There is no lack of criticisms frequently levelled against the international pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma): excessive profits, dubious or even dishonest practices, exploiting the sick and selective use of research data. Neither is there a shortage of examples used to support such opinions. A recent book by Brody (Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession and the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2008) provides a précis of the main areas of criticism, adopting a twofold strategy: (1) An assumption that the special nature and human need (...) for pharmaceutical medicines requires that such products should not be treated like other commodities and (2) A multilevel descriptive approach that facilitates an ethical analysis of relationships and practices. At the same time, Brody is fully aware of the nature of the fundamental dilemma: the apparent addiction to (and denial of) the widespread availability of gifts and financial support for conferences etc., but recognises that ‘Remove the industry and its products, and a considerable portion of scientific medicine’s power to help the patient vanishes’ (Brody 2008, p. 5). The paper explores some of the relevant issues, and argues that despite the identified shortcomings and a need for rigorous and perhaps enhanced regulation, and realistic price control, the commercially competitive pharmaceutical industry remains the best option for developing safer and more effective medicinal treatments. At the same time, adoption of a broader ethical basis for the industry’s activities, such as a triple bottom line policy, would register an important move in the right direction and go some way toward answering critics. (shrink)

This paper defends several highly revisionary theses about human rights. Section 1 shows that the phrase 'human rights' refers to two distinct types of moral claims. Sections 2 and 3 argue that several longstanding problems in human rights theory and practice can be solved if, and only if, the concept of a human right is replaced by two more exact concepts: (A) International human rights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic and international social protection; and (B) Domestic (...) human rights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic social protection but only non-coercive international action. Section 3 then argues that because coercion is central to both types of human rights, and coercion is a matter of justice, the traditional view of human rights -- that they are normative entitlements prior to and independent of substantive theories of justice -- is incorrect. Human rights must instead be seen as emerging from substantive theories of domestic and international justice. Finally, Section 4 uses this reconceptualization to show that only a few very minimal claims about international human rights are presently warranted. Because international human rights are rights of international justice, but theorists of international justice disagree widely about the demands of international justice, much more research on international justice is needed -- and much greater agreement about international justice should be reached -- before anything more than a very minimal list of international human rights can be justified. (shrink)

Human rights theory and practice have long been stuck in a rut. Although disagreement is the norm in philosophy and social-political practice, the sheer depth and breadth of disagreement about human rights is truly unusual. Human rights theorists and practitioners disagree – wildly in many cases – over just about every issue: what human rights are, what they are for, how many of them there are, how they are justified, what human interests or capacities they are supposed to protect, what (...) they require of persons and institutions, etc. Disagreement about human rights is so profound, in fact, that several prominent theorists have remarked that the very concept of a “human right” appears nearly criterionless. In my 2012 article, “Reconceptualizing Human Rights”, I diagnosed the root cause of these problems. Theorists and practitioners have falsely supposed that the concept of “human right” picks out a single, unified class of moral entitlements. However, the concept actually refers to two fundamentally different types of moral entitlements: (A) international human rights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive international protections, and (B) domestic human rights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive domestic protections. Accordingly, I argue, an adequate “theory of human rights” must be a dual theory. The present paper provides the first such theory. First, I show that almost every justificatory ground given for “human rights” in the literature – such as the notion of a “minimally decent human life”, “urgent human interests”, and “human needs” – faces at least one of two fatal problems. Second, I show that after some revisions, James Griffin’s conception of “personhood” provides a compelling justificatory ground for international human rights. Third, I show that the account entails that there are very few international human rights – far fewer than existing human rights theories and practices suggest. Fourth, I show that there are reasons to find my very short list of international human rights compelling: “human rights justifications” for coercive international and foreign policy actions over the past several decades have consistently overstepped what can be morally justified, and my account reveals precisely how existing human rights theories and practices have failed to adequately grapple with these moral hazards. Finally, I outline an account of domestic human rights which fits well with many existing human rights beliefs and practices, vindicating those beliefs and practices, but only at a domestic level. (shrink)

Among the defining characteristics of moral cosmopolitanism are the convictions that personal relations, membership in social or political organizations like local communities or nation-states are insignificant for agents when determining their scope of moral concern. The moral scope is unlimited and the moral duties reach globally. Following up observations made by Onora O’Neill and others, it is argued that Singer’s model needs a complementary tool to allocate duties.That tool can be found by supplementing the agent centered perspective of the model (...) with a regard for the social and institutional circles encompassing right holders. Instead of focusing on the duty holder, I suggest that the cosmopolitan’s “ultimate unit of moral concern” – here, the claimholder is regarded central.Thus, Singer’s cosmological model is kept, but in a rights-based methodological approach for allocating duties. Methodologically, what needs to be investigated is whether the scope of legitimate moral claims expands from the agent for the same reasons that the circle of moral concern expands from Singer’s agent. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the intersections between news media and human rights in the context of the existing human rights framework. A survey of the fundamental provisions of international human rights law and of the evolving case law of human rights organs relating to media freedom and responsibilities reveals that existing gaps and underspecified obligations render problematic the normative guidance offered by the framework in addressing the pertinent human rights issues. However, this is part of the story. The problems associated (...) with normative guidance are compounded by media practitioners’ contending approaches on the role of the media as “promoters of human rights.” The interplay between these factors is then examined through the prism of the two communities’ converging commitment to “truth-seeking.” This commitment can provide entry points to a more constructive engagement between the news media and the human rights community. (shrink)

This article reassess Rorty’s contribution to human rights theory. It addresses two key questions: (1) Does Rorty sustain his claim that there are no morally relevant transcultural facts? (2) Does Rorty’s proposed sentimental education offer an adequate response to contemporary human rights challenges? Although both questions are answered in the negative, it is argued here that Rorty’s focus on suffering, sympathy, and security, offer valuable resources to human rights theorists. The article concludes by considering the idea of a dual approach (...) to human rights, combining Rorty’s emphasis on sentiment with an analysis of patterns of responsibility for the underfulfilment of human rights. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to contribute to mass migration from many different regions. Heyward and Ödalen (2016) propose a tailor-made migration option for victims of total territorial loss: a Free Movement Passport for the Territorially Dispossessed (PTD). The PTD presents a significant advancement over standard proposals for individual migration in response to total territorial loss. However, I argue that the compensatory obligations of states are more restrictive than the PTD scheme assumes (sec. 5), and that the contents of the (...) right to compensation of the territorially dispossessed are not as far-reaching as required by it (sec. 6). In response to these difficulties, I argue that its purpose is better served by means of collective migration and propose a Passport for Territorially Dispossessed Collectives, which is also well positioned to serve as a framework for compensating a range of other climate-change related losses (sec. 9). (shrink)

: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth-century Europe. According to this theory, each human (...) being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights-claims in a non-arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories. (shrink)

The claimability objection rejects the inclusion of a right to subsistence among human rights because the duties thought to correlate with this right are undirected, and thus it is not claimable. This objection is open to two replies: One denies that claimability is an existence condition on rights. The second suggests that the human right to subsistence actually is claimable. I argue that although neither reply succeeds on the conventional interpretation of the human right to subsistence, an alternative ‘practical’ interpretation (...) provides a viable approach to vindicating this right. (shrink)

The topic of standing to blame has recently received a lot of attention. Until now, however, it has focused mainly on the blamer's perspective, investigating what it means to say of blamers that they lose standing to blame and why it is that they lose this standing under specified conditions. The present paper focuses on the perspective of the blamees and tries to explain why they are allowed to disregard standingless, more specifically hypocritical, blame. According to the solution proposed by (...) the paper, while hypocritical blamers present themselves as caring about justice or about the moral or material good of the blamees—and they themselves half‐believe this presentation—their real motivation in blaming is less respectable. It is this problematic motivation that explains why blamees are permitted to disregard hypocritical blame. Ill‐motivated blame is often unreliable, and readiness to even consider it often involves a compromise on the self‐respect of the blamees. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper puts forward a normative framework to differentiate between the climate-related responsibilities of different countries in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement. It offers reasons for applying the chief moral principles of ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘capacity’ to climate finance instead of climate change mitigation targets. This will provide a normative basis to realize the goal of climate change mitigation while allowing for developing and newly industrialized countries to develop economically and offer an account of the distributive principles that can (...) regulate climate finance. This is a real-world interpretation of the 1992 UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ that takes into account the progress accomplished at the COP21 in Paris and offers a solution to the still unsolved problem of differentiated responsibilities. This paper offers an application of this proposal to the Green Climate Fund. (shrink)

The current Ebola virus epidemic in Western Africa appears to be spiraling out of control. The worst-case projections suggested that the unchecked spread could result in almost 1.4 million cases by the end of January 2015 with a case fatality rate of at least 50%. The United States and European nations have begun to respond in earnest with promises of supplies, isolation beds, and trained health care personnel in an effort to contain the epidemic and care for the sick. However, (...) there is neither a vaccine nor specific treatment for Ebola infection, and therapy is ideally centered on supportive care. I have previously argued that the provision of palliative care is obligatory during an overwhelming health catastrophe, notably pandemic influenza. Since affected Ebola patients have best outcomes with technologically advanced intensive care—resources in scarce supply in the area—I suggest that the only acceptable approach to large numbers of very sick, dying, and suffering Ebola patients who overwhelm the reso.. (shrink)

I argue that recognizing a human right to adequate food and enforcing it as a legal right is an important way to promote and ensure sustainable food security. I consider objections that have been raised against subsistence rights and socio-economic rights, including the argument that such rights are not feasible, that they are not justiciable, and that they are too amorphous—that it is not clear what is required to fulfill these rights and by whom. I defend the right to adequate (...) food against these objections by considering how this right has been interpreted and applied in international law and how it has been protected in other domestic legal systems. I analyze different dimensions of the right to adequate food and I apply these to recent issues concerning sustainable food security in the United States, such as food deserts. (shrink)

Some recent uses of artificial intelligence for facial recognition, evaluating resumes, and sorting photographs by subject matter have revealed troubling disparities in performance or impact based on the demographic traits of subject populations. These disparities raise pressing questions about how using artificial intelligence can work to promote justice or entrench injustice. Political theorists and philosophers have developed nuanced vocabularies and theoretical frameworks for understanding and adjudicating disputes about what justice requires and what constitutes injustice. The interdisciplinary community committed to understanding (...) and conscientiously using big data could benefit from this work. Thus, in the spirit of encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration, this piece examines contemporary scholarship in political theory and philosophy to illustrate some of the vocabularies and frameworks political theorists and philosophers have developed for thinking about justice and injustice. It then draws on these frameworks to illuminate how the use of artificial intelligence can implicate questions of justice, with a focus on institutional discrimination, structural injustice, and epistemic injustice. Ultimately, the piece argues that the use of artificial intelligence—far from representing a decision to take power out of human hands—represents a novel way of harnessing human power, making questions of justice central to its conscientious undertaking. (shrink)

This paper examines the links between acting upon a duty to assist, responsibility for these actions, and how such actions link with incremental moral duties that can amass as a consequence of such action. More specifically, this paper is concerned with practices of international aid and assistance, whereby public and privately funded donations enable the actions of parties outside of the territorial and jurisdictional boundaries of a community and state to directly influence the functioning of that community, and the incremental (...) moral duties to which such action can give rise. Using a Senian account of the basis of moral duty, it explains how agents are responsible for the outcomes of their acts of assistance, even when mediated through international institutional actors, and how such acts can give rise to accumulative duties and obligations that are not bound or constrained by territorial boundaries or pre-existing special obligations. (shrink)

In this article I consider Thomas Pogge’s thesis that affluent countries are violating the human rights of the global poor by contributing support to the current global institutional order. My claim is that affluent countries are not violating the human rights of the global poor in the ways suggested by Pogge. I start by defining a set of conditions that ought to obtain in order to say that a human rights violation has taken place. Then I consider two possible interpretations (...) of Pogge’s thesis and argue that none of them fulfills the conditions required to speak of a human rights violation. On my view, as long as domestic states have the capacity to fulfill the human rights of their own people, poverty constitutes a domestic human rights violation even if the international institutional order somehow contributes to creating this state of affairs. Finally, I examine what transnational duties human rights entail and claim that affluent countries must contribute to the creation of an international order providing domestic states accurate background conditions for the promotion of human rights at the domestic level. (shrink)

A shocking number of people worldwide currently suffer from malnutrition, disease, violence, and poverty. Their difficult lives evidence the intractability and pervasiveness of global need. In this paper I draw on recent developments in metaethical and normative theory to reframe one aspect of the conversation regarding whether moral agents are required to respond to the needs of distant strangers. In contrast with recent treatments of the issue of global poverty, as found in the work of Peter Singer (1972 and 2002), (...) who employs a broadly consequentialist framework focusing on suffering, and Thomas Pogge (2002), who inventively reframes the issue in terms of a negative duty not to harm, I explore this issue through an alternative approach: a social view of deontic moral reasons that features the idea of relational normativity. I address whether moral agents must respond to needy others by considering how the needs of distant strangers make implicit claims on those able to help them. Ultimately, I demonstrate why indifference in the face of global need is morally unacceptable, hence supporting the idea of an obligation that requires response to others’ basic needs. (shrink)

Joshua Greene has put forward the bold empirical hypothesis that deontology is a confabulation of moral emotions. Deontological philosophy does not steam from "true" moral reasoning, but from emotional reactions, backed up by post hoc rationalizations which play no role in generating the initial moral beliefs. In this paper, I will argue against the confabulation hypothesis. First, I will highlight several points in Greene’s discussion of confabulation, and identify two possible models. Then, I will argue that the evidence does not (...) illustrate the relevant model of deontological confabulation. In fact, I will make the case that deontology is unlikely to be a confabulation because alarm-like emotions, which allegedly drive deontological theorizing, are resistant to be subject to confabulation. I will end by clarifying what kind of claims can the confabulation data support. The upshot of the final section is that confabulation data cannot be used to undermine deontological theory in itself, and ironically, if one commits to the claim that a deontological justification is a confabulation in a particular case, then the data suggests that in general deontology has a prima facie validity. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan critics attack the scope-limitation of justice of egalitarian liberal theorists to states. They treat justice as the production of a given set of outcomes for people regardless of location or relationship. However, in doing so they either ignore the relevant agent towards whom principles of justice are addressed or see the question of agency as a practical, derivative question, of a secondary character. This paper argues that a principle of justice without a clearly justified agent is not a genuine (...) principle at all. This is what writers like Rawls mean by the "subject" of justice (analogous to the grammatical subject of a sentence, i.e.,the agent). We should reflect on agents and why they would or would not justifiably carry certain burdens for others and what kind of benefits or goods they are able to secure. The answers to those questions explain why the idea of cosmopolitan global justice is incomplete, either requiring a global basic structural agency or not applying because no relevant agent is present that can create cooperative arrangements between individual persons across the globe. Other moral principles will still apply globally, but they will be distinct from those that apply to basic-structural agencies. This account is not a practice dependence account, as it bases the distinctness of moral and political principles on purely moral and value-based considerations. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a non-ideal analysis of a series of theoretical problems affecting liberalism, which have bearing on liberal discourses in today’s concrete political practices with de-democratizing consequences, including the instrumentalization of liberalism by neoconservative actors. I use Benjamin Constant’s attitude towards slavery as case study to show that liberalism is culpably ignorant of many structural injustices, and that this is so because of its basic thesis that the main oppression is the one the state and the political (...) community exert of the individual. The centrality of this oppression makes liberalism unable to give oppressions exerted within the web of social relations a proper place in its own theory. (shrink)

This paper aims to highlight the role played by uncertainties in global justice theories. It will start by identifying four kinds of uncertainties that could potentially have an impact on the nature, content and very existence of global duties: first, uncertainties regarding the causes of global injustices; second, uncertainties regarding the consequences of global justice initiatives; third, uncertainties pertaining to the 'imperfect' character of certain global duties; and fourth, uncertainties regarding the conduct of others. It will discuss each of these (...) uncertainties in turn, with particular attention to their normative implications, their distinctively 'global' source, and the possibility of their being addressed. It will conclude with some reflections on how the normative issues raised by uncertainties related to spatial distance compare to those raised by uncertainties related to temporal distance. (shrink)

The paper discusses Seneca’s phrase ‘human rights’ (ius humanum) in On Benefits 3 and relates the passage to recent debates about human rights in Stoicism and ancient philosophy. I argue that the Latin phrase refers either to rights or to a law conferring rights. The difference between the passage and a common expectation for human rights lies in the kind of relation between right and duty. In Seneca’s passage the right does not in itself have a correlative duty on the (...) part of other people, and yet it does, if exercised through benefactions, create a duty in others. By contrast, the relation between right and duty is usually expected to be unconditional. (shrink)

In Carr’s ethics, there is a link between the rise of the socialised nation and the crisis of laissez faire due to its loss of legitimacy among the lesser privileged. How far is this link in Carr’s ethics relevant today? There are two aspects to this relevance – theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the article argues, Carr’s analysis is relevant to the statist-cosmopolitan debate on global justice. It highlights the political vacuum in which this debate operates in the absence of a (...) framework of rights and obligations under laissez faire. Consequently, statist and cosmopolitan arguments are implicit in their acceptance of the violence committed by the status quo and lack the legitimacy Carr deemed necessary for international justice in the age of the socialised nation. The article then turns to highlight the empirical relevance of this critique. Here, it argues that the resurgence of nationalism in world politics shows that the problem of legitimacy is especially pressing today. The article thus calls for the debate on global justice to engage more seriously with Carr’s analysis of the crisis of laissez faire – specifically the legitimacy problem it raises in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts of medical ethics and professionalism emphasize the importance of social justice as an ideal for physicians. This ideal is often specified as a commitment to attaining the universal availability of some level of health care, if not of other elements of a “decent minimum” standard of living. I observe that physicians, in general, have not accepted the importance of social justice for professional ethics, and I further argue that social justice does not belong among professional norms. Social justice (...) is a norm of civic rather than professional life; professional groups may demand that their members conform to the requirements of citizenship but ought not to require civic virtues such as social justice. Nor should any such requirements foreclose reasonable disagreement as to the content of civic norms, as requiring adherence to common specifications of social justice would do. Demands for any given form of social justice among physicians are unlikely to bear fruit as medical education is powerless to produce this virtue. (shrink)

The complexities of how justice comes to be realized, and by which agents, is a relatively neglected element in contemporary theories of justice. This has left several crucial questions about agency and justice undertheorized, such as why some particular agents are responsible for realizing justice, how their contribution towards realizing justice should be understood, and what role agents such as activists and community leaders play in realizing justice. We aim to contribute towards a better understanding of the landscape of these (...) kinds of questions. First, we argue that theorists should distinguish between (i) agents who are responsible for realizing justice, but not committed to it, (ii) agents who are not responsible for realizing justice, but who are committed to it, and (iii) agents who are both responsible for and committed to realizing justice. Second, we discuss how to incorporate agents of justice more robustly into theorizing about justice. (shrink)

The “right not to know” has generated significant discussion, especially regarding genetic information. In this paper, I argue that this purported right is better understood as a preference and that treating it as a substantive right has led to confusion. To support this claim, I present three critiques of the way the right not to know has been characterized. First, I demonstrate that the many conceptualizations of this right have hampered debate. Second, I show that the way autonomy is conceptualized (...) in this literature is also problematic. Third, I examine the notion of a right in more detail, to support my third critique: that the right to know and the right not to know genetic information are often erroneously treated as having equivalent status. On my understanding, the claim being made is better thought of as a preference, not a right, and a preference not to know certain information becomes only one of several considerations relevant to medical decision making. (shrink)

This thesis is the first step in a research project which aims to develop an accurate and robust theory of global justice. The thesis concerns the content of our duties of global justice, under strict compliance theory. It begins by discussing the basic framework of my theory of global justice, which consists in two aspects: duties of minimal wellbeing, which are universal, and duties of fairness and equality, which are associative and not universal. With that in place, it briefly discusses (...) the nature of duties of fairness and equality. I shall argue that they are associative, because they are derived from the form of cooperation at hand; and that there are three kinds of them in our contemporary world: states, local cooperation and trans-state cooperation. It is from their forms of cooperation that these duties are derived. After that, the thesis focuses exclusively on duties of minimal wellbeing. Against the usual account of these duties - the human-flourishing account - I argue for my human-life account. This account argues that the function of these duties is to secure a human life for individuals; and it begins with a Razian conception of wellbeing, which states that the wellbeing of an individual is fundamentally constituted by: (a) the satisfaction of his biological needs, and (b) his success in whole-heartedly pursuing socially defined and determined goals and activities which are in fact valuable. An account of what constitutes a human life is then derived from this conception of wellbeing – it is a life that consists in having a level of wellbeing that is higher than the satisfaction of biological needs, where this is constituted by the pursuit of goals and activities with a sense of what is worth doing; and this in turn consists in: (a) being able to forms ideas of what is worth doing, (b) being able to revise them in light of further reasons, and (c) being able to coordinate one's actions according to them. I then determine the specific objects of duties of minimal wellbeing (means for the satisfaction of biological needs, education, physical security, freedom of belief, association and expression, freedom of non-harmful conduct, and minimal resources), by determining what is involved in securing such a human life for individuals. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

One fundamental healthcare issue brought to the fore by the current COVID-19 pandemic concerns the scope and nature of the right to healthcare. Given our increasing need for the usually limited healthcare resources, to what extent can we demand provision of these resources as a matter of right? One philosophical way of handling this issue is to clarify the nature of this right. Using the challenges of COVID-19 in the Philippines as the context of analysis, we argue for the view (...) that regards the right to healthcare as fundamentally moral in kind, which should thereby guide its legal and contractual appropriations. In particular, we respond to objections against this view stemming from issues concerning the universality and satisfiability of the right’s correlative duty. We deal with such issues by invoking the relative degree of incumbency of moral rights and the capability-relativity of positive duties. We further contend that as these factors define the scope of the moral right to healthcare, they thus constrain what we can demand as a matter of right to meet our healthcare needs in this time of the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to describe several sources of the moral responsibility to remedy or alleviate global poverty—reasons why an agent might have such a responsibility. The second is to consider what sorts of agents bear the responsibilities associated with each source—in particular, whether they are collective agents like states, societies, or corporations, on the one hand, or individual human beings on the other. We often talk about our responsibilities to the poorest people in the world, (...) or what we owe them. So the question is who this we is. I shall argue that the answer depends on the source of the responsibility. Some responsibilities—one species of causal responsibilities—belong in the first instance to collectives, although they will also trickle down to at least some individuals within the collective. Other responsibilities—humanitarian responsibilities, and a different species of causal responsibilities—belong in the first instance to individuals, but can, I shall argue, “trickle up” to collectives of which individuals are members. (shrink)

Using the events in Sweden in the autumn of 2015 as a practical example, this paper examines the question of whether there are circumstances when it is morally permissible for rich, democratic states to close their borders to asylum-seekers. To lay a common ground, the author starts by looking at the right of asylum-seekers, who a refugee is, and what obligations a host country have towards them. Thus, after looking at general human rights, and how they apply to the right (...) to seek asylum, the author turns to the question of who a refugee is, and the difference between refugees according to the 1951 Geneva Convention, and people who are in need of subsidiary protection, before choosing to use UNHCR’s wider definition of a refugee. While acknowledging that refugees have specific rights that other persons in need of protection do not, all asylum-seekers are entitled to not be sent back to a place of danger. Though both groups are entitled to stay on in the country, the temporary status for those in need of subsidiary protection raises some questions about integration and their standing in society and therefore the question of membership rights is discussed before the author returns to the events in Sweden in 2015 and argues that there are circumstances when it is morally acceptable for a country to close its borders to refugees, but that there are limitations when this can be done and for how long. Finally, it is argued that a system that prevents countries from having to – or choosing to – close their borders to refugees is needed. The author discusses whether the grounds for such a system could be found in the work that UNHCR does, and if the DAC agreement can be used as a model for fair distribution. (shrink)