The openness of decision-makers to be influenced by and invest in proposals for policy reform is not constant. Timing is key, as are the diversity and depth of interests, levels of knowledge, and nature of the policy challenge itself; these can all affect how governments absorb information that might fall beyond the usual cost-benefit assessments of day-to-day policymaking. This essay explores how and when the policy environment provides opportunities to introduce a more nuanced discussion of competing moral values in migration governance and, critically, the new policy directions to which they might give rise. In doing so, it will utilize a range of examples from national, EU, and global debates of the past decade, to highlight moments when a dilemmas approach has been—or could have been—useful to effect policy change. Stressing ethical dilemmas can influence migration policymakers when the conditions are right.

Today’s controversies about territorial access and rights of refugees and the cohesion of the nation-state can be traced back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Kant’s ideas about hospitality. Seyla Benhabib has argued that the resulting dilemma can be softened and bridged through “democratic iterations,” and that the EU deliberation offers a suitable perspective. However, the complex construction of the EU asylum framework has led to a paradox of highly regulated rights and closed borders, and to disappointment and opposition. The sudden opening of borders and free choice for the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression open a new perspective to address the dilemma, in line with EU principles of free choice and openness.

Theories of liberal justice depend upon ideas of how much we can expect ordinary people to be motivated by the moral interests of others; there are limits to the motivational power of such notions as altruism and sympathy. This means, however, that the theories of justice we have may have difficulty in understanding how to rightly respond to the moral claims that might emerge in the face of widespread migration in response to climate change. This essay argues that liberal states may face a dilemma in response to this migration—one in which a state must do what cannot be justified toward either the migratory or the sedentary. This claim, further, might represent a new site of intergenerational injustice, in which future generations are given political problems to which our best theories of political justice can provide little assistance.

Organizations often face moral dilemmas. For example, in 2004 the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needed to decide whether to help refugees in enclosed camps in Pakistan repatriate to Afghanistan. On the one hand, helping with repatriation might have made UNHCR complicit in forced returns, as refugees sought to repatriate just to avoid life without freedom in Pakistan. On the other hand, refusing to help with repatriation would leave refugees stranded in camps: perhaps repatriation was the best option if this was what refugees wanted. When organizations face this and other dilemmas, it is not clear how they should proceed. In other words, it is unclear which policy they should pursue when all feasible policies seem wrong. Some might think that, at least for hard dilemmas, every choice is just wrong, and so no choice is right. But that is not quite true. Even difficult dilemmas can be resolved using certain methods. One method is to ask those affected by potential policies what they think the most justifiable policy is. A second method is to choose what to do randomly. Randomly selecting a course of action can sometimes be the fairest way of determining what to do when every option seems wrong.

Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence—a means to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is illsuited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate—a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts—a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.

The essay examines the lessons from the international intervention in Afghanistan, highlighting the failures of externally imposed state building, including neglect of local governance structures and prioritizing donor interests over Afghan ownership. The international peace- and state-building intervention in Afghanistan, which spanned two decades, culminated in the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, leading to the Taliban’s swift resurgence. This event has sparked a critical examination of the strategies employed by NATO and allied nations during their engagement in Afghanistan. This essay aims to distill seven key lessons from this intervention, emphasizing the need for future peacebuilders to adapt their approaches to better align with local contexts and realities. The analysis highlights the failures of liberal peacebuilding, the importance of local ownership, the necessity of effective and legitimate institutions, and the detrimental impact of corruption. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of coherence among international actors and the need for a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics. By reflecting on these lessons, the essay seeks to provide actionable insights for future international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

The secrecy of intelligence institutions might give the impression that intelligence is an ethics-free zone, but this is not the case. In The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions, Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Andrew Alexandra, Patrick Walsh, and Roger Bradbury examine the ways that liberal democracies have come to rely on intelligence institutions for effective decision-making and look at the best ways to limit these institutions’ power and constrain the abuses they have the potential to cause. In contrast, the value of Amy Zegart’s and Miah Hammond-Errey’s research, in their respective books, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence and Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted, is the access each of them provides to the thoughts and opinions of the intelligence practitioners working in these secretive institutions. What emerges is a consensus that the fundamental moral purpose of intelligence institutions should be truth telling. In other words, intelligence should be a rigorous epistemic activity that seeks to improve decision-makers’ understanding of a rapidly changing world. Moreover, a key ethical challenge for intelligence practitioners in liberal democracies is how to do their jobs effectively in a way that does not undermine public trust. Measures recommended include better oversight and accountability mechanisms, adoption of a ‘risk of transparency’ principle, and greater understanding of and respect for privacy rights.

Many aspects of migration policy involve hard moral dilemmas. Whether the dilemmas are concerned with refugee accommodation and integration, temporary labor migration, or the prospects of rejected asylum seekers, policymakers must sometimes make tough choices between competing and equally compelling moral values. Through in-depth discussion of various concrete examples, contributions to this roundtable argue that recognition and systematic analysis of the “ethics of migration policy dilemmas” can both increase philosophical and social-scientific understanding of public debates and policymaking on migration and provide ethical guidance for migration policy. Before introducing the roundtable’s individual contributions, this essay argues for the distinct epistemic value of the Dilemmas perspective by contrasting it with an approach that emphasizes the “busting” of myths; that is, the empirical uncovering of influential falsehoods in public and policy debates, often in the hope of improving policymaking through stronger evidence. We argue that while such myth busting can be valuable, it is insufficient and sometimes unhelpful for understanding how migration policy comes about and can be improved. Policymaking is not just shaped by empirical facts and understandings but also by interests and goals, including moral ones, that give empirical considerations deeper meaning and action-guiding potential. Often, these moral goals are numerous, similarly or equally compelling, and in profound tension with one another. Where this is the case, we should not simply introduce more and more accurate factual descriptions; we must also analyze dilemmas.

My contribution to this Forum highlights the ways that Michael Willrich’s story of early-twentieth-century anarchism intersects with and complicates existing scholarly accounts of the development of the American “surveillance state.” My essay reflects on the way the subjects of Willrich’s history—immigrant radicals, those who sought to subdue and deport them, and those who defended them—shine a new light on ongoing struggles over the boundaries of modern social regulation.

The modal auxiliary form must plus perfect aspect (must have +V-en) has recently acquired the meaning of direct evidentiality in Multicultural London English, the new London dialect. Because the new meaning is a recent innovation we have a rare opportunity to witness its development at first hand, unlike earlier changes in the history of must. Our analysis supports the view that the classic definition of evidentiality in terms of information source is too narrow to explain the expression of evidentiality in spoken interaction, and that a broader definition in terms of epistemic authority is more appropriate. We argue that the direct evidential meaning is a coherent further step in the semantic changes undergone by must during its history. It represents a previously undocumented pathway in the grammaticalisation of evidentiality. It also supports the view that evidentiality is not a purely lexical phenomenon in English.

This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.

Surgical sterilisation practices significantly increased in contraceptive capacity as the twentieth century unfolded. Despite this prolific uptake, sterilisation is markedly absent from histories of birth control and family planning and instead has remained addressed within histories of eugenics and coercion. The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, to demonstrate a voluntary, contraceptive history of sterilisation that is distinct from, though connected to, involuntary and eugenic sterilisation; and secondly, to explain the integral role that individual doctors and their private practice played in the rise of contraceptive sterilisation in twentieth-century Australia. Through a combination of archival material and oral history interviews with twentieth-century practitioners of tubal ligation and vasectomy, this article reframes the history of surgical sterilisation, situating it firmly within the history of birth control.

Cross-gender behaviour gradually entered the spheres of aetiology and diagnosis during the eighteenth century with reference to scattered instances of male cross-dressing. But well into the nineteenth century, “gender identity” (a mid-twentieth-century term) remained a poorly theorised instance of medicalisation. Late eighteenth-century concepts of “dynamic hermaphroditism” accounted for gender-nonconforming behaviours and aspirations, but could not account for the observed heterogeneity in disparities between sexed body and mind. Increasingly substantive contributions to aetiology were seen during the late 1870s and 1880s, particularly in response to Carl Westphal’s convoluted, 1869 concept of “contrary sexual feeling” (conträre Sexualempfindung). Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notion of metamorphosis sexualis paranoica provided one of the most authoritative approaches to the question of gender identification in “sexual inversion”. The notion, which took the first seven German editions of his Psychopathis sexualis to achieve a definitive formulation, needs to be seen in light of Krafft-Ebing’s earlier conceptions of sexual delusion, which straddled the realms of the experienced sexual body and sense of self. Moreover, Krafft-Ebing was not the first to outline a theory of non-cisgender identity, as demonstrated by the mid-1880s work of Théodule-Armand Ribot and Rudolph Arndt, as well as various significantly earlier approaches to what had been considered the “monomania of sexual transformation”.