It is commonly believed that people become selfish and turn to looting, price gouging, and other immoral behaviour in emergencies. This has been the basis for an argument justifying extraordinary measures in emergencies. It states that if emergencies are not curtailed, breakdown of moral norms threaten (‘the moral black hole’). Using the example of natural disasters, we argue that the validity of this argument in non-antagonistic situations, i.e. situations other than war and armed conflict, is highly questionable. Available evidence suggests (...) that people in such emergencies typically do not display panic reactions or exaggerated selfishness, and that phenomena such as looting and price gouging are rare. Furthermore, a version of the moral-black-hole argument based on the mere possibility of a moral black hole occurring runs into problems similar to those of Pascal’s Wager. We conclude that we should be wary against applying the moral-black-hole argument to non-antagonistic cases. (shrink)

There is a recent interest in the ethics of high-skilled worker emigration through which the limitations of the right to exit are discussed. Insightful arguments have been made in favour of the emigration restrictions on skilled workers in order to tackle the deprivations in developing countries. However, there is still a need for clarification on how we can understand, discuss and implement limitations of a right from a normative perspective. Significantly, how we understand the limitation of a right might determine (...) how we approach such limitations – both in terms of the process of assessing the limitations and in terms of their implications. In this paper, I identify two distinct ways to understand limitations of the right to exit with respect to losses associated with health worker emigration, while also pointing to their implications for restrictive policies: as a matter of scope, and as a matter of weight or emergency, which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders. While the emergency restrictions seem to be a point of convergence in the literature, what defines an emergency and the nature of the compensation still warrant exploration. To that end, I also discuss from a normative perspective what might constitute a public emergency that would give states a prima facie prerogative to regulate temporary limitations on the exercise of the right to exit. In addition, I briefly introduce the implications of emergency restrictions, with a particular focus on compensatory schemes for individual right holders. (shrink)

Many believe that in?supreme emergencies? collectives are granted what I elsewhere call?special permissions?, permissions to carry out self-defensive acts which would otherwise be morally forbidden. However, there appears to be a continuum between non-emergency, emergency and supreme-emergency situations, which gives rise to the following problem: If special permissions are granted in supreme emergencies, they should apply, mutatis mutandis, to less extreme cases too. If, to save itself from wholesale massacre, a collective is allowed to kill thousands of noncombatants on the (...) side of the aggressor, then to save itself from a less murderous campaign, a collective should be allowed to kill several hundreds of noncombatants, and so on. But this conclusion seems to undermine the most fundamental ideas of just war theory. The purpose of the paper is to discuss possible solutions to this problem. I contend that a contractarian view of the war convention offers the most attractive solution, though, at the end of the day, I am not sure that it will work. (shrink)