The Politics of Humanity

appears to open up the possibility of not judging the victim. If a common humanity
is to be valued, it seems more coherent to conceptualise humanitarian concern in
terms of attacks upon that common humanity, rather than as suggestions that the
attack might have been successful.
However, in explicitly or implicitly reacting against cruelty, professional
humanitarians have encountered another dilemma which, somewhat against their
wishes, puts them in the position of judging the victim. This is the implicit
requirement that victims suffer innocently. Stephen Hopgood argues that even
Amnesty traditionally based its approach “around the archetype of the suffering
innocent, the POC or Prisoner of Conscience”.^49 For Rieff: “To accept people’s
humanity and respect their dignity as individuals should not entail spinning fairy
tales about their innate innocence.” Rieff goes on to remark acidly that “the one
thing tyrants and aid workers have in common is their liking for being posed next to
children”.^50 Tony Vaux argues that:

In effect, aid agencies have preserved the concept of the ‘deserving poor’.

The idea is that people deserve our help because they are innocent victims.

But this is not always true. And if it is not, are we supposed to withhold

aid?^51

The quasi-religious notion of innocence poses a serious problem for
humanitarianism, especially when juxtaposed with a hatred of cruelty as a framing
through which to conceptualise suffering. The previous section argued that a
technical, medicalised description of suffering limits the extent to which
professional humanitarians, for instance, can access and describe the wider
justification for their practice. But in stepping back, in naming rapes, genocides and
cruelty, they necessarily bring notions of guilt and innocence into the discussion.
These are notions that the technicalised version of humanitarianism was precisely
designed to dodge through concepts of neutrality and impartiality.

49
50 Hopgood, "Moral Authority, Modernity and the Politics of the Sacred": 240.
51 Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 25.
Vaux, The Selfish Altruist , 8.