Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge Research in Applied Ethics) by Serena Parekh

Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement (Routledge Research in Applied Ethics) by Serena Parekh

Author:Serena Parekh [Parekh, Serena]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780415712613
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-11-24T16:00:00+00:00


Notes

1 I refer to philosophers who are interested in thinking about our moral obligations to refugees, such as the ones I discuss in this chapter, as normative philosophers to distinguish them from continental philosophers, whom I will discuss in Chapter Three, who are more interested in a phenomenological understanding of refugees. I’ve chosen to use this term to avoid the sometimes ambiguous phrase “liberal philosophers,” since “liberal” can have different connotations in different contexts, though most normative philosophers are liberal in the most general sense.

2 Not all philosophers believe this can be done. Philip Cole, for example, argues that the question of membership shows that “there is an irresolvable contradiction between liberal theory’s apparent universalism and its concealed particularism” (Cole 2000, 2).

3 For example, Singer and Singer (1988), Carens (1992), Barbieri (1998), Cole (2000), Gibney (2004), Nyers (2006), and Wellman (2008), among others, have all written about our moral obligations to refugees. Although there is no consensus on the question of obligations, one important point is agreed upon by all these authors: the question of whether we are obliged to admit refugees to our country is the primary moral question.

4 As we will see in the discussion below, both Walzer’s and Wellman’s views of refugees are rooted in the principle of mutual aid, but they draw very different conclusions. For Walzer, this principle gives rise to the obligation to admit some refugees but allows latitude in terms of choosing which refugees and how many to admit. For Wellman, duties to refugees based on the principle of mutual aid do not trump the right to freedom of association and thus do not give rise to any obligations to admit refugees, only to “export justice” to help them.

5 We need only think of any of the measures taken by EU, Australian, or American officials to prevent the thousands of “helpless and desperate people” from reaching their shores (discussed in Chapter One) to realize that these conditions simply do not hold in the contemporary world.

6 It is worth pointing out Joseph Carens’ criticism of this point. Cities in the US seem to have very distinct characters—Boston is very different from Miami, LA is very different from South Bend. Yet this has not required that cities close their borders and only permit residents like themselves (Carens 1992). It is not clear then that “communities of character” do require the right to exclude. Also see Scheffler (2007).

7 Though both Miller and Walzer think that military intervention is a way to discharge our duties to refugees, politically speaking it is highly implausible. Western states have been reluctant to intervene to stop even terrible abuses of state power. Indeed, Samantha Power has shown that we have very rarely intervened to stop even genocide when death tolls are in the hundreds of thousands and there are effective methods to do so (Bosnia is the one exception) (Power 2013). Given this tremendous reluctance to get involved militarily in genocides or other civil conflicts for any reason, it hardly seems like a plausible solution to think that states will intervene militarily on behalf of refugees.



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