Seeking Asylum, Not Looking for Being the Scapegoat
An Ethical Analysis of the Discourse About Humans Seeking Asylum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/de-ethica.2001-8819.26934Keywords:
Seeking Asylum, Fleeing, Migrating, Human rights, Human dignity, Human right to asylumAbstract
The ethical and political discourse about asylum-seeking is often dominated by two fundamental questions: Firstly, should all humans have a human right to asylum? Secondly, are the duties corresponding with this claim even fulfillable for a state? From an ethical perspective, attempts to answer these questions by searching for an ethical justification of a human right to asylum respectively of corresponding state responsibilities could rely on the model of ethical decision-making SAMBA. The Ethics-SAMBA, which aims to provide concrete guidance for ethical decision-making with ease and argumentative elegance in four steps, is applied and results in an ethical justification based on the principle of vulnerability for the human right to asylum. Beyond that, it shows why the duties corresponding with the human right to asylum for a state need to be fulfilled – even if they are demanding and challenging. Finally, it presents some ethical arguments why the distinction between humans fleeing, seeking asylum, and humans migrating as well as borders per se are arbitrary and feudal, and this ethical analysis results in concrete proposals for concrete appropriate action.
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