On this session of the Political, Legal, and Moral Philosophy Research Group (POLEMO) we will discuss a paper by Georgiana Turculet (Copenhagen University):
The problem of Indeterminacy and Refugee Protection
Abstract: States minimize their duties of justice towards refugee protection on three arguments. First, states officials argue that it is not the duty of a given state to undertake x action, or “Why me?”. Second, that x is not what the content of the duty that a given state is willing to take (e.g. hosting or paying third parties to host is interchangeable). Third, that even if the state were the one responsible for a specific duty, and the content was accepted, protection is not a duty towards a specific refugee or group of refugees. These arguments, and in particular the first and the third, I will show, generate instances of indeterminacy, which has pernicious implications for refugees, to the extent to which employing these arguments hinders effective protection. While I attempt to conceptually capture this phenomenon, I show that these arguments are neither adequately addressed nor answered in the current normative literature, and suggest new ways forward.