Justified state partiality and the vulnerable subject in migration

Abstract

According to David Miller, there exists a special relationship between migrants at the border and members of a political community that the migrant hopes to join. It is the task of a political philosophy of migration to define a state’s obligations toward individuals who are vulnerable to the state’s actions without being members of the political community. I define the vulnerability in question as lacking capacity to be autonomous for lack of options to realize one’s plan of life. I then discuss Miller’s claim that what matters is sufficiency of generic options rather than access to all options. Miller wants to say that sufficiency can be achieved by assuring the protection of human rights. This claim neglects the source of the individual migrant’s vulnerability. I therefore argue that Miller neglects the specific relationship he has identified between potential host state and hopeful migrant, and advocate instead that the potential host state has to consider the vulnerability that is due to its own policies, such as migration regimes. This grounds a causal responsibility to protect the basic interest in leading autonomous lives for the migrant at the border.

Keywords:

• migration
• vulnerability
• autonomy
• duties of justice
• human rights
• David Miller

Acknowledgments

This article was written during my time as the John Stuart Mill Visiting Chair in the Philosophy department at Hamburg University. I would like to thank the department and in particular Thomas Schramme for the opportunity to organize the workshop on David Miller’s manuscript, at which a first draft of this article was presented. I also wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of Miller’s treatment of refugees, see David Owen’s discussion of chapter 5 in this symposium.

2. This was communicated in response to a question at the manuscript workshop that is the basis for this symposium.