The Politics of Humanity

building and election fighting, is not a problem to be solved, but a constitutive
context of the possibility of humanitarianism itself.
Of course, given the complexities discussed above, reliably stirring
humanitarian political action remains a highly contingent process. Discussing the
possible reactions of Euripides’ contemporaries to his play The Trojan Women ,
Martha Nussbaum neatly sets out the unreliability of the causal chain from
aesthetic to affective to human to political realms:

Did compassion really enable those Greeks to comprehend the real

humanity of others, or did it stop short, allowing them to reaffirm the

essential Greekness of everything that's human? Of course compassion

required making the Trojans somehow familiar, so that Greeks could see

their own vulnerability in them, and feel terror and pity, as for their own

relations. But it's easy for the familiarization to go too far: they are just us,

and we the ones who suffer humanly. Not those other ones, over there in

Melos.^102

IV Selectivity and Impartiality

Before the following chapters’ focus on the characteristics of humanitarian action, it
is worth pausing briefly to consider the humanitarian action that does not happen.
A major objection to relying on the kind of process outlined above is the issue of
selectivity, inconsistency and partiality, when it comes to the mobilisation of
empathy and the carrying out of humanitarian action. Indeed, empathy is all very
well, but we need to ask ourselves whose pain is being felt. This links back to the
centrality of notions of impartiality to professional humanitarians’ self-perception.
Here I will mainly be addressing the extent to which it is possible to generate
solidarity impartially. But it should also be noted that working out what impartiality
means often implies an account of fairness or justice, as will be unpacked in Chapter
5.
On this view, empathy hides a multitude of sins. Critics of humanitarianism
who emphasise the selectivity of humanitarian action either consider the issue to
102
Nussbaum, "Compassion & Terror": 11.