Abstract
What are emergencies and why do they matter? In this chapter, I seek to outline the morally significant features of emergencies, and demonstrate how these features generate corresponding first- and second-order challenges and responsibilities for those in a position to do something about them. In the first section, I contend that emergencies are situations in which there is a risk of serious harm and a need to react urgently if that harm is to be averted or minimized. These conceptual features matter morally, since it is precisely to them that those who invoke emergencies to justify otherwise impermissible actions tend to appeal. The basic first-order challenge facing emergency responders is two-fold. It is, first, to identify how these features shape circumstances of action in ways that affect (or do not affect) which reasons for action and which corresponding courses of conduct are justifiably available to them. In situations when emergency responders are compelled to make authoritative determinations due to significant contestability and indeterminacies in the contours or materialization of the said features, their challenge is then also to make these determinations legitimately. In the second section, I argue that second-order challenges having to do with the foreseeability of emergencies, the value of exposure to them, and their preventability further compound the predicament of emergency responders. I conclude by saying a few words about one last morally salient feature shared by many, though not all, emergencies considered in the chapter—namely, their public dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights, as amended) s 15(1).
- 3.
Although Schmitt contends that his methodological ambitions are purely descriptive, many passages of his relevant work—such as his assertion that states have a right of self-preservation (Schmitt 2005, 12)—sit awkwardly with this contention.
- 4.
On this broad understanding of morality, see e.g. Raz (2004, 2–3).
- 5.
I defend this claim in Tanguay-Renaud (2012, 30–36). It is true that certain doomsday scenarios threatening the annihilation of human civilization and the subversion of the very foundations of morality may challenge its applicability. The point is that these supreme moral emergencies are the rarest of the rare, the unlikely exception to the exception, and that it is clearly inadvisable to take them as paradigms for the understanding of the relationship between emergencies, morality, and appropriate responses. On this point, see further Tanguay-Renaud (2009, 47–50).
- 6.
On categorical needs—elaborated in terms of the necessity to avoid serious harm and understood in contrast to mere instrumental needs—and the entrenched and non-substitutable character of many such needs, see Wiggins (1987, 1–57). Wiggins’s account of needs remains one of the most insightful to date, despite being lacking in nuance in some notable respects. For example, while he sometimes seems to assume that needs to avoid serious harm must, as a conceptual requirement, be morally compelling, we can easily think of cases where this is not the case. A moral monster like Hitler, afflicted by a fatal though easily curable disease, may well need treatment, while saving him is not a morally compelling goal. Something similar may also be said of the need to rescue the individual in poor health who, after careful and measured deliberation, has decided to end his life.
- 7.
For a remarkably succinct and cogent survey of the theoretical literature on the question of legitimate practical authority, see generally Green (2010).
- 8.
On this point, see Gardner (2010, 83–89).
- 9.
This point is eloquently articulated in Scarry (2011).
- 10.
Note that Gert recognizes that emergencies that are unlikely to be foreseen are only a “kind of emergency situations” and, thus, that emergencies can very well be foreseeable.
- 11.
In fact, as Victor Tadros (2011, 217–240) points out, evidence-relative risks, as opposed to genuine fact-relative or merely belief-relative risks, may sometimes play an even more morally significant role than I allow here.
- 12.
Cf. Rubenstein (2007) on chronic challenges linked to underdevelopment and lack of access to basic resources in some parts of the world. Another oft-cited example is the so-called ever present threat of terrorism. Given the pervasive nature of the phenomenon (however defined), it is often argued that the fight against it is urgent, although likely to be very long and unlikely to be won like a traditional war. Some even argue that it cannot terminate definitively.
- 13.
More recent engagements with just war theory, such as McMahan (2009), go some way towards remedying this methodological defect by focusing on the responsibility of various individual players in wars. Yet, the background unit of evaluation tends to remain whether one is fighting in a just or unjust war, as opposed to more discrete campaigns or missions.
- 14.
A similar type of criticism could be directed at states such as Brunei Darussalam, Swaziland, Israel, Egypt and Syria that claimed for many decades—and in many cases still claim—to be facing perpetual emergencies justifying resort to harsh ‘‘emergency powers’’ to control their populations. See e.g. Reza (2007). The further point to be made, of course, is that unjust regimes treating insurgent movements as emergency threats to their subsistence generally fail to acknowledge that they themselves—qua unjust regimes—can generate prolonged emergencies that may, or should, be resisted (given their more harmful character overall). No doubt, the ‘‘Arab Spring’’ uprisings of 2011 against oppressive dictatorships ruling through ‘‘emergency measures’’ are a sobering reminder of this possibility.
- 15.
Such cases are distinguishable from emergencies characterised by temporally distant, though highly probable harm, in which we know that if we do not act now, harm will likely result at a later point. Consider for example the case of early Canadian settlers who needed to store food in the summer to be able to survive the winter. In so-called meta-emergency cases, it is uncertainty as to the very existence of serious risks that is the operative variable. Note, however, the reservations expressed in the next paragraph.
- 16.
As noted by Suzanne Uniacke (1994, 83–84), “in the case of a hijacker holding hostages who kills in self-defence in a shoot-out with police, it very clearly makes a difference to the normative background that the hijacker has foreseeably and wrongfully created the circumstances in which he is endangered.”
- 17.
This intuition applies to a much broader array of daily situations, such as threats of terrorism for air travelers or risks of rape for women who interact with men. Should airplane users stop flying, and women seek to seclude themselves from men?
- 18.
Sorell “Morality and Emergency” (n 28) 23.
- 19.
On task-efficacy as grounding a duty to govern (and, perhaps, a duty of assistance more generally), see Green (2007).
- 20.
I resort to the admittedly vague and general concept of “realistically unavoidable harm” to prevent any distracting digression into metaphysical debates about ‘‘can’’ and ‘‘could.’’
- 21.
Of course, ‘‘what we want’’ should be read to refer to what we rationally want, as opposed to raw desire.
- 22.
See e.g. Emergencies Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. 22 (4th Supp.) (Canada), online: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/E-4.5.pdf.
- 23.
See e.g. Simester (2008, 299–304).
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks are owed to Kimberley Brownlee, David Enoch, John Gardner, and Alice MacLachlan for comments and discussions.
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Tanguay-Renaud, F. (2013). Basic Challenges for Governance in Emergencies. In: MacLachlan, A., Speight, A. (eds) Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5201-6_5
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