II Cruelty and Innocence
The theme of unacceptable suffering has been taken up by Rieff, who argues that
humanitarianism “defines itself largely in negative terms”, and cites Brauman as
stating simply that “humanitarianism asks the question, What is a human being?
and answers, ‘One who is not made to suffer’”.^30 The work of philosophers such as
Jonathan Glover underscores the daunting implications of this after a century of
unprecedented innovation in the means of causing suffering.^31 The question of how
to conceptualise our markers of the unacceptable in this respect is one that has
received recurring attention within political philosophy. In the rest of the chapter, I
will examine several strands that speak to professional humanitarians’ attempts to
define what humanitarianism constitutes itself against. Since the conception of
humanitarianism being elaborated is not one defined in terms of a singular ethic or
practice, the emphasis is on concepts that seem to have a certain amount of
transhistorical resonance, even as they change and are redefined over time, in
response to the innovations mentioned above.
Our starting point will be cruelty. As an introduction to this discussion, it is
worth citing a passage from Orbinski’s memoir, in which he describes his encounter
with one particular woman whom he treats amidst the chaos of a hospital
overwhelmed with new arrivals:
She was slightly older than middle aged. She had been raped. Semen mixed
with blood clung to her thighs. She had been attacked with machetes, her
entire body systematically mutilated. Her ears had been cut off. Her face had
been so carefully disfigured that a pattern was obvious in the slashes. Both
Achilles tendons had been cut. Both breasts had been sliced off. Her
attackers didn’t want to kill her; they wanted her to bleed to death. They
knew just how much to cut to make her bleed slowly ... I felt a wave of
nausea as I looked again at the pattern someone had cut in her face. I turned
from her and vomited for the first and only time during the genocide ...^32
30
31 Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 93.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000). 32
Orbinski, An Imperfect Offering , 227. Orbinksi also drew on this encounter in his Nobel
speech. Orbinski, "Nobel Lecture".