humanitarian impulse effectively, meaningful links to the self-perception of
individuals and groups need to be created (and that is not an impartial process).
Yet altruism still features heavily in the aspirations of professional
humanitarians, who worry that emotional engagement and an impartial assessment
of others’ needs sit in tension. This points to a profound paradox at the heart of
professional humanitarians’ understanding of the principle of humanity: to honour
it seems to require that it be exercised impartially, yet it is nourished by the partial
play of empathy and emotional engagement with particular instances of suffering.
Tony Vaux acknowledges the point:
At the heart of humanity are not only conflicts of selfishness and altruism,
but the paradox of being emotional enough to feel concern while not being
so emotional that we limit that concern unfairly. We need both attachment
and detachment. And it is particularly tempting to feel ‘concern for the
person in need’ rather more strongly in the case of those whom we like, and
to attack those whom we do not like even if their ideas and objectives are
similar to our own.^114His account reminds us of the position of a doctor, who constantly needs to
combine professional detachment with the nourishing power of a commitment to
healing people. And if we take the example of professional medicine, we see that an
apparently impartial concept like “greatest need” is actually very hard to define in
abstract, and has to be negotiated, often controversially, as we see in Britain with
every controversy over guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence (NICE), through a political discussion, in which not everyone can
necessarily find satisfaction.^115 This brings us to the concept of triage, which is
evoked in different guises in the humanitarian context.^116 The problem of selectivity
114
115 Vaux, The Selfish Altruist , 70.
There are interesting parallels between the work of an organisation like NICE, the
National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, and the guidelines and accountability
mechanisms, such as the Sphere Project, that professional humanitarians have created and
which will be examined in Chapter 6. 116
See for instance Redfield, "Sacrifice, Triage, and Global Humanitarianism". Patrick Reed,
Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma , Documentary Film (CanWest Global
Television Network et al., 2007).