The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.

This chapter explores the trajectories of those activists who fail to develop attachment to their organizations. It argues that understanding disengagement from activism requires us to distinguish not simply between those who continue to participate and those who leave, but also separate individuals whose reasons for leaving are external (i.e., they face insurmountable obstacles to continued involvement), from people whose motives are internal (i.e., they do not find participation appealing enough). With that purpose, it introduces the distinction between potential dropouts (those who continue participating because they lack a better alternative), voluntary dropouts (those who choose to leave the movement for a more effective source of income), and reluctant dropouts (those who disengage forced by special circumstances). The chapter concludes by arguing that potential and voluntary dropouts have in common the fact that participation does not become an end in itself, while reluctant dropouts share with long-term participants “resistance to quitting”, a strong (but not infallible) inclination to overcome obstacles to participation.

I shall, first, adumbrate the sceptical challenge that arises from those views which argue that inadvertent action involves voluntariness in some deep sense of the concept. In a second step, I will suggest that we should not regard inadvertence as a block to a unified picture of moral responsibility. For, responsibility does not require voluntariness in a wholesale manner. Then I will draw on the theory and practice of the law of torts to suggest the plausibility of the distinction between responsibility and standards of fault. Subsequently, I trace a more principled foundation for this distinction in the philosophical literature: Tim Scanlon, drawing on the distinction between blame and permissibility, has demonstrated convincingly that the mental states of agents, which are relevant for determining blame, should not (in principle) feature among the grounds of the permissibility of actions. The argument submits that permissibility is determined by (objective) reasons for action while blame depends on the meaning of actions, which requires reference to (subjective) mental states of agents. I conclude by siding with authors who argue that among the grounds of responsibility is a reason not to act negligently. Notably, this displacement of negligence from voluntariness to the realm of reasons suggests that responsibility entails capacity for rational agency.

What happens when we insert refugees into a history of twentieth-century Britain? As we might expect, exploring the entry, reception and resettlement of refugees reveals a good deal about British attitudes towards vulnerable strangers, belonging and identity. Yet the book argues for the value of using the arrival of refugees to consider a far wider set of historical problems. Focussing on refugees’ relationship with British society and institutions allows us to historicise, not only the changing experiences of refugees themselves but how Britain also changed over time. Assumptions that refugees fleeing Nazism were solely the responsibility of voluntary organisations, as much as the expectation that 20,000 Hungarians within a few short weeks in the winter of 1956-1957 would be found employment, or that Ugandan Asian arrivals in 1972 might need protection from the National Front, all speak volumes about profound shifts in British society across the twentieth century. Unpicking the historical processes underpinning these assumptions leads us, for example, to think about the changing nature of the welfare state, the relationship between voluntary organisations and government, the role of pressure group politics and the relationship between national employment levels and the reception of foreigners.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

This chapter focusses on two refugee movements caused by the Nazi regime: Jews and dissidents from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia seeking refuge before the outbreak of war in September 1939; and Dutch and Belgium refugees who arrived in May 1940 as they fled the German advance. The Britain they were attempting to enter was still fearful of mass unemployment and was a country of endemic antisemitism and everyday xenophobia. Still self-confident on the world stage and driven by its imperial interests, Britain was nevertheless obliged to engage with the emerging internationalist and humanitarian structures of the League of Nations. The tensions caused by these competing forces saw Britain retaining its anti-alien immigration legislation while also becoming a signatory of the League’s 1933 and 1937 Refugee Conventions and dominating many of its refugee initiatives. As the refugee crisis deepened, voluntary organisations stepped into the humanitarian vacuum, with their activity demonstrating the diversity, energy and resourcefulness of British civil society. As well as paying particular attention to the role of refugee organisations, this chapter demonstrates how the balance between state and voluntary initiatives changed over the duration of the war as government became ever-more drawn into supporting refugees who had reached Britain’s shore.

History seemed to be on the side of Hungarian refugees arriving in Britain in the winter of 1956–1957. Public sympathy for these ‘heroes’ who had stood up to Soviet oppression chimed with wider Cold War politics, while an expanding economy in need of workers seemed to ensure that they would settle quickly into British society. But if Britain’s enthusiastic welcome of the Hungarians – supported by a mammoth voluntary effort – seemed to show it as a self-confident nation, cracks rapidly began to show. The Suez crisis had revealed Britain’s waning power, a trend reflected in many Hungarian refugees’ desire to move on to America or Canada. Refugees’ lack of ‘gratitude’ was to come up time and again as volunteers, camp workers and the public found Hungarians uncooperative and demanding. Resonating with contemporary fears over generational conflict, once ‘resettled’, wayward behaviour by young male refugees saw them labelled ‘juvenile delinquents’ or ‘Central European teddy boys’. Where their foreignness intersected with local concerns with competition over work or local ‘girls’, xenophobia spilled over into hostility and violence. This was in many ways a foretaste the 1958 Notting Hill riots, and demonstrated that beneath a veneer of British self-confidence, many Britons were experiencing profound disquiet at the ways in which the country was changing.

Britain in 1972 was different in many ways to the Britain of 1956. The post-war years of full employment were gone; poverty had been ‘rediscovered’; unemployment was rising; the 1960s had simultaneously seen the emergence of ‘affluence’ and countercultural challenges to it; racism and anti-immigration sentiments were a visible and endemic part of daily life and were slipping into the political mainstream; and Britain had lost most of its empire. And yet the anti-racist politics and radicalism of the 1960s and Britain’s increasingly established Black and Asian populations were showing that there were new ways of being British. This chapter explores how these shifts affected the reception and resettlement of the Ugandan Asians. It shows that the expellees – sometimes treated as ‘refugees’, sometimes as ‘immigrants’ – while welcomed by the government-led Ugandan Resettlement Board and a diverse and energetic voluntary initiative, often faced a Britain experienced by its poorest inhabitants. A place of slum housing, rack-renting landlords, a byzantine welfare system and low pay, intensified for the expellees by institutionalised and casual racism. At the same time grassroots activists, race relations workers and the sustained efforts of the expellees themselves to establish new lives in Britain demonstrated that Britain was also being re-worked from within.