{"title":"Human rights and liberal values: can religion-targeted immigration bans be justified?","authors":"Tyler Paytas","doi":"10.1080/16544951.2021.1926085","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Justice for People on the Move (2020), Gillian Brock argues that immigration bans targeting religions run afoul of international human rights agreements and practices concerning equal protection under the law, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion. Religion-targeted bans are also said to violate ethical requirements for legitimacy by not treating immigration applicants fairly and signalling the acceptability of hatred and intolerance. Brock centres her discussion around the example of the Trump administration’s 2017 Muslim ban, for which she notes additional problems such as the ban’s being motivated by dubious empirical assumptions about the risk of terrorism. I raise two challenges for Brock’s argument. I begin by asking whether banning the immigration of individuals from certain Muslim majority countries could be justified on the grounds that a large portion of the population in those countries appear to reject core liberal values such as the equal rights of women and homosexuals. This leads to my primary challenge, which concerns the practice of treating religion as a morally protected category such that discrimination based on religion is inherently impermissible. I argue that religions should be viewed as more akin to political ideologies than to morally arbitrary categories like race and sex, and that if a given religion is genuinely harmful to liberal values, an immigration ban could in principle be compatible with respect for human rights.","PeriodicalId":55964,"journal":{"name":"Ethics & Global Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ethics & Global Politics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2021.1926085","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT In Justice for People on the Move (2020), Gillian Brock argues that immigration bans targeting religions run afoul of international human rights agreements and practices concerning equal protection under the law, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion. Religion-targeted bans are also said to violate ethical requirements for legitimacy by not treating immigration applicants fairly and signalling the acceptability of hatred and intolerance. Brock centres her discussion around the example of the Trump administration’s 2017 Muslim ban, for which she notes additional problems such as the ban’s being motivated by dubious empirical assumptions about the risk of terrorism. I raise two challenges for Brock’s argument. I begin by asking whether banning the immigration of individuals from certain Muslim majority countries could be justified on the grounds that a large portion of the population in those countries appear to reject core liberal values such as the equal rights of women and homosexuals. This leads to my primary challenge, which concerns the practice of treating religion as a morally protected category such that discrimination based on religion is inherently impermissible. I argue that religions should be viewed as more akin to political ideologies than to morally arbitrary categories like race and sex, and that if a given religion is genuinely harmful to liberal values, an immigration ban could in principle be compatible with respect for human rights.
在《为流动中的人们伸张正义》(Justice for People on the Move, 2020)一书中,吉莉安·布洛克认为,针对宗教的移民禁令违反了国际人权协议和有关法律平等保护、良心自由和宗教自由的实践。以宗教为目标的禁令也被认为违反了合法性的道德要求,因为它没有公平地对待移民申请人,并表明仇恨和不容忍是可以接受的。布洛克以特朗普政府2017年的穆斯林禁令为例进行了讨论,她指出了其他问题,比如禁令的动机是关于恐怖主义风险的可疑经验假设。我对布洛克的观点提出了两个挑战。我首先要问,禁止来自某些穆斯林占多数的国家的个人移民是否合理,因为这些国家的很大一部分人口似乎拒绝核心的自由主义价值观,如妇女和同性恋者的平等权利。这就引出了我的主要挑战,即把宗教视为一种受道德保护的类别,从而使基于宗教的歧视本质上是不允许的。我认为,宗教应该被视为更接近于政治意识形态,而不是种族和性别等道德上武断的类别,如果某种宗教确实对自由价值观有害,那么禁止移民在原则上可以与尊重人权相一致。