money than it could usefully spend.^106 For Brauman, since “[mass] solidarity is not
based on reasoning alone” (as I outlined above) the role of aid organisations is
especially important in bringing lucidity into decision making.^107 They become, then
a kind of solidarity filter. Terry links this to the importance of independence in
humanitarian action, of course at the heart of both the ICRC and the MSF
approaches. She recognises though that in practice the independence that would
allow for true impartiality is much less practical for many other actors with different
funding structures. For example, she notes that “UNHCR is particularly affected by
funding discrepancies between those refugee emergencies that are perceived to
hold important stakes for major donor governments and those that are not”.^108 But
arguably even those agencies cannot indefinitely remove themselves from partialist
tendencies, as beyond the short term solidarity has to be mobilised anew.
The debate centres on the extent to which action that makes a moral claim
is undermined by selective application. The argument I will make here is that this
debate is essentially misconceived in the case of humanitarianism, because of the
dynamic outlined in this and the previous chapter.
The charge is that selectivity is a major, possibly defining feature of
contemporary humanitarianism, and that it undermines even the initial plausibility
of action. Arguably this focus reflects a belief that, rather than cruelty being the
worst thing we do, hypocrisy is. Indeed, Shklar, while recognising the dangers of
hypocrisy, considers that “To put hypocrisy first entangles us finally in too much
moral cruelty, exposes us too easily to misanthropy, and unbalances our politics.”^109
With regard to the, admittedly problematic, practice of military humanitarian
intervention, Chris Brown defends a certain degree of inconsistency in decision-
making, against the likes of Noam Chomsky, for whom hypocrisy clearly is the worst
106
Peter Redfield, "Sacrifice, Triage, and Global Humanitarianism", in Humanitarianism in
Question: Politics, Power, Ethics , ed. Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (London: Cornell
University Press, 2008), 211. 107
Rony Brauman, "Global Media and the Myths of Humanitarian Relief: The Case of the
2004 Tsunami", in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy , ed.
Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 109. 108
109 Terry, Condemned to Repeat? , 23-24.
Shklar, Ordinary Vices , 86.
marcin
(Marcin)
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