Re-Centering Ethics for Refugees: Attention, Not Action

Editors' note: This essay is part of the 2026 Global Ethics Day online exclusive roundtable from Ethics & International Affairs. View the whole collection here.

Re-Centering Ethics for Refugees: Attention, Not Action

If ever there was a domain in which ethical norms have been degraded in today’s geopolitical landscape, it is the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and vulnerable migrants. A refugee, by definition, is someone fleeing persecution, seeking protection in a country not their own. When we think of refugees from the past—Jews fleeing the Nazis, dissidents fleeing communist oppression—it is hard to find anyone who believes, in hindsight, that we should not have helped. But today the tides have turned. Writing in 2026, we are living in a moment where U.S. policies toward refugees are not merely insufficiently informed by ethical consideration. They are, by almost every measure, unethical and nothing short of cruel. The U.S. asylum system is virtually closed down.¹ People already in the United States who are waiting for their asylum claims to be processed are being arrested and detained.² Worse still, some are being deported to countries where we know it is likely they will be detained indefinitely, tortured, or killed.³ Morality has been turned on its head⁴: cruelty masquerades as a virtue and empathy a vice.⁵

Given this, what would it mean to “re-center ethics” for refugee policies and practices today? Refugee ethics has long been theorized almost entirely as a matter of institutional justice, as a question of whether the policies and actions of governments are sufficiently informed by the right ethical principles. Instead, I want to suggest that we consider what refugee ethics asks of individuals, not just states.

Why Individuals Matter

Why should re-centering ethics start with individuals, rather than with policy? Fundamentally, the kind of cruelty occurring today requires a public that tolerates it. While some celebrate turning refugees away and closing asylum, far more are simply indifferent or do not understand what is actually being done. This erasure of ethical concern, though enacted by the government and its supporters, depends on a public that does not understand the serious moral wrong being done. This is why individual ethical consideration has to be central to any project of re-centering ethics: a government can feel free to abandon its obligations to refugees only as long as doing so does not matter to the citizens it answers to.

Beyond Action

When I give talks about refugee ethics, the question I almost always get is: what can I, as an individual, do? Should I donate money? Organize a food drive? Volunteer somewhere? These actions are worth doing. But I want to suggest that this focus on action can displace the harder, less satisfying work that ethics requires. To make sense of this claim, we need to turn to two philosophers from the twentieth century: Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt. For them, ethics is a matter of attention (Murdoch) and thinking (Arendt). Drawing on their views, I want to suggest that part of what incorporating refugee ethics means for individuals is paying attention to the issue and tolerating the dissatisfaction that comes with morally complicated problems. The point is not that this is going to fix anything for refugees. But it does something else. It creates the conditions in which indifference can be resisted, and action, when it is needed, becomes possible.

Attention

Iris Murdoch's approach to ethics breaks with a familiar assumption, namely that ethics is mainly about outward behavior and actions such as lying, being generous, or helping those in need. Re-centering ethics, in this more common framework, would mean focusing on individual acts or implementing better policies. For Murdoch, this view of ethics is incomplete. It neglects the background conditions on which ethical conduct depends: attention.⁶ “Attention,” on her view, does not mean focusing intently for the purpose of noticing or remembering. It is a moral practice of overcoming the self and the distortion of reality that comes about when we interpret the world through our fears, fantasies, and anxieties. Attention takes you out of the self. Once our self-centered distortions are cleared away, reality can come into view, at least for a time.⁷ Action flows out of this, as attention shapes not just what we notice but what we come to feel is called for. How we decide to respond to refugees is shaped by the quality of our attention, and how we see refugees and their struggles, long before we get to the point of decision. This is why attention itself is central to ethics, and cultivating attention, in Murdoch’s sense, is a condition for knowing how to answer the question: “What should I do for refugees?”

Thinking

Hannah Arendt spent much of her career trying to understand how evil becomes possible under totalitarianism. Her answer, in part, was that thinking is what stands between ordinary individuals and complicity in it.⁸ She observed that people who refused to participate in Nazi crimes were not those who had a better education or were more politically informed. What distinguished them was that they had practiced what Arendt calls “the internal dialogue of thinking.” They had built a habit of this internal dialogue in ordinary life, one strong enough that when evil became real, they were able to recognize it for what it was. Many of the people who complied were not stupid; they were thoughtless. They never stopped to examine what they were doing and fell back instead on ready-made judgments and clichés. Few of us will ever be tested so starkly. But the habit Arendt describes does not switch on only in emergencies; it comes from the sustained, unglamorous ethical work that individuals need to do well before the emergency arrives.

A Different Kind of Ethical Work

What Murdoch’s attention and Arendt’s thinking have in common is that neither is a concrete action that one can complete and then feel good about. These two types of engagement are distinct from other kinds of ethical contributions. Thinking and attention both require habitual engagement with something outside our immediate daily dramas. Both produce a deeper awareness of what is actually happening in the world, even when a “solution” is not obvious. But neither attention nor thinking is ever one and done, and both demand returning to the issue again and again. Thinking and attention themselves are a refusal of indifference and of the comfort of clichés (“there is nothing I can do,” “it’s not my problem”) and this refusal plays a large, if underappreciated, role in recentering refugee ethics.

Concretely, individuals could spend more time reading about the ethics of refugees or accounts of the experiences of refugees themselves; they might engage with many of the well-made, though hard to watch, movies that depict the hardships of migrants, many from the point of view of migrants themselves.⁹ But learning about refugees is not enough on its own. To count as attention in Murdoch's sense, it has to be done without imposing our own fears or fantasies onto what we are seeing. And for Arendt, serious reflection is needed, not to arrive at a fixed understanding, but to become someone capable of judging when a real moral choice is in front of you. On its face this might sound too easy to count as ethical action. However, to the contrary, it is incredibly demanding.

This background ethical work is essential to re-centering refugee ethics in another way. It lays the groundwork for political engagement. As I have argued elsewhere, the injustice in how we treat refugees is structural.¹⁰ This kind of injustice can be missed if we are not attending to the issue carefully enough. The problem is not just a handful of unfair policies or insufficient generosity, but a system that we have built whose ordinary, routine operation produces suffering as a matter of course. This kind of injustice will not be undone by any number of individual acts of goodwill—mine or anyone else’s. What makes change possible is people working together through collective action at moments of political opening. But those moments require people who are ready for them, people who have already done the work of focused attention and careful thinking about what is at stake and are able to recognize the importance of acting. Attention and thinking prepare people to recognize what is happening, consider it ethically, and understand the importance of working to change the injustice. This is the basis for structural change.

When the first Trump administration announced its travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries in 2017, it was met almost immediately with mass protests at airports around the country, and with lawyers who showed up ready to challenge the policy’s legality on the spot.¹¹ This is what readiness looks like in practice. No one had planned these responses in advance, but people who had already paid enough attention were able to recognize the moment when it arrived and were able to act without hesitation.¹² For various reasons, that kind of readiness has been more limited today during the second Trump administration and, as a result, some of the cruelest immigration policies have gone unchallenged, and perhaps even unnoticed, by the general public.¹³ This is what re-centering ethics is meant to prevent. Helping refugees is not something you do once. It requires a kind of ongoing inner work and sustained attention, especially in the long stretches when nothing seems to call for it, that makes protest possible when it is needed.

Living With Complexity

I will end with something that might sound surprising. Taking ethics seriously, for an individual, does not mean adopting a strong position and defending it. When trying to figure out what we owe refugees in a country where reasonable people genuinely disagree about it, taking ethics seriously will mean clearing away your own fears and fantasies well enough to actually see what someone who disagrees with you is looking at. This is an uncomfortable task.

The easier path is to deny the complexity and retreat to your corner: if you do not support open borders, you are racist; if you think people should get asylum, you do not care about national security. But most of this is a caricature. These views are often motivated by deeply held values and genuine concerns. People who worry about admitting large numbers of refugees may care about what rapid change means for their communities, or how it affects the cost of housing. Weighing these concerns against the claims of people fleeing persecution requires nuance and sensitivity, and pretending it does not is part of why this issue has become so polarized. That said, not everything on this issue is complicated. Deporting people to countries where we know they are likely to be tortured or killed is not a hard case requiring us to weigh competing values. It is just morally wrong. Attention and thinking would help us to recognize the difference between moral complexity and moral rot.

Cruelty does not become virtue on its own. It requires a public willing to look away, or one that, in Murdoch's terms, has stopped attending closely enough to notice the reversal has happened. The work of re-centering ethics that I am describing is slow, and it may not feel like doing something. But it is essential ethical work. At the end of the day, re-centering ethics means not just different policies but a public that can no longer mistake cruelty for virtue.

—Serena Parekh

Serena Parekh is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Northeastern University. She is the author of three books, including No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2020), which won the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Her expertise on refugee ethics and human rights has brought her commentary to outlets including the New York Times, BBC World Service, The Atlantic, and Al Jazeera. She is a former co-editor of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly and served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion.

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