to deny asylum when admitting large numbers of needy peoples
into our territories would cause a decline in our standards
of living? And what amount of decline in welfare is morally
permissible before it can be invoked as grounds for denying
entry to the persecuted, the needy, and the oppressed? In formulating
their refugee and asylum policies, governments often
implicitly utilize this distinction between perfect and imperfect
duties, while human rights groups, as well as advocates of
asylees and refugees, are concerned to show that the obligation
to show hospitality to those in dire need should not be compromised
by self-regarding interests alone. In chapter 3 I shall
return to the question of obligations across borders and argue
that the construal of such obligations in the light of the narrow
dichotomy of legitimate self-preservation versus the duties to
others is inadequate. The international system of peoples and
states is characterized by such extensive interdependencies and
the historical crisscrossing of fates and fortunes that the scope
of special as well as generalized moral obligations to our fellow
human beings far transcends the perspective of the territorially
bounded state-centric system. Instead, I shall defend the perspective
of a world society as the correct vantage point from
which to reason about obligations across borders.