In his recent article my Jesuit colleague Frank Brennan asked whether there is any ethical discussion to be had about stopping the boats. He proposed seven points that would give greater ethical coherence to the Government's 'shock and awe response'.
I am in substantial agreement with Frank's argument, and recognise how much hard labour will need to be invested in the political process if his seven points are to be adopted. I would like to carry the conversation further from the ethical perspective.
My question that goes beyond the scope of Frank's paper: if his seven points were implemented, would Australia's asylum seeker policy be ethically coherent or acceptable? I shall argue, as I suspect that Frank also would, that this is not the case. The corollary of this position is that pressing for legal and practical changes to policy will not redeem the policy but will be a necessary and worthwhile exercise in harm minimisation.
The ethical premise from which I begin is that all human beings are precious and unique simply because they are human, and that this value must be respected. They cannot be treated as things or as statistics. In particular their treatment cannot be used as a means to a policy objective that does not look to their personal good.
The second premise of my argument, flowing from the unique value of each human being, is that nations, like individual persons and communities, have an ethical responsibility to help people who come to them in great need if they can. When the priest and levite in the story of the Good Samaritan passed by the traveller in desperate need, they did not simply act uncharitably. They acted wrongly.
Australian asylum seeker policy is based on the harm done to people who come to Australia in great need. The harm done to people is caught in Frank's phrase 'shock and awe'. In military theory the exemplar of shock and awe is Hiroshima. It involves an exercise of overwhelming power that will instil in the enemy the fear of action that will shut down their society and render them unable to fight. That is a fair description of the effects on human beings of prolonged detention in Australia and Nauru documented over many years. In McGorry's phrase they are 'factories for producing mental illness'.
In exercises of shock and awe the destruction of civil society is a means to a military end. In