Consistency Problem
Here is where the Golden Rule gets genuinely difficult – and where most of us, if we are honest, fall short.
The Golden Rule does not ask what we would want if we were already comfortable. It asks what we would choose if we genuinely did not know where we would land. And it requires – this is the part we most often skip – that we apply the same standard consistently, regardless of whose ox is being gored.
We are generally good at applying moral standards to situations that affect us directly. We are considerably less consistent when the situation affects primarily people outside our circle.
Consider the logic behind certain uses of military force abroad. When we support actions against foreign governments based on the assessment that their leaders pose a threat, we are implicitly accepting a principle: that external actors can justify intervention based on their own threat assessment of another country’s government. Most Americans would be deeply uncomfortable if that same principle were applied to the United States – if a coalition of nations decided that American leadership posed a sufficient threat to justify military action here. The outrage would be immediate and universal.
But the Golden Rule requires consistency. If we would not accept that logic applied to us, we have to examine carefully whether we are justified in applying it to others. That does not mean every security concern is illegitimate or that all interventions are equivalent. It means the standard we use to justify our actions should be one we would accept if the positions were reversed.
That is a demanding requirement. It is supposed to be.
What Expanding the Circle Actually Looks Like
None of this requires open borders, the elimination of enforcement, or the pretense that every policy question has an obvious answer. Expanding the circle of compassion does not mean abandoning judgment. It means applying judgment consistently – to people outside our circle with the same seriousness and the same standards we apply to people within it.
In practical terms, it means being willing to ask, about immigration policy and every other policy: have I genuinely tried to understand the situation of the people most affected? Have I sought out accurate information rather than relying on sources with a stake in my conclusions? Would I design this system the same way if I did not know which side of it I would be on? And am I accounting for the people who are easiest to ignore – the ones without political power, without legal status, without a voice in the room where these decisions are made?
Those questions do not guarantee agreement on specific policies. Reasonable people who ask them honestly will still disagree about details. But they will disagree differently – from a foundation of genuine understanding rather than fear, and with a shared commitment to applying the same standard to everyone rather than one standard for us and another for them.
That is what expanding the circle of compassion means in practice.
The circle has expanded before – always slowly, always against resistance, always requiring people who were willing to extend moral concern further than their immediate self-interest demanded.
It can expand again.
Foundations/Further Reading
- Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress — moral progress, altruism, reason, and the expansion of concern beyond kin and tribe.
- The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, edited by Emma Seppälä, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Stephanie L. Brown, Monica C. Worline, C. Daryl Cameron, and James R. Doty — compassion, empathy, altruism, compassion collapse, culture, and the psychology of extending concern.
- Harry J. Gensler, Ethics and the Golden Rule — knowledge, imagination, consistency, and action as disciplined requirements of Golden Rule reasoning.
- Marilynn Brewer, “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate?” — in-group favoritism, out-group bias, and the distinction between attachment to one’s own group and hostility toward others.
- Douglas S. Massey, “Why Border Enforcement Backfired” — border militarization, migration incentives, and the failure of deterrence-based enforcement.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society — immigrant integration, assimilation, second-generation outcomes, and evidence-based immigration discussion.