Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes the notion of a ‘good life’ as an anchor for bringing together the focus on an individual ability to choose moral personhood with the political and socio-historical conditions that structure, shape, and affect this ability.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes the notion of a ‘good life’ as an anchor for bringing together the focus on an individual ability to choose moral personhood (which has been at the centre of the anthropology of morality and ethics) with the political and socio-historical conditions that structure, shape, and affect this ability. It explores how the process of crafting oneself into a moral person took place within the context of structural inequality of the refugee camp Konik camp that housed 1200 Kosovo Roma refugees in Podgorica, Montenegro, for 18 years (2000-2018). More specifically, the paper ethnographically looks at how the Red Cross humanitarians who managed the camp and the camp residents morally reasoned in different ways. The paper demonstrates that, although both the humanitarians and the camp residents had some leeway to choose what kind of a moral person to become, this leeway was structured in very different ways due to their unequal socio-legal positions within the Montenegrin society and the Konik refugee camp landscape. The moral reasoning of the humanitarians affected the refugees’ possibilities to lead a good life, while the refugees had no such ability. These kinds of differences become indiscernible when the focus is placed solely on individual moral reasoning. The paper argues that ethics in the context of structural inequality of a refugee camp includes an unequally shared ability to engage in deliberation and to make decisions on what kind of a life to lead (rather than just what kind of a person to become).