A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Duties

Democracy / Duties / Moral values

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Experiencing and responding to hate

This post has been published anonymously to protect the identity of its author, who is still receiving messages of hate.

Recently I did a radio interview in which I argued for equal access to certain social services, such as health care, for migrants and refugees. I did not focus on the instrumental value migrants have for countries – I did not focus on the economic and health benefits everyone has if people on the same territory are able to work, and are healthy and sane. I focused on the broader ethical arguments for equal access, even though I mentioned the instrumental arguments too. Perhaps I should have expected that not everyone would agree with my views. But nothing could possibly have prepared me for the hate mail that I received after the interview. In this post, I try to describe the experience and make a plea for greater solidarity in standing against such hate.

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Democracy / Duties / Health / Liberty

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Euthanasia and Slippery Slope Arguments

One argument made against the proposal to legalise assisted dying in the UK is that making this change might result in older citizens feeling pressured to choose death, increased pressure on people to think about and defend their existence, and theslippery-slope inevitable acceptance of voluntary and, then, involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. This kind of argument can be called a slippery slope argument. A
slippery slope argument claims that if we make a proposed policy change, other changes or outcomes will occur, and because these other outcomes are objectionable, we should not make the policy change. I am generally sceptical of slippery slope arguments and in this post I wish to register some issues with their use.

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Duties / Migration

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Migration & Feasibility: Real Constraints or Cheap Excuses?

border-fence-becoming-birds

In the current discussions about our duties (of justice) towards refugees, feasibility constraints are often invoked to justify the limits of what can be done: Austria has to close its borders and limit the number of daily asylum applications due to feasibility constraints, the feasibility limit of refugees admitted to the European Union as part of the current resettlement scheme with Turkey is set at 172.000 or mayors of various cities claim that it is not possible for them to shelter refugees.

Following these debates, I often gain the impression that infeasibility claims are invoked far too easily. Hardly ever they are based on feasibility studies and often they seem more of an excuse to shy away from our duties (of justice). At the same time, powerful arguments for the need to account for feasibility constraints when identifying our duties of justice in the non-ideal real world have been put forward in the literature on non-ideal theories of justice: what justice demands from us should not go beyond what we can possibly do. How is it possible to account for feasibility considerations in this later sense, without allowing them to become a cheap excuse in political debate to shy away from our duties of justice towards refugees?

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Animals / Climate / Duties

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Why good intentions need informed intentions

IMG_20150802_164103738

In discussions about climate change and climate justice, there has been quite some debate about individual duties – should we try to change our lifestyle to reduce emissions, or should we try to influence political processes that bring about institutional change? It always seemed to me that the correct answer is: do both, or whatever you are able to do. Given how drastic the consequences of climate change are likely to be, and given how climate-unfriendly our Western lifestyle typically is, this seemed the right answer. Wouter Peeters has made this case in previous posts, so there is no need to repeat the arguments here. But I’ll add a third point: in our attempts to do good, we also have a duty to be as well-informed as possible.

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Duties / International / Migration

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It’s raining men, hallelujah! On migration and sex ratios

In a recent article in Politico Magazine, professor in political sciences Valerie Hudson (Texas A&M University) addresses an often neglected consequence of the current migration crisis. As most of the one million migrants from the Middle East and North Africa that arrived in Europe in 2015 are young men, recent mass migration potentially disrupts the gender balance in European countries with liberal migration policies. Although The Economist notices that for big countries, like Germany, the effect of recent immigration on the already existing gender imbalance is negligible, changes in sex ratio might indeed be considerable in countries with less than 10 million citizens, like Sweden, Hungary, Austria and Norway.
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Duties / Migration / War

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“Refugees” and “economic migrants” – a morally problematic distinction

More than a million migrants and refugees have crossed European borders in the last year, posing yet another challenge to European unity. There is one thing that really strikes me in the public debate about how to deal with this huge influx: people tend to take it for granted that the legal distinction between “refugees” and “economic migrants” and the differential treatment that goes with it are morally justified. There is a broad consensus that, of course, we have to grant asylum to people fleeing from the horrors of the Syrian civil war, but that we are justified in refusing asylum to people escaping from poverty. But is there a morally relevant difference between taking refuge from poverty and escaping from war? I do not think that there is, and hence believe that the differential treatment of the two groups is unjust.

The legal point of reference for the distinction is the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which, as amended by the 1967 Protocol, defines a refugee as

“A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it”.

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Climate / Duties / International

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Do I make a difference? (4): The agency of individuals and households

Previous posts in this series:
(1) The exceedingly small but fully real effects of my greenhouse gas emissions
(2) A threshold phenomenon?
(3) Unilateral duties to reduce greenhouse gases or promotional duties?

My argument thus far can be summarized as follows: the greenhouse gases emitted by individuals have a small but fully real effect in that they increase the exposure of vulnerable people to the risk of serious suffering from climate change harms, now and in the future. These individual emissions are sufficient to do so and also necessarily have this effect. From this follows that individuals have a unilateral duty to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that they can reasonably avoid. Promotional duties are very much necessary as well, but cannot substitute this unilateral duty to reduce emissions.

© UCS 2012
© UCS 2012

In this post, I will give an indication of how individuals can reduce emissions that are clearly avoidable on the individual level. We cannot expect people to reduce emissions that are unavoidable on the individual level, since these are necessary to meet their basic rights, but I will argue that households and individuals emit much more greenhouse gases than is often believed, especially in the developed world. A significant share of these emissions can be avoided, including a share of those resulting from residential energy use, personal transportation and the consumption of meat and dairy products (1)

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Climate / Duties / International

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Do I make a difference? (3): Unilateral duties to reduce greenhouse gases or promotional duties?

Previous posts in this series:
(1) The exceedingly small but fully real effects of my greenhouse gases
(2) A threshold phenomenon?

In the previous posts in this series, I have argued that individual greenhouse gas emissions have an exceedingly small but fully real effect: they are sufficient to increase the risk that vulnerable people suffer from climate change harms and necessarily do so. What follows from this, normatively speaking? In this post, I will argue that it provides a strong reason for a unilateral individual duty to reduce one’s greenhouse gas emissions.

To be more precise about the responsibility and the duties of individuals, I will first differentiate between emissions that are avoidable on the individual level, and those that are not. Subsequently, I will defend the claim that individuals have a duty to reduce their avoidable emissions in order not to increase the risk that vulnerable people suffer from climate change harms. Moreover, I will refute the assertion that unilateral actions to reduce emissions are ineffective, while promotional actions supposedly are effective. (more…)

Distribution / Duties / Economics / International

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(One of) Effective Altruism’s blind spot(s), or: why moral theory needs institutional theory

Blick aus dem Bürofenster kleinThere has been much talk about effective altruism recently (see e.g. here or here) – the idea that you should try to do as much good as you can, using the most effective means. It reads a bit like an update of good old Jeremy Bentham and “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” by a McKinsey consultant. It is easy to ridicule, and ridicule is indeed a frequent reaction because humour eases the tension that one can feel when confronted with these ideas. For there seems to be more than a grain of truth in effective altruists’ claim that we could do so much more to help those who were less fortunate in the “natural lottery” of where and when they were born. One thing that speaks in their favor, after all, is that effective altruists ask serious questions about what it means to be a moral agent in today’s world. What I here want to pick out from the debate is their picture the social world and of human institutions, which I take to be flawed. It is an illustration of why moral philosophy should not neglect the world we live in and the institutions that structure it.

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Climate / Duties / International

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Do I make a difference? (2): A threshold phenomenon?

Previous post in this series:
(1) The exceedingly small but fully real effects of my greenhouse gas emissions

Many assume that individuals are not responsible for climate change and do not have any agency in tackling it. In this series of posts, I argue that this view is mistaken. The previous post concluded that individual emissions have an exceedingly small but fully real effect in that they increase the risk that vulnerable people suffer from climate change harms.

Extending this conclusion, in this post, I will address (and reject) the assumptions that individual emissions are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause climate change. (more…)