The Politics of Humanity

aggrieved party. As such it is victim-centred. But it assumes no harmony of
grievances among them. This is a particularly important point for humanitarianism,
which deals with situations in which conflicts of genuine injustices are extremely
likely.
Thus we cannot be confident that a vision of justice represents any kind of
definitive resolution of injustice. With regard to legislative processes, Shklar writes
that: “Every social change, every new law, every forced alteration of public rules is
unjust to someone. The more drastic and sudden the change, the greater the
grievances.”^105 This links back to the point made earlier, that few of us would like to
live under the blindfolded impartiality of a 19 th century conception of social justice.
In an interesting aside, Shklar notes that the figure of Justice in Giotto’s magnificent
frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, is not yet blindfolded, as would later
become the representational convention.^106 We have already seen how impartiality
does not truly capture how humanitarians mobilise concern. But need that mean
they play no role in the formulation of how we understand justice?
In Chapter 3 I mentioned the view expressed by Luc Boltanski that a “politics
of pity” should be replaced by a “politics of justice”. The work presented since
suggests that the excesses of humanitarian action can often be traced back to an
exclusive reliance on pity, or a total belief in justice. Rather than describe the scope
of humanitarianism with reference to one or other theory of justice or rights, or rely
on the sometimes degrading experience of pity, I propose that at its best, it might
be properly described as a politics of injustice. For Shklar, “the sense of injustice is
eminently political”, and injustice seems like a promising way to capture the
politicisation involved in the humanitarian rejection of cruelty and inhumanity, and
attempts to mobilise empathy and concern in response.^107 We should not
essentialise the role of injustice and obsessively try to identify an injustice on every
occasion, for suffering worthy of humanitarian concern may result from misfortune.
But we should merely recognise its importance in nourishing humanitarianism and
in shaping our understanding of common humanity, and prompting us to listen to
105
106 Ibid., 120.
107 She draws here on Erwin Panofsky’s work in iconology. Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 83.