to function. It also contains its own account of human nature, of what we might be
willing to do to each other by way of cruelty. It is worth remembering that
Inhumanity is necessarily a human category.
The suffering engendered from an explicit attempt to cast a human out of
the category of human is almost axiomatically inhuman in terms of a humanitarian
concern with the integrity of the category of human. Other attacks, however, may
be less obvious, and pose their own risks for the putative humanitarian. Rorty
identifies three modes of dehumanisation. The first is the distinction between
human and animal described above. But this distinction plays out not only between
perpetrator and victim, but also between observer and perpetrator. Rorty’s second
type of dehumanisation is the infantilisation of the other, allowing that they might
be human, but are childlike, not capable of making mature choices. This theme adds
another gloss to the question of humanitarianism’s uneasy accommodation with
the question of innocence. His third type is simply limiting the ways one can count
as human, by taking “human” as synonym, for instance, of “man”.^62 Here Rorty links
to the feminist work of scholars such as Catherine MacKinnon who challenge all,
including humanitarians with the question of “are women human?”^63
This schema is probably not exhaustive. But it raises another complicating
factor for understanding humanitarianism as a simple reaction against
dehumanising cruelty. The history of humanitarianism shows that it has often, in
constituting itself against one of these forms of dehumanisation, simultaneously
engaged in dehumanising processes of different kinds. For instance, one of the key
chapters in the history of humanitarianism is, of course, the abolition of the slave
trade, the reaction against the trade, and ultimately slavery itself, as a cruel practice
that treated humans like animals.^64 But it is impossible to detach the humanitarian
discussions about the evils of slavery from inter-related discussions about the
62
63 Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality", 168-169.
Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (London:
Belknap Press, 2006). Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationa 64 lity and Sentimentality", 169.
With reference to the post-Second World War refugee crisis, Peter Nyers notes Hannah
Arendt’s observation that the language used by many humanitarian organisations closely
resembled that used by societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Peter Nyers,
Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2006), 85.