Description
The turn to everyday, vernacular understandings of ethics has brought intriguing possibilities, but is there a danger in associating such ‘ethics’ with practices seen as only normatively ‘good’, or ‘caring’? Everyday understandings of responsibility and obligation can just as easily be careless, inattentive and exclusionary. This paper will examine British immigration politics and the recent turn to justify a hostile environment and illegal international practices (e.g. the Rwanda policy) through an ethics of ‘fairness’ – to the British population and migrants who ‘play by the rules’. Here, everyday language is used to justify racist, white supremacist practices that claim a moral immunity toward ‘undeserving’ foreigners. Fairness has become a way of claiming British society is untouched by obligations to international ‘others’, immune from any responsibility for their welfare. To challenge this via ‘universal’ liberal and democratic principles (human rights, humanitarianism and egalitarianism) is insufficient, as fairness emerges from the same discourse. This paper argues that we need a deeper understanding of this account of fairness in order to challenge the very possibility of moral immunity within liberalism. And we can only do so by using that everyday ethics, turning ‘fairness’ against itself and revealing the impossibility of moral immunity.
