A border looks different depending on which side of it one stands. To a citizen, it may appear as a line of defense: a necessary guarantee of order, security, and political sovereignty. To a migrant, it may look like a wall against hope, a bureaucratic machine that turns fear into paperwork and danger into indefinite delay. The challenge of an ethics of migration lies in this tension between different standpoints.
Leibniz did not write a theory of migration in anything like the modern sense. The political world he inhabited was not yet organized around the same forms of border control, citizenship, asylum, and administrative classification that shape present debates. Nevertheless, a short text called “The Place of Others,” included in my recently published three-volume edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers 1677–1686 (Oxford University Press, 2026), offers an illuminating way of approaching a central difficulty in contemporary debates about migration, namely: whose standpoint counts? In this text, Leibniz reflects on the practice of imaginatively changing positions with another person, claiming that “the place of others is the true point of view in politics as well as in morals.” Elsewhere he gives the principle its clearest form: “the place of others is the true point of view for judging more equitably when one puts oneself there.” At first glance, this might seem like a pious appeal to empathy, but such an assessment should be resisted, because to put oneself in another’s place is not to let imagined feeling settle the question, but rather to alter the position from which judgment is made. That change of position brings different facts into view, leading the judge of a policy to consider not only what the policy is meant to achieve, but also what it does to those subjected to it. As such, it works against the excessive confidence or certainty of judging from where one already stands.
Migration debates are shaped by one-sided standpoints: the migrant may seek safety, work, family reunion, or a future for a child; the citizen may want social cohesion, secure borders, functioning public services, and confidence that the law is not being disregarded; while the state may want order and administrative control. The mistake lies in allowing one of these standpoints to dominate the debate, pushing the others out of view. Leibniz’s principle helps because it asks us to move between standpoints without pretending that any one of them settles everything. The migrant’s perspective does not automatically decide the matter any more than the citizen’s or the state’s perspective does. Instead of yielding a migration policy, Leibniz’s principle gives us a test for one: Before endorsing detention, imagine being held without knowing when the process will end. Before endorsing family separation, imagine explaining that separation to a child. Before endorsing deportation to an unsafe place, imagine being told that your danger is not quite perilous enough to count.
None of this proves that such policies are always unjust, but then Leibniz’s principle was not intended to hand us an instant moral answer anyway. Instead, by disrupting our natural myopia, it serves as a check on premature and one-sided judgments. When a policy begins to look intolerable from the place of the person affected by it, this does not end the debate, but it does force the policy’s defenders to confront some uncomfortable questions requiring clear answers: What evil is the policy meant to prevent? How serious is that evil? Is this measure necessary? Is there a less harmful alternative? Who bears the cost of precaution?
Crucially, Leibniz acknowledges that this shift in perspective has a darker, political twin. Those engaged in statecraft, he says, routinely put themselves in the place of a hostile neighbor or a suspicious ruler in order to anticipate their plans. Hence the place of the other is not always that of the vulnerable person whom I might harm; it may also be the place of the person whose plans I fear. In the latter case, Leibniz’s principle is a tool of strategic suspicion. This duality fits the migration debate perfectly, as states have real concerns about security, institutional capacity, and the rule of law. Leibniz accepts that suspicion and mistrust are permanent features of politics, observing that in political matters involving security, it is often safest to assume the worst. But he immediately adds a vital qualification: political precaution is morally permissible only when the feared evil is massive, and when the measures taken to prevent it do not cause a greater evil than the one they are meant to avert. That condition is important, because it requires security claims to be measured against the harms caused in their name. A state may regulate entry, distinguish between claims, and weigh what its institutions are able to bear, but a policy is not justified simply because it is precautionary or defensive in nature. It still has to be judged from the place of those on the receiving end of it: the family kept apart, the person held indefinitely, the applicant left for years in uncertainty, the refugee returned to danger because the evidence did not fit the required categories.
A Leibnizian approach to migration would therefore be awkward for both sides of our usual debates. It would no more say that need automatically creates a right to admission than it would say that the suffering of migrants cancels every concern about borders, resources, or law. At the same time, however, it would not allow policy to be designed only from the standpoint of those who are already safe. The standpoint of the migrant is not an optional humanitarian decoration, but instead belongs to the “true point of view” that makes a more equitable judgement possible. This is important to note, because Leibniz’s principle does not serve as a shortcut to simple moral answers in debates about migration, but instead offers something just as useful: a way to unsettle our self-certainty when we think about these debates. To put oneself in the place of others means asking not only, “What do we fear?” but “What do they suffer?” Not only, “What do we need to prevent?” but “What are we willing to inflict?”
In debates about migration, strangers are often spoken of in depersonalized terms: flows, numbers, pressures, cases, claims. Some of this language is unavoidable because governments have to count and systems have to classify, but every general policy eventually touches someone in particular: a person at a desk, in a camp, in a queue, on a boat, in an interview room, or beside a suitcase. Leibniz’s “place of others” does not abolish the state’s right to judge, but simply asks the state, or rather those who speak in its name, not to judge solely from the position of power. Without that change of perspective, we risk allowing our judgments to become too hasty, too clean, and too self-satisfied.
Lloyd Strickland
Lloyd Strickland is a historian of philosophy and editor of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (volume 1,volume 2andvolume 3published on April 30, 2026). In a 25+ year career, he has taught philosophy at Lancaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University (where he was Professor of Philosophy and Intellectual History), the University of Central Lancashire, and the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. His research focuses on the history of western philosophy, especially the thought and reception of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, on which he had published many journal articles and numerous books, including Leibniz on Binary: The Invention of Computer Arithmetic (2022, with Harry Lewis), Leibniz’s Key Philosophical Writings: A Guide (2020, with Paul Lodge), Leibniz’s Legacy and Impact (2019, with Julia Weckend), and Leibniz’s Monadology (2014).
