The ethics of commercial human smuggling

Even though human smuggling is one of the central topics of contention in the political discourse about immigration, it has received virtually no attention from moral philosophy. This article aims to fill this gap and provide a moral analysis of commercial human smuggling. The article accomplishes this by analyzing whether the moral outrage against human smugglers during the European refugee crisis can be justified. To do this, the article first analyzes whether (commercial) human smuggling is inherently wrong. Answering this question in the negative, this article then asks whether the wholesale condemnation of human smuggling in the European case can nevertheless be justified by recourse to a nation-state’s purported right to political self-determination.