The Politics of Humanity

Once again the trope of triage comes up as a way to suggest that our solidarity is
related to our sense of the possible.^120
Perhaps impartiality is, in the end, a transcendental ideal that, while serving
as a useful corrective to excesses of partiality, does not provide us with a full
account of how to make decisions. Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, the
contexts in which the humanitarian impulse is called upon is frequently one within
which tragic choices are a likely feature of any decision to act, or a conscious
decision not to act.^121
Furthermore, and on a more positive note, humanitarianism could only be
truly impartially conceived and enacted if it were the only important and valuable
kind of solidarity. As we will see in the rest of the thesis, if the point even needs to
be argued, this is not the case. But more importantly, humanitarianism is never a
solidarity floating free, but rather is always related to and enabled by other forms of
solidarity. For instance, feminism is clearly a solidarity that has done much to
establish the importance of considering women as fully human. A feminist solidarity
and a humanitarian one need not necessarily always pull in the same direction. Yet
the bringing about, through all kinds of action, of a more humanitarian world, can
never just be about being kind impartially, it also requires dedicated feminists to
devote their lives to establishing fully the status of being a woman, and a sensitivity
to the particular vulnerabilities experienced by women, as a meaningful and robust
voice in the discussion over our common humanity. It may well be that the most
effective way of enriching the category of common humanity is through the
exercise of that kind of partiality. The task of humanitarianism is in large part,
whatever one’s approach to it, about expanding the reach and content of human
solidarity.^122 It seems deeply perverse in doing so to neglect existing possibilities of
solidarity, which by definition are likely to be partial or particular in nature. To be
suspicious about the fickle and contingent workings of our humanitarian impulses
120
121 Ibid., 321.
Chris Brown, "Tragedy, 'Tragic Choices' and Contemporary International Political
Theory", 122 International Relations 21, no. 1 (2007).
For an argument about how changing norms of military humanitarian intervention over
the past two centuries have been driven by expanding notions of common humanity see
Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention , 52-84.