Mich: Do search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean advance justice?

Ali Emre Benli (LUISS, Hoover Fellow)
Do search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean advance justice? The European Union border regime was recently reformed in response to increases in arrivals and risky sea crossings carried out by immigrants and refugees. In this article, I investigate to what extent such reform can be considered as advancing justice. Moral evaluation of policy is not an easy task. First, given the complexity of actual circumstances, it is hard to determine the scope of empirical information relevant for a case under investigation. Second, given extensive disagreement on moral issues, it is hard to advance a judgment without imposing one’s own moral view on others. In turn, I develop what I call a social judgment approach, inspired by the work of Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice . I argue that the extent of the problem and availability of remedies may allow reaching moral agreements on less unjust alternatives without the need to work out what ideal justice would involve. I show that although the set of moral values that ground a restrictive refugee regime and the set that grounds a right-oriented refugee regime will diverge, they may nevertheless both justify extensive rescue missions in the Mediterranean.