states. The only examples of humanitarian action entirely conceivable in relation to
conventional, individual moral agents discussed so far have been the Rescuers of
Jews during the Holocaust.
There is, then, another step to make in discussing the question of moral
agency within humanitarian agency. That is to acknowledge the assumption that the
collective moral agency of institutions is at least a possibility. Onora O’Neill makes
the persuasive point that, “[if] ethical reasoning is accessible only to individuals, its
meagre help with global problems should not surprise us”.^31 This claim is not
unproblematic, but the key point is that we make this assumption anyway in the
initial move from individual acts to the acts of collective agents such as
humanitarian NGOs. Thus, either we have to accept the possibility that there is
simply no such thing as humanitarianism as we know it (beyond the individual, that
is), or acknowledge that there is no absolute a priori reason why states cannot lay a
claim to the moral dimension of humanitarian agency. Toni Erskine argues that for a
collectivity to be a plausible candidate to be ascribed moral agency, it requires:
an identity that is more than the sum of its constitutive parts and, therefore,
does not rely on a determinate membership; a decision-making structure; an
identity over time; and a conception of itself as a unit.^32On this account, states are clearly at least as strong candidates for collective moral
agency as NGOs or IGOS. In addition to this, it should be made clear that questions
of humanitarian agency are not uniquely questions of moral agency. They are also
questions of political agency, though any conceptualisation of humanitarian agency
entirely divorced from questions of moral agency is difficult to reconcile with the
argument made in Chapter 4, that humanitarianism needs “moral politicians” to
enact it. To re-frame the lessons of the previous section and the previous two
chapters, the moral dimension of humanitarian agency cannot be understood in
31
Cited in Toni Erskine, "Assigning Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents: The Case
of States and 'Quasi-States'", in Can Institutions Have Responsibilties? Collective Moral
Agency and International Relations , ed. Toni Erskine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 35. 32
Ibid.