Group Asylum, Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

Abstract

It is assumed that the states have the right to control their borders and decide whom they want to exclude, isolate, ban, or impose restrictions on. Although it seems that the problematic notion of “sovereignty” gives the state the right to make these kinds of decisions, there are situations where ethical duties to other human beings supersede sovereignty and where, in fact, those ethical duties limit sovereignty. This would be the case of group asylum situations. In this paper, we propose Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition as a complement to the liberal notion of solidarity. By introducing a derivation of the ethics of recognition, namely, the “ethics of care,” we argue that our connection to others and the ethical duties we have with them impose some limits on the idea of sovereignty.

Keywords

• migration
• group asylum
• sovereignty
• ethics of recognition
• ethics of care
• solidarity