will almost always rear its head again in practical contexts. The dilemma was
already recognised by Dunant:
Then you find yourself asking: "Why go to the right, when there are all these
men on the left who will die without a word of kindness or comfort, without
so much as a glass of water to quench their burning thirst?”^117The way that the principle of impartiality has evolved is to establish that the
quenching of thirst should not be hampered by the colour of one’s skin, say, or
one’s religion. However, deciding which kind of suffering represents the greatest
need, inevitably reintroduces a hierarchy of suffering, in the absence of an
unlimited supply of material and moral resources. It is not clear that different kinds
of suffering are commensurable. Indeed, it may do a disservice to the principle of
humanity to try to argue that they are.
Tony Vaux argues that "[we] need a rule of impartiality precisely because we
are not impartial."^118 But it is not at all clear that a world richer in humanitarianism
would necessarily ever, in practice, be a more truly impartial world. Indeed, it is
very unclear on what basis the calculation of “more” or “less” would be established.
Richard Rorty notes: "[free] universities, a free press, incorruptible judges, and
unbribable police officers do not come cheap”.^119 These measures arguably
represent past humanitarian gains, and it would clearly be absurd on humanitarian
grounds to neglect them. It would not make the world a “more humanitarian” place
to abolish the human rights protections from which, for instance, Europeans
benefit. Yet equally clearly, if we were to decide “greatest need” impartially, the
resources poured into this would not be justifiable. Indeed, Rorty is profoundly
sceptical that that our ambition to widen the ambit of solidarity to all humankind
can ever be achieved, for all the gains he undoubtedly thinks can be achieved
through the spread of a human rights culture through a sentimental education.
117
118 Dunant, A Memory of Solferino , unpaginated text.
119 Vaux, The Selfish Altruist , 162.
Richard Rorty, "Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage", in Global
Ethics: Seminal Essays , ed. Thomas Pogge and Keith Horton (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2008),
318.