The Politics of Humanity

instrumental rationality that will prove to be a project that is largely
unachievable”.^36
The dilemmas that faced aid workers in the refugee camps of Zaire, say, over
which kind of harm would be the least bad option, are still present in extreme
situations, and still have to be resolved by professional humanitarians themselves,
rather than them being constrained to action by an accountability mechanism
working on behalf of the neediest. Professional humanitarians have to choose to
whom, or to what, they hold themselves accountable.
At such moments, at an individual level, perhaps they feel themselves
ultimately accountable to a religious or other moral code, but collectively, as
humanitarians, they are returned to being accountable to their guiding principles,
most importantly the principle of humanity, and the idea of acting “in the name of
humanity”. In the last resort, they find themselves to be the only form of
accountability the needy can call on. But that rescue of last resort itself represents a
moment of radical unaccountability. In effect, this returns professional
humanitarians to the paradox of acting in the name of an extremely powerful
legitimising idea, supposed to be the ultimate source of accountability, but one that
can result in the most profoundly unaccountable, contingent actions, of the kind
examined in the previous chapter. Arguably, this is the position of many acts “in the
name of humanity”. For example, for many, the Nuremberg judges may have
represented a last possibility of holding to account, but the judges themselves were
unaccountable to anything other than their concept of the requirements of
defending the idea of common humanity. Arguably, then, the real challenge for
humanitarians is to fully acknowledge this unaccountable moment in any claim
made in the name of humanity, as humanity as such is never a capable collective
agent.
Alternatively, we could shift the emphasis of what kind of accountability is
being sought. Returning to Van Brabant’s definition of an accountability
mechanism, we could characterise the critique presented above as a failure to really
articulate a plausible category of “humanitarian right” and concomitant
36
Stein, "Humanitarian Organizations".