Rethinking Ethics: the Duty of Rescue

4 Rethinking Ethics: The Duty of Rescue The plight of ordinary Syrians fleeing violence demands our generos ity of spirit. It is not so hard to imagine ourselves in the same plight. Indeed, seventy years ago millions of Germans were themselves refu gees displaced by warfare. The Second World War had begun with Poland being occupied by Germany, but ended with it occupied by Russia. Britain was providing a haven for thousands of Poles. A decade or two before that, German Jews were desperately looking for safe haven: many went to Britain and the USA. A decade earlier, Armenians were fleeing Turkish pogroms. Another decade earlier and Russian Jews were fleeing Russian pogroms. Go back three cen turies or so and Huguenots were fleeing French pogroms. You get the picture. Generosity of spirit in response to the need for refuge is not some new demand upon mankind, or an implausible emotion that modernity has to invent from scratch. It is something hardwired into our humanity; revealed again and again when cruel fate has put people in need of it. Without instinctive generosity of spirit, the lives of many millions of our ancestors would have been nastier, more brutish and shorter than they were; and consequently we ourselves might never have been born. The key difference between us and our ancestors is not that an astonishing new burden is being placed upon us, but that we are much better able to bear it than they were. Our parents and grand parents grew up in a society that was too poor to educate and even to feed all of its children properly. Yet theirs nevertheless managed to accommodate waves of refugees from Russia, Poland and Germany. Generosity of spirit towards refugees is not new. Today, due to 24/7 media, the internet, and broadcast news, we know more about 97 REFUGE suffering elsewhere than any previous generation, and yet we are turning our backs to it. But generosity of spirit is not enough: our responses must be grounded in wisdom. The headless heart may lead to outcomes little better than the heartless head. So we need to be a little more specific about what generosity of spirit implies. What should it mean in the context of Syria, and, by extension, what should it mean more widely in the global context of refugees? Science makes progress through experiments. The natural sciences rely upon lab experiments; medicine and economics progress through randomized controlled trials and natural experiments. None of these approaches are of much use for the present question, but moral philosophy does have its own form of experiment: the thought exper iment. We can use thought experiments to make progress in teasing out what we should mean by generosity of spirit. In this chapter we are going to focus on a series of ethical ques tions. The most immediate of them concerns the initial response to the desperation of people fleeing from violence: what is our moral duty towards refugees? The next ethical question is generated by the desire of many poor people to migrate to Europe, revealed in their willingness to risk their lives in small boats. Do migrants, even if they are not refugees, have a global moral right to migrate to the country of their choice? The final ethical question arises from the arrival of around a million refugees in Germany. What are the moral obliga tions that follow from this influx, both for Germany and for the refugees? If you think that this ethical analysis is a waste of time we offer you a challenge. Write down how you would answer these three ques tions and for each sketch a brief justification. Then read this chapter and think about the arguments. Finally, return to your answers: do your justifications survive what you have learnt from the thought experiments? In a justly celebrated book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt shows that people tend to cling on to their moral judgements, wrig gling from one fatuous justification to another as each is seen to be wrong.1 In other words, people are morally lazy. Unfortunately, wisdom is sometimes demanding. RETHINKING ETHICS: THE DUTY OF RESCUE THE DUTY OF RESCUE TOWARDS REFUGEES In a famous moral thought experiment, students are asked to imag ine themselves alone by a pond into which a child has fallen by accident and is crying for help. As a bystander, you were not respon sible for that accident. You are a good swimmer, but is it legitimate for you to ignore that urgent cry because you do not want to damage your clothing? Generosity of spirit quite unambiguously requires that you jump in. Hard luck about your new clothes. Those Syrians forced to flee their homes by violence are ethically analogous to that drowning child.2 Like the bystander, we have an unambiguous duty of rescue towards them. This does not follow from some structure of legal rights: like that drowning child, fleeing Syrians are not demanding their rights and threatening to sue you. Nor, like the drowning child, are they blaming you for having caused the problem. A lingering vestige of colonialism is that Western com mentators are inclined to explain whatever happens anywhere as being due to Western actions, but Syria was a long-lasting autocracy. It was destabilized by contagion from the Arab Spring, itself an autonomous pro-democracy uprising that started in Tunisia and spread around the Arab world through social media. As the Syrian protest transmuted into sectarian conflict and then to full-scale civil war drawing in regional powers, the West chose not to intervene. Even when the Syrian government resorted to chemical weapons the West stayed out. Occasionally, refugee movements do involve direct Western complicity - Vietnam, Kosovo, and Iraq, for example - but that isn't the case here. We ground the ethical case for helping refugees in the duty of res cue because it is a moral norm that is widely accepted and it is all that is needed. Wide acceptance is fundamental to any practical prospect of global action. The time when the West could impose the moral values of its elite on everyone else are gone for ever, and in our view this is a cause for celebration. Some commentators in the West have attempted to ground the case for helping refugees in arguments which extend to particular aspects of post-Christian ethics. They urge us to 99 REFUGE be more morally demanding of ourselves: to be saintly. We are scepti cal of such arguments, but acknowledge them here for completeness. One line of argument is that, in a globalized world, all injustice is structurally interconnected. 3 Quite apart from whether this would generate a moral basis for assistance to refugees, it is factually wrong. As an Oxford professor, Matthew Gibney, highlights: 'even in our globalized world, some injustices are simply local',4 and that is largely the case with Syria. So it does not appear to be a very solid found ation for the duty to help Syrian refugees. Why, then, are you morally obliged to help them? The first principle of the heart: compassion Like the drowning child, fleeing Syrians appeal to our common humanity. The instinct they naturally evoke in us is neither the need to obey the law, nor guilt for failing to bomb the Syrian government. It is the raw compassion that is at the bedrock of the human condi tion. We might think of it as the first principle of the heart. It is not saintly to experience such a sense of compassion: it is sociopathic not to experience it. Our duty of rescue to refugees is quite easy to justify morally through a series of steps. We are all part of political communities. These are important because they allow us to live collectively, and to allocate rights and duties. But to function, they generally also have boundaries of membership; they are a bit like - though distinct from - clubs, neighbourhoods, and families. 5 We have 'special obliga tions' to those within our own political communities, our families, friends, and fellow citizens, but we also have lesser 'general obliga tions' to others. 6 Despite this, the boundaries of our moral community go beyond those of our political community, including towards refugees. This is because of our shared common humanity. We are all human beings and hence have some minimal set of shared obligation towards one another as fellow human beings. Again, some Western political theo rists are dissatisfied with reliance upon psychology, wanting to deduce duties more grandly from critiques of modernity. We live, they assert, in an interconnected and interdependent world in which our IOO REFUGE possible. We should provide a towel, some money, food, and shelter for the night, while making arrangements to get her back home. Transposed into refuge, this implies that our duty is to restore cir cumstances as near to normality as it is practically possible for us to do. Most likely, the person who is now a refugee previously had a home and a means of earning a living; and was part of a community. If we are able to do so, we should aim to restore these basic features of normal life. The principles of the head: comparative advantage and burden-sharing Having an obligation, though, does not mean we cannot find ways to intelligently meet such responsibilities. There are better and worse ways in which we can discharge our obligations to refugees. The existing ethics literature on refugees tends to only look at individual states' obligations to offer asylum to a refugee at its borders.

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