The Politics of Humanity

intentions to act is vital to understanding how the “politics of humanity” functions.
Finally, the chapter broaches the troubling ability of humanitarian action to cause
harm, in its attempt to respond to harms caused. It argues that an injunction to “do
no harm” evades the difficult questions and the genuine tensions inherent in the
paradoxical notion of “humanitarian violence”. It suggests that Michael Walzer’s
notion of the “moral politician” provides a more plausible way forward than that
suggested by a humanitarian Hippocratic Oath.
Chapter 5 then explores three possible ways to pin down the “politics of
humanity”, attempts to resolve, or at least temper, the contingencies of
humanitarian action and its capacity to do harm. First, it explores professional
humanitarians’ attempts to deal with the problem internally, to try and remedy
their unaccountability though projects such as codes of conduct. Though sometimes
yielding qualitative improvements in humanitarian action, I argue that these are
unlikely to render humanitarians accountable to those they aspire to help. As such,
a much more ambitious project of empowering the suffering is explored. Universal
human rights, already a vocabulary that permeates humanitarian discourse, has
been suggested as an overarching grounding for humanitarian action. Yet, the
analysis demonstrates that humanitarianism remains the broader conceptual
category, that human rights still leave open the possibility that more contingent
acts of humanitarian rescue might become necessary. This is brought out through a
brief engagement with the paradoxes and tensions of the idea of military
humanitarian intervention, and related debates such as that on R2P. Finally, the
chapter discusses the potential of theories of justice to provide grounding and
direction to humanitarian action. In particular, I discuss the twin potential of
projects of global social justice to deal with the root causes of much suffering, and
to avoid the contingencies of charity. However, I argue that these claims present us
with false choices in practice. Moreover, I question, drawing on the work of
Amartya Sen, the value of transcendental ideals in rendering the world less unjust.
Judith Shklar’s injunction to take injustice seriously reveals the possibility of
multiple, shifting injustices that evade definitive resolution or a definitive account of
justice. As such, it emerges that while humanitarians cannot evade the