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In the waters off the British coast, volunteers with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) are doing what they’ve always done: rescue people in trouble. But these days, some Brits are getting upset with the rescuers—to the point of attacking them or those they’re saving—because many of the people that they’re trying to save are attempting to enter the United Kingdom illegally.

In the Caribbean and the Pacific, the U.S. military has attacked numerous so-called drug boats. There has long been an obligation, moral and legal, to save the lives of those at risk at sea; today, the RNLI upholds that while the U.S. military violates it.

In the waters off the British coast, volunteers with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) are doing what they’ve always done: rescue people in trouble. But these days, some Brits are getting upset with the rescuers—to the point of attacking them or those they’re saving—because many of the people that they’re trying to save are attempting to enter the United Kingdom illegally.

In the Caribbean and the Pacific, the U.S. military has attacked numerous so-called drug boats. There has long been an obligation, moral and legal, to save the lives of those at risk at sea; today, the RNLI upholds that while the U.S. military violates it.

A sense of community between seafarers dates back centuries, but the modern obligation was formalized early last century. Individual nations had written a duty to rescue into their laws throughout the 19th century, but the first real international agreement came in Article 11 of the 1910 Brussels Convention on Assistance and Salvage at Sea: “Every master is bound, so far as he can do so without serious danger to his vessel, her crew and passengers, to render assistance to everybody, even though an enemy, found at sea in danger of being lost.”

But it was a famous disaster and a heroic rescue that solidified the rule. Just after midnight on April 14, 1912, the telegraph clerk on the RMS Carpathia, a trans-Atlantic........

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