TY  - EJOU
AU  - Hillier-Smith, H. Bradley
TI  - Statist and Cosmopolitan Obligations to Refugees
T2  - Journal of Controversial Ideas

PY  - 2026
VL  - 6
IS  - 2
SN  - 2694-5991

AB  - This article first discusses the questionable ethics of the debate on the normative relevance of IQ for obligations of refugee protection and outlines conditions for permissible engagement. It then develops the central argument that the deployment of accurate and complete statist and cosmopolitan analyses, that carefully consider both the costs and, importantly, the benefits of refugee protection, can resolve much of the disagreement in the debate on the normative relevance of IQ to obligations of refugee protection. This is because these complete analyses reveal that the benefits of refugee protection within political communities in the Global North are immense, and this is true irrespective of prospective IQ. These immense benefits thereby outweigh even priority-weighted costs. Therefore, states in the Global North have obligations to protect refugees within their political communities on both statist and cosmopolitan grounds, and the purported IQ of those protected is not relevant to those obligations. The article, finally, reinforces the demonstration that any view that IQ is relevant to obligations of protection is false and repugnant.
KW  - refugees
KW  - obligations
KW  - cosmopolitanism
KW  - statism
DO  - 10.63466/jci06020015