Treatment of refugees
I expect we all agree the Australian treatment of asylum seekers is terrible, and the motivation of the Coalition's policy is to appeal to people's xenophobia, but is there a way we could seek to discourage desperate people from putting themselves in the hands of unscrupulous people-smugglers without being as inhumane as we have been and continue to be? What should countries like Germany do, where the flow of refugees is so much greater and, unlike in Australia, really could make material changes to the make-up of their culture? What constraints on refugee flow and immigration acceptance are acceptable?
One aspect of the refugee discussion is that the justifications currently being offered are utilitarian. The suggestion is that, by deliberately and openly causing suffering to asylum seekers, we discourage others from trying to seek asylum here and thereby exposing themselves to the depredations of people smugglers and pirates, and drownings at sea. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the deliberate infliction of suffering does act as a deterrent, and assuming for the sake of argument that it does, we can consider whether such an 'end justifies the means' approach of pure utilitarianism meets with our respective approvals.
Is it ever acceptable to seriously harm an innocent person in order to prevent harm to others? A deontological approach to morality, as advocated by Immanuel Kant, would say no. But deontological approaches are not widely popular these days.
Articles:
Article about Sweden cutting back its huge refugee intake to the EU minimum.
Article about the difficulties Germany is facing
Wikipedia article on European refugee crisis
Podcasts:
ABC: Human rights discussion about refugees and other issues, involving Gillian Triggs and others
BBC Moral Maze - Moral imagination and migration
BBC Moral Maze: What is our moral duty to Mediterranean migrants?
Q1. Is it ever acceptable to seriously harm an innocent person in order to prevent harm to others? A deontological approach to morality, as advocated by Immanuel Kant, would say no. But deontological approaches are not widely popular these days.
The saying 'the end justifies the means' is sometimes used as an exemplar of thoughtless consequentialism, of which the government's treatment of refugees might be an example. It has been wrongly attributed to Karl Marx and Niccolo Machiavelli (claiming that they advocated it) and Saint Jerome (4th century CE - the claim is that he criticised it), but its earliest use seems to date back at least to the ancient Roman poet Ovid (1st century CE).
Can the end ever justify the means?
Q2. Is the means (of causing suffering to asylum seekers) necessary in order to achieve the end of stopping the people-trafficking trade? Are there other alternatives? If so, what?
Q3. Does Australia need such tight border control against boats anyway? Even at their highest, the flows of refugees were only a tiny proportion of the Australian population. What do you think would happen if the rule was that you could become a citizen if you reached here on a boat? What additional conditions do you think should be attached to that?
Q4. What policy would you advocate Labor should take? It seems that most pmembers and supporters of the ALP disapprove of the way asylum seekers are treated, but the party has adopted a policy of agreeing with the government's measures because otherwise they will be unelectable, given the Coalition's ability and willingness to drum up fear and loathing on this issue. Is it immoral to not oppose a policy that you regard as immoral but you know you could never successfully overturn, if opposing it would prevent you from being able to overturn other policies that you consider immoral?
Q5. What do you think Germany should do? European countries don't have the geographic barriers to enormous refugee flows that we have. What about Sweden?
Q6. What do you think the US should do about the group of people travelling through Mexico towards the US border?
Article about Mexican 'caravan'
Q7. What do you think of countries basing refugee intake partly on the religion or origin of the refugees, in order to favour refugees with value systems that they consider to be more compatible with the country's culture? Does a country have a right to protect its existing culture and to what extent does that weigh against the need of refugees for asylum.
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Backup Topic (in case we solve the refugee question before 10pm) - Identity Politics
There's a fair bit of analysis suggesting that a major contributor to phenomena like the electoral success of Trump and Brexit was an excessive preoccupation of the progressive camp with Identity Politics, to the neglect of class. Hence there was a backlash from the very large groups of people in the low socio-economic strata that didn't fit into a group about which Identity Politics cares. Is it necessary to pursue identity politics as a separate aim, or can it be subsumed into the Enlightenment ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity? If it does need to be maintained as a separate aim, has it been getting too much air time, at the expense of issues that relate to far greater suffering (global warming, growing inequality), and does the attention paid to it need to be scaled back to give those other causes a chance? Are some types of identity politics, involving seriously oppressed minority groups like African-Americans, more worth maintaining than others that involve groups that are neither minorities, nor seriously oppressed on average (white women)?