Rescuing bodies or saving lives? The meanings of rescue

This section considers different ways of thinking about the meaning of rescue, from thin accounts of saving human bodies to much thicker ones of saving human lives. It argues that there is no neutral, objective way of doing so. All rely on necessarily provisional accounts of what humanity is, embody specific relations of power, and raise particular challenges for humanitarian practice. The challenges of rescue cannot be understood without grasping the contingent, dynamic character of the conceptions of common humanity that inspire it, and, in particular, how this might be shaped or distorted by putative rescuers.

Sometimes, the meaning of rescue, and its place within our understanding of humanitarianism, can appear clear. On the one hand, in a warzone a doctor can stem the flow of blood resulting from a potentially fatal gunshot wound, or at a feeding station during a famine a child can be brought back from the brink of starvation. On the other hand, we are often faced, as with the haunting picture of Alan Kurdi, with evidence of a life that could all-too-easily have been saved, but was not.Footnote ¹¹

Behind those individual stories lie multifaceted structural problems. Wider injustices or intractable conflicts underpin the threat to life, or indeed the fact that rescue is an option for some but not others. Kurdi’s life could have been saved not only by rescue-at-sea. While it would probably be too much to ask, both conceptually and practically, of humanitarianism itself that it resolve the crisis that led to his fatal journey, perhaps the stroke of a pen elsewhere could have allowed his journey to take place safely strapped into an economy seat on a plane bound for Europe.Footnote ¹²

For particular people, on a particular day, the meaning of rescue can become narrow, clear and visceral: live or die; survive or perish. Though a conception of humanitarian crisis as merely a certain quantity of bodies on the brink of death can never sufficiently describe what is at stake in the conduct of humanitarian politics, some notion of humanitarian crisis as a threat to bodily survival remains an important practical basis for conceptualising humanitarian action. It follows that we should take seriously the idea that the heart of humanitarian action lies in the saving of human bodies.

This characterisation of the object of humanitarian rescue presents some obvious advantages. We know roughly how many calories a human body needs to survive another day, how much blood a body can lose before it expires, what medicine might cure or manage a fatal disease. This leads to conceptions of life saving as that which, very simply, keeps human bodies alive, to be assessed and responded through scientific and technical expertise. The path to matching a person in need with a person in a position to help them is by no means simple. But prior to this problem is a bigger risk to conceptualising humanitarian action solely in terms of bodily life saving.

The issue is the way that the terms of rescue can come to determine an individual’s humanity, imposing a definition of their identity so narrow it becomes a straightjacket. If, to save a human being it becomes sufficient to save a human body, that risks reducing the humanity of the rescued to a set of biological properties, to a kind of ‘bare life’.Footnote ¹³ Admittedly, sometimes one gets the impression that for Giorgio Agamben and his many followers within critical humanitarian studies, this leads to the extreme position that there is little more to humanitarian rescue than biopolitics, and that a refugee camp cannot in any meaningful way be distinguished from a concentration camp. They are both ‘sites of hierarchical power’, in Norman Geras’s phrase, and such sites are, for those of a biopolitical bent, the key loci of modernity and of modern social life.Footnote ¹⁴ Against this, we might recall Primo Levi’s admonition against this kind of undiscriminating conflation: ‘There’s no gas chamber at Fiat.’Footnote ¹⁵ That is, all sites of hierarchical power do not necessarily imply a slippery slope towards extreme abuse.

Nevertheless, two important points emerge from this. The first is that it reminds us that the moment of rescue is necessarily one of radical power inequality between rescuer and rescued.Footnote ¹⁶ At best this can strain the ability of each to identify with the other.Footnote ¹⁷ At worst this can indeed lead to us rescuing for the other a very different idea of common humanity from that which we claim for ourselves. But in many respects, the play of this power disparity is much more nuanced. I shall return to this dimension of the problem in subsequent sections. The second point is that human bodies can never be sufficient descriptions of human beings, at least within the context of humanitarianism, wherein common humanity necessarily asserts itself as weightier than mere common biology.

This is the crux of the matter when it comes to understanding what humanitarianism is rescuing, the sense that a human being is not just a human body and that we cannot derive a satisfactory account of humanitarian action purely from bodily need. Is the rescue of human bodies a necessary but not sufficient condition for the rescue of a human being? Certainly, the claims of a humanitarian perspective that consistently ignored present bodily suffering would very soon ring hollow. But acts of memorialisation of dead individuals or lost communities can plausibly be understood as humanitarian acts.Footnote ¹⁸ They address injustices committed by those who would erase people from history, and construct narratives that aim to prevent future injustices. The enormous body of Holocaust literature does this in several ways: it recovers some of the detail and complexity of the human lives that were annihilated, and reminds us of those acts of courage in the face of inhumanity that led to acts of rescue, or of attempted rescue. The wishful, indignant call of ‘never again’ is, among other things, an instance of humanitarianism using the process of memorialisation of those rescued and unrescued to obviate the need for future rescue. While it may seem that this idea of memorialisation as rescue is a story about prevention, about rescue-in-advance, there is also perhaps a sense that it is also a last-ditch act of rescue that aims to save something of the humanity of those who were not rescued in the bodily sense.Footnote ¹⁹

Dwelling on the intangible meanings of rescue takes us close to religious discourses of salvation (see the next section). But this intangible sense of rescue also speaks to the more practical notion of témoignage, situating testimony squarely in the present, central to much of the French humanitarian tradition, and especially important to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).Footnote ²⁰ For José Antonio Bastos: ‘[even] if it is impossible to help the refugees, we must keep trying, and find the truth of what is happening, and we must speak. Sometimes speaking is the only action that is possible. To not speak is to fail the possibility of humanity.’Footnote ²¹ The implication is simply that, at times, if we cannot rescue the individual lives under threat, we can at least save a ‘possibility of humanity’.

Even in the case of a single individual, at a single moment in time, humanitarian action as rescue potentially has to negotiate – and this negotiation is profoundly political and characterised by particular relations of power – conceptions of humanity across a wide range of contexts, which include humanity as a set of biological properties and humanity as ethical, political, and legal identities. For some, these include less tangible notions of a soul or of unity with a divine being. For others, they might include the ability to care, love, laugh, and cry.

Humanity can be understood, violated, and rescued across all these dimensions. The complexity of that which is to be rescued and preserved is inextricably interwoven with the complexity of how we articulate the distinctiveness, value, and beauty of humanity. Attempts to pin it down once and for all fail, as a lepidopterist’s display case must always fail to reveal the most vital characteristic of the butterfly: its mesmeric flight. Among influential recent attempts to grapple with this complexity, Martha Nussbaum’s list of the central human capabilities is a thoughtful and rich questioning of what constitutes a human life, of what people should be able to do and be to live a life that might be considered fully human, including, for instance, the ability to have an emotional and imaginative life.Footnote ²² But ultimately, as an answer, it proves unsatisfactory, precisely because it takes the form of a list, and such a document is always likely to be more plausible as a political programme to enable more humane lives than as a description of humanity itself.

A list cannot quite ever succeed in capturing the boundless and unpredictable creativity of a Mozart or a Shakespeare. Nussbaum may come closer than most, by trying to capture the potentialities of human life, and taking seriously the things, like love, that really give it meaning.Footnote ²³ She makes a good case for a human life conceived of according to the central capabilities as being much less nasty, brutish, and short than any number of alternatives. But the intangible, by definition, still eludes such an exercise. We are unlikely to place such a list in our time capsules, for to do justice to its ambitions is to acknowledge its inevitable provisionality. This provisionality is something that Anne Phillips’s The Politics of the Human captures well, its anti-foundationalism drawing on the ‘contrast Sartre makes between saving someone as abstract man (or human) while annihilating him in his specificity and particularity’.Footnote ²⁴

Thus the dilemma that, when it comes to potential acts of rescue, there may be profound tensions in terms of which elements of a perceived common humanity may be rescued. Some elements may be saved, others sacrificed, with all the violence that implies.Footnote ²⁵ In contexts of forced migration, for instance, there are real dilemmas about whether the humanitarian act is to try to save the most bodies or to try to save the context and way of life within which people conceptualised their own humanity. One may well involve sacrificing the other.Footnote ²⁶ This dilemma can permeate an individual’s experience of rescue. Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo demonstrates that many refugees who are relocated and attain bodily security, who are rescued in quite a concrete way by institutionalised humanitarianism, nevertheless often experience a numbing, irreplaceable loss of all the other elements, beyond their own immediate bodily security, that add up to a human life beyond the mere passing of days.Footnote ²⁷

This tension is of course primarily experienced by the rescued. But it also characterises some of the sharpest dilemmas of humanitarian action by potential rescuers. Naturally, other considerations beyond the rescue of those in danger, such as political expediency, often condition the actions of potential humanitarian actors. But there are also dilemmas about whether, say, in effect to collaborate in forced displacement, in order to save people in the short term. Variations of this kind of dilemma have been experienced widely within the ‘humanitarian international’, for instance in the creation of ‘safe’ areas in Bosnia in the early 1990s, in the delivery of aid in refugee camps in (then) Zaire in 1994–6, or in the violation of the principle of non-refoulement in disbanding those camps.Footnote ²⁸ Of course, in facing these dilemmas, humanitarian actors are necessarily imposing their own conceptualisations of rescue, and what it means to be rescued.

It is clearly hard to gain a clear picture of what saving a human being, beyond saving a human body, entails. Bodily survival is vital, but is never likely to be sufficient to make sense of the negotiation of what a common humanity might be or entail. The dilemmas evoked above, wherein humanitarian actors have to choose between what kind of act of rescue will better honour their conception of a common humanity, also make clear the fact that, ultimately, it is their conception of that common humanity that will inform the decision taken. It is therefore their conception that will be saved or lost, along with the human lives at stake. Rescue ‘in the name of humanity’ usually means rescue in the name of a very particular understanding of humanity. Saving a body carries the risk of diminishing the human life it embodies, while trying to save a thicker notion of human life risks imposing another, rather different notion of human life.

The role of the rescuer

The previous section brought to the fore the subjectivity of the rescuer, and so it is to that role we now turn. What functions does the role of rescuer serve for those who embrace it? This section explores the role and the position of the rescuer, alive to the central problem that, in articulating a conception of wounded common humanity in response to the suffering of another, the concerned agent risks defining the other’s humanity for her, albeit perhaps for the very ‘best’ of motives.

The ethical stakes are raised when it comes to engaging in potential acts of rescue, for the moment of rescue is, almost by definition, one in which one agent hold’s the other’s life in her hands. How she understands and characterises the other’s humanity is in her hands as well. While she may want to deny this power, she must also will it. This is well illustrated by Roger Rosenblatt:

This states very clearly something that is arguably a necessary correlate of the desire to engage in humanitarian action and save human lives: the desire to play God (and the relationship between a God and its creation cannot be one of equals).

Though merely a figure of speech for Rosenblatt, the character of a quasi-religious, or indeed avowedly religious mission is writ large across the history of humanitarianism. This speaks to an irony of modern humanitarianism. It was enabled by the opening up of a particular intellectual space by humanist and then Enlightenment thinking, largely against the strictures of religious dogma. However, as humanitarianism emerged as a framing for practical action, much of the motivation of those who engaged in humanitarian action remained deeply religious, linked to powerful ethical codes such as Christian charity.

This was clearly the case during one of the first modern international humanitarian campaigns, to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.Footnote ³⁰ The campaign was characterised by discourses of humanity and freedom, visceral reactions to revelations about the cruelty of the practices involved, and strong conceptions of religious mission. For some abolitionists, what they aimed to save might have been simply the tortured bodies of the slaves, to be released from bondage to engage in, develop, or rediscover, their own projects. For others, the object of rescue was the freedom of the Enlightenment’s universal, perfectible man. For many, the key objects of salvation were people’s souls. The slaves were to be freed not to become fully human on their own terms, but rather to become fully human in the only acceptable way, as Christians to be saved, if not in this life then in the next. Important to many abolitionists, perhaps the dominant concern, was the salvation of their own souls, the preservation of which became, in their view, incompatible with the owning of slaves.

A militant religious drive for salvation was a major factor in the development of institutionalised humanitarianism in the nineteenth century, imbricated with other salvationist (and colonial) projects, such as the floods of missionaries spreading out across the world, or, at the domestic level, the creation of organisations like the Salvation Army. The humanitarianism of, say, Gladstone encompassed campaigns to save far-flung Christians, notably in Bulgaria, and nocturnal missions to ‘rescue’ ‘fallen women’.Footnote ³¹ In the same era, the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead linked his sensational reports on atrocities in Bulgaria to his own spiritual self-preservation and avoidance of damnation.Footnote ³² A happily ‘fallen’ nineteenth-century humanitarian, Byron, mocked the naïve tendency of his contemporaries in the London Greek Committee to conceive their putative objects of rescue in a manner equally detached from the lived experience of the actual people at stake.Footnote ³³ Philhellenes obsessed with ancient Greece were no doubt dismayed to find an absence of philosophising Classical Greeks to save when they arrived on the shores of a contemporary Greece heavily under Ottoman influence. To take another different conception of what is being saved, Andrew Carnegie’s ‘scientific philanthropy’ embodied a vision of the human perfectible through the application of modern scientific knowledge.Footnote ³⁴

Underpinning the humanitarianism of Gladstone, Byron, or Carnegie is the ease with which humanitarianism can become associated with utopian projects and the projection of an idealised humanity. The persistence of this tendency is powerfully critiqued by David Rieff, who sees contemporary humanitarianism as taking on the role of ‘saving idea’, ‘central to the Western imagination’ because of its persistence as the last ‘moral fable’ left standing.Footnote ³⁵ As such, the idea of rescue underpins what Craig Calhoun calls the ‘emergency imaginary’.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, I would argue that humanitarian action always depends on a ‘rescue imaginary’ through which we construct the terms of the humanitarian social encounter. And close to the concept of the imaginary lurk the notions of fantasy and delusion – we are still very clearly failing sufficiently to challenge and reduce the role of ‘white saviour complex’ within humanitarian action.

The challenge is to prick the bubbles of delusion without engendering hopelessness. For Rieff, ‘humanitarianism is a hope for a disenchanted time. If it claims to redeem, it does so largely in the limited sense that in a world so disfigured by cruelty and want it intervenes to save a small proportion of those at risk of dying, and to give temporary shelter to a few of the many who so desperately need it.’Footnote ³⁷ Rieff defends the minimal, visceral act of providing ‘a bed for the night’ – a minimal, partial act of rescue. But he is sceptical about the way it also nourishes that ‘longing for salvation [which] is all but hardwired into Western culture’. When it comes to the bigger picture, it ‘is a saving idea that, in the end, cannot save but can only alleviate’.Footnote ³⁸

But Stephen Hopgood’s work suggests that this humble approach may not be sufficient for many of those engaging in humanitarian action, for they crave a justificatory framework within which to define their moral authority, even when they are not concerned with saving souls, but merely bodies.Footnote ³⁹ Laura Hammond also notes the tendency of professional humanitarians to elevate their principles ‘to the level of the secular-sacred’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For religious strands of humanitarianism, the framework is clear, as is the redemptive power of acts of rescue. But returning to Rosenblatt’s quote, even the most avowed atheist, confronted with an expiring child, will either yearn for a God-like power to rekindle life, or a God-like, transcendental authority to denounce that suffering as wrong and unjustifiable. Even if the conception of the human invoked is not a religious one, it goes significantly beyond mere embodiment. While the chosen, practical act of rescue may well be limited to an act of bodily life saving, with the attendant risks of negotiating with the other only on the basis of ‘bare life’, the context of that act of rescue can never be limited to the practical act, for it is always embedded in a struggle to articulate and preserve a thicker, more intangible sense of common humanity, albeit one that may be narcissistic and contain its own sources of violence and suffering.

However, there remains ‘a possibility of humanity’ connected to that visceral experience of a human life in danger, and therefore a possibility of rescue if the more intangible meanings of humanity at play for the rescuer is in synch with the requirements of the situation. Moreover, does it matter if I think you’re saving my body, while you think you’re saving your and/or my soul? This leads to the question of how to weigh motives, intentions, and consequences, and the broader location of humanitarian rescue within international ethics.

Before delving deeper into that discussion, I will consider the voices of the Righteous. According to the testimony of Rescuers, the category of common humanity was particularly psychologically salient for them. But in engaging in reactions of rescue, the visceral played a part, and also threatened the integrity of the Rescuers’ identity, sense of self, and humanity. For Otto, ‘the primitive had certainly a strong part in my motives’. He also evoked a fellow rescuer, ‘a woman who said she was tired of hearing about her spirit, courage, and nobility. “I did it because of self-respect”, she said, “a lot of self-respect”.’ For Otto: ‘I like the word self-respect because it is what I said before. It is one of the egotistic components in my motivation. I respect more and feel good about it and this is a very good definition.’Footnote ⁴¹

This suggests that humanitarian rescue is always both about saving the other and saving one’s sense of self. It is both other-regarding and narcissistic, and the two elements are not really separable. The problem here, of course, is that the risks of failure are not necessarily equivalent. For the rescuer, the risk may be a loss of self-esteem, for the other, death, another facet of the inherent inequality of rescue. This pushes us to explore further how we might plausibly characterise rescue meaningfully, and to ask whether there is any stable basis to assess an act of rescue and say that it is consistent with an account of humanitarianism.

Do motives matter?

So far, this article has delineated the idea of rescue within humanitarian action as something that oscillates between self and other, that is always infused with power relations, and which involves a constant (political) negotiation of what humanity means and entails. Given how central the promise of rescue is to the ethical status of humanitarianism, understanding the ethics of rescue is thus crucial. On what basis, if any, can we make qualitative assessments of acts of rescue, in a manner that can honour the meaning(s) of rescue for both rescued and rescuer? This section draws on discussions within international political theory to elucidate this question, in particular the interplay between motives, intentions, and consequences in framing our judgements about putative acts of humanitarian rescue.

Yad Vashem accords the title of ‘Righteous among the Nations’ according to both the acts themselves and the motives behind them.Footnote ⁴² The question of motive is a key touchstone in humanitarian debates. For many, the absence of a motive entirely consistent with the act of rescue calls into question the validity of that act, whatever the outcome. In fact, three distinct variables are worth considering here: motives, intentions, and consequences. The tensions between them have been usefully explored within international political theory in relation to military humanitarian intervention. For Terry Nardin, an ‘agent’s intention is what he chooses to do; his motive is the dispositions and desires that explain his choice’.Footnote ⁴³ Motive relates to our reason for action, intention of how we plan to act. Nardin also notes that motive and intention are often used interchangeably. When it comes to the carrying out of the act itself, another element comes into play: the means of rescue, which will be examined in the next section. For now, we will concentrate on the interplay between motives, intentions, and consequences, arguing that, for different reasons, all are important, but that they function at different levels of the humanitarian endeavour.

In a characteristically provocative piece, Stephen Hopgood asks whether, if the core justification of the practice of humanitarianism is to save lives, a consequentialist logic ultimately imposes itself upon the process of deciding how those lives should be saved.Footnote ⁴⁴ If it can be done best by a profit-seeking company, then why not? After all, is humanitarianism not always motivated by a variety of different justifications? The piece provokes partly because in raising the question of money and profit, it touches upon an issue with which many professional humanitarians are profoundly uncomfortable. The Red Cross principle of voluntariness is rarely mentioned in analytical work, because it is generally not seen to carry as much weight as ideas such as impartiality or neutrality. But arguably it still goes deep into professional humanitarians’ sense of self, and suggests that for many, doing the right thing for the right reasons remains crucial (even if they are uncertain as to what the right thing might be).

This fits into Hopgood’s analysis of humanitarianism’s oscillation between sacred and profane.Footnote ⁴⁵ To focus only on effectiveness risks forfeiting a sense of transcendental moral authority. Yet the ‘keepers of the flame’, in becoming gatekeepers of their practice, risk dwindling impact on the real world. Fine motives, or plausible declared intentions alone can never be enough if they do not lead to meaningful outcomes. For James Orbinski, ‘[the] moral intention of the humanitarian act must be confronted with its actual result’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hopgood’s argument challenges us to ask whether there is any better way of defining humanitarianism than the vague, but visceral, notion of the existential act of saving a life. His conclusions come close to Rieff’s: humanitarianism should scale down its ambition and stick to saving some lives and providing some beds for the night.

On its own terms, Hopgood’s line of argument is difficult to rebut. One possibility, from within the practice, is suggested by Rony Brauman, MSF’s preeminent éminence grise. We might accept the consequentialist logic of varying sources of life-saving relief, such as armies or corporations. But that does not necessarily mean we have to label the action humanitarian and to locate it within humanitarianism. It can be valuable on moral grounds other than those described as humanitarian.Footnote ⁴⁷ Brauman’s point is logical in terms of defending the operational principles needed to run a consistent humanitarian practice. But ultimately, the distinction cannot hold if we see humanitarianism as a wider context for the negotiation of common humanity and human solidarity. In this negotiation, surely what is crucial is not what professional dedicated humanitarians are willing to do, but precisely what those who are not might be. Humanitarianism is as much about expanding the latter as the former.

At best, this is about bringing into the conversation actors, like those carrying out acts of rescue during the Holocaust, who are not conventional humanitarian actors but whose acts get to the heart of what we mean by the term humanitarian. At worst, it is about limiting the excesses of actors with very different agendas. Humanitarianism teases out the minimal, not just maximal, understandings of our common humanity and what is required to preserve or save it. For instance, part of the role of international humanitarian law is to define what one should accord one’s enemies out of common humanity. Brauman and Hopgood both share a consequentialist vision of life-saving action, they merely differ on the significance and placement of the boundaries of ‘humanitarian’ action within that.

A consequentialist approach to saving lives can coexist perfectly well with a concern to take intentions seriously, as long as the intentions correspond to the articulation of outcomes, and are not simply collapsed with a deontological account of a ‘correct’ humanitarian motive. In the context of humanitarianism, it is especially important to make a clear distinction between motive and intention, for humanitarianism is a context in which different motives can coalesce into a shared intention to act in pursuit of a certain kind of outcome. As Nick Wheeler puts it: ‘the key question is not the purity of motives but the relationship between motives and humanitarian outcomes’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The common phrase ‘good intention’ is problematic because it often means ‘correctly-motivated intention’. The idea of a single legitimate humanitarian motive for rescue is a category error, which reduces ‘humanitarian’ to a synonym of ‘altruistic’. We can have mixed, diverging motives, but share the determination and declared intention to engage in an act of rescue linked to ideas about the importance of common humanity. One might be interested in the preservation of an immortal soul, the other in a sense of consistency with a political ideology in which the care for others is important, the third feel the need to expunge a previous act of cruelty. It makes more sense to discuss the role of motives within humanitarianism, rather than humanitarian motives as such. It is the political negotiation of different motives that leads to intentions.

At a different level of analysis, motives present the biggest qualification to a purely consequentialist account of acts of rescue within humanitarianism. Within humanitarian practice, a consequentialist logic is ultimately irresistible if the goal of the practice is to maximise life-saving action. But the previous two sections, in discussing the complexities of articulating the meaning of saving a human life, suggest that, if the idea of saving lives is to be assigned value, we have to engage with the ways in which such value is generated. The goal of the practice, even narrowed down to the saving of human lives, is deeply complex in its possible meanings. The goal of saving human lives exists in a wider social context, one in which the goal is articulated and defined as valuable. The goal is such a fragile one, its betrayals so frequent, that it becomes vitally important to understand how it can come to be valuable and spur people to action. So we have to turn back to the reasons why people save other people, and take motives seriously in a more general sense. It is not a question of finding some pure humanitarian motive, but rather of drawing together the threads of why a sense of solidarity can emerge sufficient to call for and generate acts of rescue, that is, to coalesce into concrete intentions.

Returning to the Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: if a sense of common humanity makes it important and desirable that Jews be rescued, the rescue of Jews can plausibly become a humanitarian campaign within which not every individual act has to be linked back to a pure ‘humanitarian motive’. To do so would be unnecessarily demanding, untestable, and a misunderstanding of the breadth and complexity of humanitarianism as a category. Yet, to understand the development of the view that it is desirable that Jews, or others, be rescued under the auspices of a common humanity, it also seems valuable and important to look at the particular reasons given by those who did exactly that.

When those reasons are examined, they reveal that a search for purity would be fruitless. For Otto: ‘I also examined myself whether it wasn’t part of showing off, and it was.’Footnote ⁴⁹ When asked, ‘did you see your activities with the Resistance as being primarily political or primarily as a result of your humanitarian instincts?’, he responded, ‘Both. Both. Both.’Footnote ⁵⁰ For Knud, ‘humanitarian’ motivations were inextricably mixed with a strong desire to resist German aggression at all costs, and the desire to protect Jews as fellow Danes.Footnote ⁵¹ What is interesting is precisely that the rescuers were very different, ‘ordinary’ people (or at least people who saw themselves and their actions as ordinary) who engaged in exceptional activity according to a similar pattern. Very different lives and experiences fed into common ways of interpreting and acting on the situation they saw before them. Different and complex sets of life choices led to a moment in which they felt they had no choice but to act. Their perceptions of what was at stake were very similar: they all felt the salience of belonging to a common humanity, the resonance this had within their sense of identity, and that the integrity of their sense of self depended on the consistency of their actions with their self-understanding.Footnote ⁵² So in understanding the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, we can characterise rescue in a number of different ways, including the practical rescue of Jews (in which a consequentialist logic should be seen as important at an aggregate level, lest we return to the position that the only valid acts of rescue were ones done for impeccable reasons), the saving of the sense of self of those who felt compelled to rescue. Kristen Monroe also points to the acts of rescuers saving the very ‘possibility of humanity’ evoked above:

Within the context of humanitarianism, then, rescue can plausibly entail a consequentialist logic once articulated, but we must look beyond that logic to understand the reasons behind its articulation. Humanitarian action can be invalidated both by a lack of tangible results, and by lack of justification for why those results might be valuable. It cannot, however, be assessed at the level of intention, for that will yield an impoverished account explaining neither inputs to nor outcomes of the politics of humanity.

Furthermore, when we look at how motives and intentions intersect in contemporary professionalised humanitarian practice, where the identification with a common humanity is clearly articulated, we see that individual humanitarians inevitably have complex, idiosyncratic reasons for actually engaging in humanitarian action.Footnote ⁵⁴ Humanitarian rescue depends on notions of common humanity being nested among, and intertwined with, (both individual and collective) actors’ other commitments and interests. It depends on actors’ self-understanding, indeed self-interest, incorporating a humanitarian component that might be activated due to an entirely different need or interest of the actor. In Wheeler’s Saving Strangers, motives come into play not in the guise of providing an illusory humanitarian purity but insofar as they are compatible with action promoting the emergence of norms legitimising humanitarian intervention.Footnote ⁵⁵ As academic debates on military humanitarian intervention morphed into ones on the Responsibility to Protect, Chris Brown made the important point that for it to succeed in its aims, it needed to shed its anti-politics and embed its goals in the self-understandings and interests of key powerful actors.Footnote ⁵⁶

But that inevitable privileging of the interests and preferences of powerful actors in acting in the name of humanity, needs to be tempered by the voices of those who may plausibly call humanity by a different name. That is, claims of saved human lives need to be challenged by the reality of those lives before and after intervention, and considered in relation to what may have been lost or sacrificed along the way. Latent throughout the article so far has been the possibility of humanitarians, in their presumption, causing harm or violence, and the final section will address this problem head on.

Violence, power, and politics

This notorious quote reminds us of the risks immanent in a heroic salvationism – the power to rescue is a power easily abused, and the potential of humanitarian action to cause harm is now widely recognised. Among others, Mary Anderson’s work noted the negative side effects that humanitarianism can have, such as the way aid can exacerbate conflict, or create dependency.Footnote ⁵⁸ She famously called for humanitarianism to strive to ‘do no harm’, an aspiration that remains influential today.Footnote ⁵⁹ But is this remotely possible?

It is vital, in a study of rescue in humanitarian action, to focus in on the problem of causing harm, which was a constant implicit tension in the first two sections. The problem emerges from the most paradoxical aspect of rescue, which is in turn perhaps the defining paradox of humanitarianism: humanitarians seek to act based on some notion of shared, equal humanity. Yet to act is to seek and claim power, to engender inequality.Footnote ⁶⁰

The moment of rescue is necessarily a radically contingent and undetermined one, wherein different conceptions of the human are negotiated, but negotiated in a context of fundamental power disparity. This context of inequality, though, is necessary to the possibility of rescue, just as it is in many areas of our social life, such as fire fighting or in an intensive care unit. We might well think that acts of rescue are valuable and tolerate, or even promote, such inequalities. But we must recognise the potential for harm inherent within them. The most obvious instance is where the potential rescued agent does not see him/herself in need of rescue at all, and the act of rescue actually becomes the main, unwanted, driver of change in their life.

The possibility of missionary excesses can never be completely overcome, for the moment of rescue is one of life’s ‘presumptive occasions’, to borrow Michael Walzer’s phrase.Footnote ⁶¹ Walzer uses the example of preventing a suicide, choosing to emphasise the overriding value of life, even though we cannot fully know how much worth that value retains for the attempted suicide. The question of how much we need to know about the other in order to save them is crucial for humanitarianism.Footnote ⁶² But perhaps humanitarianism can never know enough, constantly negotiating the earthly and the intangible. Therefore humanitarian action must always be seen as a presumptive occasion to some extent, with potential for immense rewards, but also immense harms.

But even in cases where a large part of the act of rescue is clearly agreed upon between rescuer and rescued, the act can still cause harm, for instance in limiting, or appearing to limit, the rescued’s humanity and possibilities to that particular relationship of bodily rescue. In many entrenched refugee situations the body is nourished but the humanity is left on life support. The danger of this is particularly high in the kinds of contexts in which humanitarian acts of rescue are called for, precisely because they are contexts of radical and rapid change, in which a conception of restorative rescue, to a life similar to that which went before, may well be impossible.Footnote ⁶³ In that case, the rescuer faces choices about what new and different life they are enabling or imposing.

There is also the question of unintended side effects. The provision of food aid is notoriously difficult precisely because of the distortions it can impose on local economies and livelihoods, and its ambiguous role in the political economy of conflict. Two decades ago, Alex de Waal, writing on famine, argued that ‘[the] greatest harm done by the humanitarian international is to create delusion’:

Professional humanitarianism has learned from such criticisms and developed much since then.Footnote ⁶⁵ But the deeper point, about people’s agency and role in their own survival still rings true when set against the imaginaries embodied by subsequent humanitarian projects such as the Responsibility to Protect.Footnote ⁶⁶

For Rieff, ‘it is impossible to really do no harm’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This links to his sense that it is important to acknowledge that the context of humanitarianism is failure, and therefore thinking that we can step into such contexts and do no harm must always be entirely illusory.Footnote ⁶⁸

Most controversial of all is the problem of violent means, arguably the crux of whether military humanitarian intervention can plausibly be situated within humanitarianism. The issue is not whether the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) should have a standing army. Rather, the question is whether professional humanitarian organisations’ many reasons for distancing themselves from the use of violence imply excluding the use of violence entirely from the wider discussion about humanitarian rescue.

Rieff argues that by allying itself to the use of force, humanitarianism risks undermining its ability to do any good. He criticises the obscuring of the reality of violence by defenders of humanitarian violence.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rieff is not a pacifist, and believes that force may be sometimes morally required, but he distinguishes the moral justification of the use of force from the practice of humanitarianism. As Orbinski puts it: ‘Humanitarian action exists only to preserve life, not to eliminate it.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The Talmudic saying that prefaced this article is preceded by the idea that whoever destroys a life, destroys an entire world.Footnote ⁷¹

But surely Rieff’s intuition that force should be used to stop a genocide, and his notion that humanitarian violence is wrong stem from the same discussion – a humanitarian discussion about the universal value of human life and the need to defend a common humanity. Though ultimately coming down on the same side of the argument as Rieff, Hugo Slim notes that:

It is clearly inappropriate to envisage organisations like the ICRC and MSF using or advocating force. But that is not the same thing as saying that stopping a genocide with force is not part of the same humanitarian discussion. If humanitarianism is the conversation through which we describe and understand the worst excesses of cruelty and inhumanity, it cannot exclude a priori action that emerges precisely as a response. We should always be sceptical of justifications for the use of force. But can we really exclude force once and for all from our understanding of how humanitarianism functions? Is it not possible that violence may always be the worst way to honour our sense of humanity, but on very rare occasions the only way to save or preserve it?

Humanitarian identity should not become co-terminus with particular agents across all time and all actions engaged in by the relevant agent. That would be a very ahistorical reading of humanitarianism.Footnote ⁷³ Immaculate humanitarian identity is not necessary to engage in humanitarian rescue in the name of a common humanity. Arguably the tendency to think the contrary reflects a desire to preserve the moral authority and voice within international politics of particular humanitarian actors. The impulse to rescue looms large in our understanding of what humanitarianism is. But it necessarily coexists with the desire to pre-empt future occasions for suffering, to engage in rescue-in-advance through the elaboration of laws, institutions, and practices. An obvious example here is the development of human rights. Perhaps when it came to designing a more just system that obviated the need to rescue at all, someone who had spent his or her life publicly arguing against prejudice on the basis of race or religion would be able to make a more coherent input. We may well require high priests of humanitarianism, to go back to Hopgood’s point about sacred and profane. We need not ask these high priests to get their hands dirty, but merely tolerate within the politics of humanitarianism, within the politics of humanity, some who accept that burden.

This potential burden is complicated in two ways. First, the agents involved in actual humanitarian action are more likely to be collective agents. But my argument, while positioning itself against a blanket exclusion of violence from humanitarian action, fails to account for an important dimension of the actual use of violence in humanitarian acts of rescue, since it almost always involves ‘collateral damage’. As Michael Doyle puts it: ‘the necessarily “dirty hands” of violent means often become “dangerous hands” in international interventions’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The presumption of the rescuer is scaled up, and they are confronted with an irresolvable equation with rescued people on one side and victims of collateral damage on the other. So some of the violence involved will very likely represent a moral crime on the very terms of the humanitarian project at stake. In his seminal essay on dirty hands, Michael Walzer writes that in the case of a politician who carries out, or orders a moral crime to be carried out:

The figure of the moral politician is particularly interesting in the context of humanitarianism’s politics of humanity. It is this kind of actor that might be tentatively situated within humanitarianism (perhaps within a government or a military force) to engage in acts of rescue. The moral politician is different from the high priest within the politics of humanity, but they are both part of the same broad enterprise (an iterative and contingent humanitarian conversation). There are obvious problems here, such as the danger of state leaders co-opting humanitarians as a ‘force multiplier’.Footnote ⁷⁶ But this section aims merely to suggest that while they should always be approached gingerly, there is at least the possibility that violent means might occasionally be included within humanitarianism, broadly understood, to defend the idea of a common humanity and human life, as well as particular human bodies.

The problem of humanitarian violence reminds us of the possibility of tragedy, in the genuine sense of the term, inherent in the humanitarian enterprise: professional humanitarians are frequently in positions where all the options at their disposal involve doing wrong in a morally important way.Footnote ⁷⁷ De Waal has argued that the tragedy of humanitarians is precisely that ultimately they are unable completely to escape the possibility of acting cruelly.Footnote ⁷⁸ That is, they cannot entirely avoid causing precisely the kind of suffering that spurred them to act in the first place. This makes a strong case for embracing the role of the ‘moral politician’, for as Rieff argues: ‘[the] virtue of the political is that the case for making the most tragic of all public decisions becomes controversial and a matter for public debate, rather than some kind of categorical moral imperative whose need to be undertaken is deemed to be self-evident.’Footnote ⁷⁹ The challenge for putative humanitarians then, is how to face up to their moral and political responsibility in such situations, for they are not easily avoided or pre-empted.