The Politics of Humanity

to such a situation, it is clearly a disaster from a more broadly humanitarian point of
view.”^99 Nagel brings the question back to the issue of empathy discussed earlier in
this thesis. “The normative force of the most basic human rights against violence,
enslavement, and coercion, and of the most basic humanitarian duties of rescue
from immediate danger, depends only on our capacity to put ourselves in other
people’s shoes.”^100 The extent of disagreement over what constitutes justice
between global justice theorists and their liberal critics has largely hidden the
broader humanitarian concern they all share, and a broad extent of agreement on
basic, visceral injustices. It would be absurd to minimise the force of the
humanitarian vision underpinning Rawls’ work, say. For instance it is easy to neglect
how transformative his duty of assistance to burdened societies would be if fully
implemented, and interesting to note that it actually proves a rather better fit with
the kind of empirical work done by scholars like Collier and, especially, Sen on
whose work Rawls in fact draws in his account.^101 Richard Shapcott also makes the
point that Rawlsian cosmopolitans display a tendency to reduce “all questions of
ethics to those of justice”.^102
Shklar’s injunction to take injustice seriously adds another dimension to the
question, in that it recognises that justice and a sense of injustice do not quite sit in
opposition to each other. For instance, a sense of injustice might conceivably be
sated by revenge, which could not plausibly be accommodated within a conception
of justice.^103 Moreover, Shklar gives the example of the case of Bardell v. Pickwick in
The Pickwick Papers to show how a misunderstanding between Mr. Pickwick and
Mrs. Bardell leads to two conflicting, yet fully understandable senses of injustice.
Any full resolution would require knowledge only accessible to the reader (or to a
God, presumably).^104 A focus on injustice demands that we give voice to the
99
Thomas Nagel, "The Problem of Global Justice", Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2
(2005): 118. 100
101 Ibid.: 131.
102 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 105-113.
103 Shapcott, International Ethics , 227.
Shklar, The Faces of Injustice , 84. This adds an interesting gloss to the discussion of
humanitarian intervention above. Should humanitarian intervention perhaps be
characterised as an avenging practice, rather than 104 an act of justice?
Ibid., 9-14.