Ethical Reflections on the Institution of Asylum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.21204Keywords:
asylum, ethics, statism, cosmopolitanism, refugee policy, affluenceAbstract
This article explores the rationale for protecting and assisting refugees, from an ethical perspective. It also examines the relationship between a country’s obligation to provide asylum and that country’s affluence. The field of tension between statist and cosmopolitan ethics is analyzed. After showing that the former establishes weak and limited asylum obligations and after offering a brief argument for cosmopolitanism, the article explores cosmopolitan forms of utilitarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarianism. A reasonable synthesis of the last three perspectives is proposed: it includes a strong duty to provide asylum, a broad definition of the kinds of displacement that create entitlements to international protection and assistance, and international burden-sharing based on relative affluence.Metrics
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Copyright (c) 2001 Peter Penz
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Refuge authors retain the copyright over their work, and license it to the general public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows for non-commercial use, reproduction and adaption of the material in any medium or format, with proper attribution. For general information on Creative Commons licences, visit the Creative Commons site. For the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, review the human readable summary.