Bradley Hillier-Smith

Rights entail corresponding negative duties not to violate those rights. On this, all rights theorists agree. Yet, in our non‐ideal world, these negative duties and thereby persons’ rights are pervasively violated. What duties are there to right‐holders whose rights are under threat and are violated? There is substantial disagreement among rights theorists here on whether rights also entail positive duties to protect and assist the right‐holder if and when their rights are threatened and violated. While the Interest Justification of Rights supports such positive duties, defenders of the Inviolable Moral Status Justification of Rights reject them. On this latter view, all persons have an inviolable moral status that gives rise to particularly robust rights and stringent negative duties, but not additional positive duties, which are not necessary to reflect inviolability. This article challenges that view by demonstrating that positive duties to protect and assist right‐holders against rights violations are in fact grounded by that very same justification invoked to ground robust rights and stringent negative duties: the inviolable moral status of persons.

This paper argues that recent debates on egalitarian objections to immigration restrictions overlook a crucial, powerful normative principle that underpins objections to inequalities: any inequalities between morally equal persons – whether in goods, resources, welfare but also in powers, statuses, rights, and freedoms – that arise from morally arbitrary factors are pro tanto unjust. This principle of moral arbitrariness is fundamental to both luck and relational egalitarianism yet is often missing from debates that apply such theories to migration ethics. The result of this omission is that certain arguments that purportedly reject luck egalitarian cases for open borders in fact fail since they fail to recognise the normative force of the principle of moral arbitrariness; yet, simultaneously, relational egalitarian cases for open borders are not fully successful since they fail to recognise that the principle of moral arbitrariness is required to distinguish immigration restrictions as unjust where other (relational) inequalities may not be. Hence, the overall argument of this paper is that the recognition of the principle of moral arbitrariness is essential for the success of both the luck and relational egalitarian cases, and thus a proper recognition of the full normative force and implications of this principle entails the egalitarian case for open borders indeed succeeds.

It is well established that those facing homelessness suffer severe harms and deprivations. Homeless persons are among the worst-off people in any given society. And yet homelessness is a relatively undertheorized issue in ethics and social and political philosophy, and it remains an enduring feature of many affluent, liberal democratic societies. This paper aims to provide an account of the underacknowledged moral harms of homelessness that can ground and motivate adequate durable solutions and public policy reform to alleviate homelessness. The paper argues that the few existing philosophical accounts of the moral harms of homelessness—the freedom-based, privacy-based and care-based accounts—reveal important insights but suffer limitations. The paper then advances a novel status-based account that foregrounds the social and moral status poverty of homeless persons. This account reveals an underacknowledged but fundamental moral harm of homelessness, addresses the limitations of existing accounts, and grounds adequate durable solutions. This more complete account can then help challenge the unsettling tacit acceptance of homelessness in contemporary societies and provide a normative framework for urgent reform.

Rindermann et al.’s article concludes that certain refugees may have a lower IQ and as a result may not provide as significant an economic contribution to host states compared to the average citizen, and so may be an economic cost. This commentary first casts doubt on this conclusion. It then, and most importantly, demonstrates that even if this conclusion were true, it would be irrelevant insofar as it would have no moral or legal significance in mitigating or defeating obligations towards refugees. The commentary shows that any normative view that IQ and economic contributions can mitigate or defeat obligations to provide protection has unacceptable implications. The commentary then demonstrates that legal and moral obligations to refugees are in no part contingent on IQ and economic contributions and to suppose otherwise would simply represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature, grounds, and weight of obligations towards refugees. Hence, supposed IQ or economic contributions are entirely irrelevant to, and cannot undermine the strength of, refugees’ claims to protection nor states’ obligations to provide it.

This book appears at a time of intense debate on how states should respond to refugees: some philosophers argue states are not necessarily obligated to admit a single refugee, others argue states should continually admit refugees until the point of societal collapse. Some politicians argue for increasing refugee resettlement, others seek to prevent refugees from arriving at the border. Some countries provide expansive welcome schemes and have taken in over a million refugees, others have erected concrete walls and barbed wire fences. The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees provides an account of what an ethical response would be by developing an understanding of the moral duties that states have towards refugees. The first half of the book analyses state practices used in response to refugees, to understand the negative duties of states not to harm or violate the rights of innocent refugees. The second half analyses morally significant features of contemporary refugee displacement, to understand the positive duties of states to alleviate the distinctive harms and injustices that refugees face. The two halves together thereby outline the negative and positive duties of states towards refugees which together constitute the elements of an ethical response. The book then demonstrates this ethical response is not only urgently required but is also within reach.

Most theorists working on moral obligations to refugees conceive of western states as innocent bystanders with duties to aid refugees if they can do so at little cost to themselves. This paper challenges this dominant theoretical framing of global displacement by highlighting for the first time certain practices of western states in response to refugee flows such as border violence, detention, encampment and containment which may make us question whether states who engage in such practices are indeed innocent. This paper provides the first normative analysis of these practices by seeking to classify them as either doing or allowing harm and invoking the fundamental moral imperative central to core common moral commitments—not to harm innocent people—to suggest that certain western states are not merely failing to aid refugees and allowing harm to come to them, but are instead responding to their calls for aid by harming them.

Certain states in the Global North have responded to refugees seeking safety on their territories through harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment that serve to prevent and deter refugee arrivals. These practices are ostensibly justified through an appeal to a right to control borders. This paper therefore assesses whether these harmful practices can indeed be morally justified by a state’s right to control borders. It analyses whether Christopher Heath Wellman’s account of a state’s right to freedom of association, which represents the most restrictive account of a state’s right to control borders available in the literature, can extend to justify current harmful practices against refugees. If not, then no available justification will be able to do so, and thus contemporary harmful practices used against refugees cannot be justified by a state’s right to control borders.