instance, the discovery of particular practices within slavery, such as the Middle
Passage, by the public at large served to delegitimise the wider practice as a whole,
and contributed to the reconceptualisation of slavery itself as cruelty.^34
The reaction to cruelty has greatly influenced the development of modern
humanitarianism. Of course, it has characterised efforts to “humanise” war, and we
might recall Abraham Lincoln’s injunction that “military necessity does not admit of
cruelty”.^35 Jean Pictet in his seminal commentary on the fundamental principles of
the Red Cross, comes surprisingly close to acknowledging a hierarchy of suffering in
terms of its human causes, noting that “The most odious form of suffering is that
which man inflicts deliberately”. For him, the reaction to cruelty nourishes the
principle of humanity. He goes on to cite Montaigne: “I bitterly hate cruelty as the
worst of all vices”.^36 As an aside, it is interesting to note that Montaigne, who was
intensely suspicious of what we might term trans-cultural generalisations, seems to
have felt that this concept functioned at an appropriate level of generality.
This tradition has two particularly important manifestations in
contemporary political philosophy. Judith Shklar, very much placing herself in the
tradition of Montaigne, argues that cruelty has been neglected by philosophy, yet
has profound implications. Catherine Lu notes the potential of Shklar’s starting
point, which articulates itself not in terms of utopian human perfectibility and
necessary moral progress but rather in that which we should avoid.^37 For Shklar:
“[putting] cruelty first is, however, a matter very different from mere humaneness.
To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both
religious and political conventions.”^38
This radicalism inspires the liberalism of Richard Rorty. Rorty takes as the
leitmotif of his liberalism the idea that cruelty is the worst thing we do. It is a
particularly humanitarian understanding of liberalism, set out in his writings on the
34
35 The process behind this is discussed in the next chapter.
Cited in Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Uncovering War Crimes in the Land of the Free ,
Updated ed. (London: Penguin, 2009), 3. 36
37 Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross , unpaginated text.
Catherine Lu, "The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism", Journal of Political
Philosophy 38 8, no. 2 (2000): 254.
Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (London: Belknap Press, 1984), 8. Italics in original.