The Politics of Humanity

orientation and the deep, though diversely articulated humanitarian commitment,
are precisely those that emerge as significant in the argument made so far in this
thesis. To seek resolution of the theoretical disagreement as an a priori requirement
of articulating humanitarian political projects is to make a category error about the
character of humanitarianism as an on-going conversation, hence the benefits of a
less determined internationalism that nevertheless takes the state seriously.
Lawler’s internationalism is understood in terms of the ways in which
domestic politics, possibly influenced by transnational political discussions, comes
to shape the identity of states in ways that accommodate genuinely other-regarding
policies. He contrasts this with two cosmopolitan tendencies to instrumentalise the
state: one which sees it as an agent of a fixed universal idea of the good, with all the
hegemonic excesses that implies; another which sees even democratic statehood as
something to be transcended en route to the pleasures of global civil society. Both
write off the potential of the state too easily.
This reading of cosmopolitanism relates to two points made throughout this
thesis. Firstly, humanitarian action always contains a necessary element of
universalising presumption. We are always in the position of foisting our conception
of humanity on others if we aspire to act in any kind of solidaristic manner.
However, the excesses of humanitarianism come when we take that conception of
humanity to be transcendent, rather than something to be argued for and lived in
our daily lives. Secondly, working out from a transcendental conception of the good
tells us little about the processes examined in Chapter 3 of actually feeling and
acting on empathy, a necessarily partial process. What I argued then was that rather
than an account of what it might mean to be impartial serving as a reliable
corrective, we have to educate ourselves and others to have a wider potential
sphere of empathy. Moreover, humanitarian action itself is the result of coalitions
being built and expressed in ways which do not have to map onto state boundaries,
but do seek to express themselves in terms of the actually-existing political
institutions they are embedded in. This was clearly the case in the example of
British abolitionism. More recently, Lawler affirms that: