The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees

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.

Bradley Hillier-Smith is an Associate Lecturer in Moral, Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research specializes in migration ethics, the philosophy of human rights, and the ethics of forced displacement, and has been published in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, and Politics and the Journal of Social Philosophy. Bradley is also a charity-worker and a political campaigner.