This gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Hugo Slim today.
Hugo is a visiting fellow of Iraq. I feel that the the visiting in the title is probably a little bit of a misnomer
given that Hugo has been with us right from the right from the beginning.
And his country is a huge piece of the work that he like has done in the time that we've been around.
Hugo has a very rich background and experience in issues to do with humanitarian ethics.
He has worked for NGOs. He's worked for the United Nations.
He has been a scholar and an academic for several years.
He's worked as a mediator and he has advised corporate clients.
So he's sort of seen it from the full range of perspective and pleasure to have
him speak today and to get some of the benefits of his experience and his wisdom.
So the topic today is humanitarian ethics, you know, conflict agency dilemmas and responsibilities.
Dafoe Thank you very much. And thank you all for coming.
And I hope you got enough to eat and that you're able to munch away when I when I talk and starve in front of you.
I must I must say at first that this is really a work in progress,
because one of the reasons is that this is a more permanent feature than I used to be,
is that I am not starting up a project on humanitarian ethics, which we've got some funding for from about five NGOs,
Oxfam, Save the Children, British Red Cross, Carrefour and World Vision and People.
So I am going to spend the next year here at Elac working to get a better understanding of ethical problems in humanitarian work.
But also, I hope, producing some quite practical outputs that will help aid agencies become more
ethically capable and confident and hopefully more ethically judicious as well.
So this is a work in progress,
and I'm afraid I'm not going to deliver you all the solutions to every ethical dilemma that a humanitarian agency ever has.
It's not going to be about that at all, in a way. But I hope this might in a way be the first discussion of our research project,
and that you will bring some ideas and questions to the table when we when we have our discussion as well.
So let's hope we can do that. To start with, of course, it's important to say that there are some archetypal humanitarian agency dilemmas,
and if I missed a few, it might get us in the mood.
And of course, the most poignant and tragic of all, in a way, is perhaps the experience of the ICRC during the Holocaust in World War Two.
And one can imagine, as it happened,
the experience of the ICRC delegates who repeatedly knocked on the door of Auschwitz to ask to be admitted to be a humanitarian act in that context.
And of course, we can also think of the masquerade in front of the ICRC at Treblinka in the Holocaust as well,
when they were shown a model camp and the two delegates came away confused and impressed at what they had seen.
And of course, we can also think from the Holocaust of those extraordinary moments when ICRC could do something,
but it was desperate and tragic and late and in a sense, hopeless.
So there are images of ICRC delegates running along the deportation trains in Greece, pushing food parcels through the window, the doors of the train.
And there are similar examples of people like Frederick Bourne in the ICRC walking and driving
alongside the deportation death marches that Eichmann finally led from Hungary and giving food,
trying to argue with guards, trying to reason with the SS that these kind of ICRC images, of course,
create issues of enormous ethical problem, ethical dilemma, ethical tragedy in humanitarian work.
But more recently, of course, we can think of things like the World Food Programme deciding to work in North Korea around the famine map.
And we can think also of agencies in Colombia and DRC setting up IDP camps for people who are now being displaced for a third or fourth time.
So this whole notion of are we stuck in some cycle here?
Are we playing in to some extension of a crisis of a conflict?
And we can also think more recently of aid agencies working in the internment camps in Sri Lanka after the government offensive.
And of course, we can think back a little further to to agency dilemma and ethical.
Connie, when being invited by U.S. armed forces to jointly plan the invasion of Iraq with
them and to plan the humanitarian action that could flow with the invasion force.
So these are the kinds of things I suppose I would count as ethical moments for for humanitarian agencies.
And when they would tend to describe themselves as having this thing they might call an ethical dilemma or ethical agony of some kind.
I'm going to try and do just a few things in the next half an hour.
And so I'm going to try to think a little about humanitarian action in the context of global ethics today.
So perhaps put it in its place as an extraordinary form of altruism, in fact,
that we we have now that I want to look a little bit at the ends and means in humanitarian ethics as it is today.
In other words, how humanitarians understand their own ethic, what they are trying to push as a moral project.
Take that apart a little. And then thirdly, I'm going to look at categories of ethical problems that they would tend to present.
And those I think we're going to look at much more detail on in the year ahead and understand better.
And then finally, I'm going to just posit some ideas around agency responsibility and what it would mean for an aid agency,
humanitarian agency, to to move towards ethical solutions in its work.
But first, of course, I also want to recognise a little that ethics as a term, of course, doesn't just mean a single approach, a single thing.
There are, of course, as all of you named, varieties of schools and quaint, conflicting schools of approaches to ethics, how you decide on what to do.
And I'm just going to talk about probably three or four of them.
And the first one, of course, is virtue ethics, which of course,
we would trace back to Aristotle and the idea that a good life is lived with the aim of living a good life and in accordance with certain virtues.
And of course, the the tradition of virtues is a very important and pervasive one.
I'm having a bit of renaissance, as you name.
The second one, of course, would be called the decent, logical tradition of ethics would be flagged with people like Emmanuel Kant,
and it would be thinking very clearly about duties and rights and obligations and those mystical things called imperatives,
things you just have to do because they're right always to do.
And then third, of course, emerging from practically minded empirical Brits, we would have the consequentialist school of ethics.
We would have utilitarian people who would say, you know,
it is possible to decide on what to do now on the basis of the consequences you want and expect from a certain action.
So you get rule based utilitarianism and things like that as another form.
And then of course, today we have to engage with postmodern ethics with an idea that there are no grand narratives to modernity,
no grand goals we can pursue, that everything is fragmented,
and therefore ethics becomes a highly localised,
fragmented part of different little narratives that we have to negotiate without reference to some great goal.
So there's a for parts of ethics, which I think are playing at the moment in humanitarian thinking.
So I thought it'd be worth flagging at the beginning. But moving on now to think about what place humanitarian action has in global ethics,
it is an extraordinary thing today that there is the desire and the capacity to reach any person in any country suffering from war or disaster.
And that is really quite a phenomenal change in the expansion of altruism in the last 50 years, really.
So that whether you are in Congo or Burma or now Mexico or Nigeria,
the chances are someone will turn up in something called a humanitarian agency and
will make an effort to understand your needs and reach out to meet them somehow.
And that really is, I think, quite phenomenal.
And this seems to confirm the sort of ideas of moral progress that people like Peter Singer have been arguing for
30 years and in a way that Adam Smith argued hundreds of years before Peter Singer that our moral sentiment,
our sympathy, our fellow feeling, as Smith called it, is something that reaches beyond immediate.
Yet circles of friendship and family and country and smiths fallen patriotism and actually becomes universal in its ability to empathise,
sympathise and act.
And of course, singer and today's evolutionary psychologists take this up much more biologically and in terms of evolutionary science.
And Singer would argue, like many, that our species has developed altruism in a series of obviously what singer calls expanding circles of empathy.
And the first one, of course, is kin based. I help my family, my parents, my children, my cousins, because I'm genetically driven to do it,
because there's something in my DNA which says I want my DNA to survive.
So there is some kind of kinship altruism that is observable in almost every animal and is considered to be the sort of core of our altruism.
And then, of course, the second aspect that evolutionary psychologists, singer and everybody have noticed in altruism is reciprocal altruism.
Because there comes another thing and it's an extraordinary thing. You can even look at birds giving warnings to other birds.
You can see, you know, animals that they know each other helping each other and saving each other.
And we do it. And it's on the basis of reciprocity.
And it's you know, you do my life and I'll do your life.
It's that kind of scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, literally.
And that's where people observe reciprocity emerging as a driver of altruism.
But that very seldom goes beyond the group. And of course, Singer's great insight was that it is reasoned,
it is thinking that allows us to make that extraordinary imaginary step and to take the objective position, as he calls it, of the other.
And then when we start thinking of how the other might have interests and experience things,
then we can imagine altruistically, way beyond our kin and way beyond our group.
And that, in a sense, evolutionary psychologists would argue,
is what is happening now in the way that we spread out and feel the whole world to be of interest to us.
And we have an ability now that we do over and over again to take the position of distant unmet others.
People who we've never known will never know and never meet.
And we demand moral action on their behalf and for them.
So these expanding circles, I think,
are manifest most evidently in humanitarian action today and its desire and capability to reach anyone in anywhere,
anyplace experiencing armed conflict. So that's where this ethics sits, I think.
And it's not surprising, perhaps that it is a little confused, having grown so quickly in the last few years.
And of course, we have to notice very early that it is still a little accidental in its system.
The main organisation of humanitarian system is very western,
very driven by money and agencies, huge aspects of Oriental or whatever you want to call it.
Altruism are less easy to see massive patterns and trends of Islamic altruism,
which operates in slightly different ways and not particularly organised.
And their profits are not blowing through the UN and other systems.
So we, we don't observe that, but they are probably bigger still.
So how does this expanding altruistic humanitarian project understand its own ethics?
What is this organised humanitarian action believing of its morals, if you like.
In the last 60 years there's been an enormous amount of writing of ethics by humanitarian agencies.
They've been very keen to try to write down what they believe and get confessional,
if you like, about about their professional, professional about it.
And the first moment, of course, that was very important was in 1965,
when the great Swiss Geneve and ICRC lawyer John Piketty, when he wrote on behalf of the Red Cross, the Red Cross principles.
And of course, they were seven principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, and the other three that we named together.
But what I mean voluntarism universally I can remember then of course, you know, people sort of thought the Red Cross did that and.
But then in the nineties NGOs realised, gosh, waiting a lot of this war stuff too.
Now we're right in the thick of Bosnia, we're right in the thick of Rwanda, Somalia, Angola.
We better write our own version of this. So non Red Cross NGOs, under the guidance of the head of the Red Cross, wrote the Code of Conduct,
which was first drafted in around 91, emerging really out of Somalia and getting a lot from Oxfam.
People like Peter Walker is not Tufts and Nick Doctor.
And they came out with a very similar ten point code, which was very Red Red Cross based.
And then later in about 98, a thing called the humanitarian charter emerged, which linked those principles very directly to international law,
the laws of Geneva around international humanitarian law and refugee law in particular,
and humanitarian charter linked humanitarian action legally with laws and rights and not only with ethical principles.
And that's important to you. And then they went further still and decided to quantify what these ethics and rights might look like.
So they wrote a book of standards called The Sphere Standards, which are now in their third edition or something where they said, Right, you know,
if you're going to respond to the right for water, it's going to be ten litres a day per person if you're going to do shelter, the right to shelter.
It's going to be this. If you can do the right to food, it's going to be this.
And again, the same quite ex Oxfam extreme mafia put together a core group of very concrete,
commodified standards of what it would mean to have your ethical needs met ethically by humanitarian agency and have your rights realised.
So we have that body of principle and law and standards,
which has all been woven together in the last few years, very deliberately, but in its strict sense.
What is the moral composition of the humanitarian ethic, if you like?
And let me start by observing some family resemblances between the schools I've already mentioned of ethics.
First of all, there is a family resemblance with virtue theory because of course, Piketty's seven Red Cross principles mirror exactly in some ways.
And so certainly in that structure there Christianity's seven virtues, which are,
of course, faith, hope and charity bolted on to Aristotle's four key virtues.
So we're already seeing a virtue theory of ethics at play in the composition of humanitarian ethics.
And also we're seeing some quite heavy dilemmas, a logical ethics at play in humanitarian professions of ethics.
We are seeing a phrase called the humanitarian imperative come shouting through Article one of the code of conduct.
But imperatives abound not just in the code and not just in sphere,
what it would look like in warfare and tents and health and shelter, but also in linking humanitarian actions.
They place this law and to ontological injunctions and prohibitions in child and human rights law and refugee law.
So we see a family resemblance. That is pretty categorical.
There is a categorical trait in humanitarian ethics, and I think we can see a family resemblance to Consequentialist as well.
Because funnily enough, despite all the D ontology and virtue ethics,
when you listen to a lot of humanitarians agonising, they are usually to be found and heard agonising.
Consequentially, they're usually worrying and thinking hypothetically, not categorically, as camp would say.
So they're thinking, What will happen if I do this?
What will happen if I don't do this? What will happen if they do this?
So there is some consequential family resemblances to in humanitarian ethics at the moment.
And I think there's a bit of postmodern family resemblance to in that famous shrug of our MSF colleagues,
Médecins Sans Frontieres, that what is the point, if any?
There is no metanarrative, there is no grand project. These people are just dying.
They are dying, as you might say.
They have a differ end of this moment,
the disruption of history when they are silent and everyone discusses around them and they have no place in ethical discussion.
So you get this sort of postmodern despair as well in in MSF thinking I think as well.
So if that is the various schools of ethics and how they play in and out of humanitarian ethics,
let me try and look in on more detail about what humanitarians believe of their project.
And the first thing I need to say about humanitarian ethics and.
Trying to go around the world and help people in war and disaster is that humanitarian ethics is a teleology of persons, not progress.
So really, in its most pure and honest and direct form, the project is the person, the person before you.
That is the project of humanitarian action to help and preserve that person.
The person is the end in humanitarian ethics.
And that, of course, means that doesn't have a great project of political progress.
It's not really concerned, in truth about the good society.
It is most deeply and solely concerned about the person before you and those that that teleology, if you like.
In ethical terms, that telos comes out most clearly in the first two principles of humanitarian action,
which, if you would, if we were to borrow Christian imagery,
the cardinal virtues of humanitarian action, which are humanity and impartiality and humanity since the goal of the project.
The goal is the preservation, preservation of the human person.
That means their physical survival, their breathing, fleshly bodily survival.
But more than that, it is the preservation of the person in dignity,
which is a phrase that Pictou particularly makes great emphasis on in his commentary preservation of the person in dignity.
So it's really about all their needs.
It's about their essential flourishing, not just survival.
So that is the goal of humanitarian action, the passive and impartiality.
The second principle sets out really the the belief that that is to apply to all people.
It is a principle of total equality, and that is the principle that aid and humanitarian action should be given only on the basis of need alone.
And that is the second cardinal virtue cardinal principle of humanitarian.
Actually, aid is only given proportionate to need.
It has nothing to do with your class, your race, your side of the conflict, your politics, your gender or anything.
It is about need and therefore it is a vision of total equality of personal.
Before that suffering is it were. So these are the two cardinal virtues of humanitarian action.
But humanitarian ethics is also have practical ethics and it has two key operational principles that allows it to operate.
How is it going to go into other people's war when people are fighting full of hatred and fire
and peace and loathing and get a patch of ground to operate and get a permission to operate?
Now, the next two principles enable that they are neutrality and independence, and these are not values.
I mean, nobody is saying it's good to be neutral. We should all go around being neutral.
Nobody saying it's good. It's a moral good to be independent. We should all go and be independent.
We can't can thrive and flourish.
But they are saying these are really important operational postures to adopt if you want to work in other people's wars.
And neutrality is really a means of gaining proximity by maintaining distance.
It's the best way I've ever heard it described actually, by a veteran ICRC guy the other day in Geneva.
Here, he'd worked a lot in the Vietnam War, and he said, Neutrality is the way we get close by keeping our distance.
And I think that is probably a pretty good confirmation of of that.
You don't get involved, you don't take sides. You don't have a political view on the conflict.
You don't care about winners and who wins. You are ultimately disinterested in the politics and therefore you can get this precious proximité,
as they call it, in in ICRC and MSF humanitarian discourse.
Independence is the second operational principle.
And this is very important because it allows you to be impartial. If neutrality allows you to get close,
independence allows you to be impartial because it means that you have freedom to make
your own decisions about who you give your food and shelter and water and protection to.
So the crucial aspect of. Independence is the freedom to make impartial decisions and impartial distributions.
No one of all two or three of the parties can tell you who to give to.
Now, those are the four really key ethical principles of humanitarian action.
And then in the code of conduct that emerged in the late nineties, six more were added in a sense, as professional principles.
And these are how you do that well as a professional humanitarian worker.
So there are things like building local capacity participation involving everybody in their own relief.
So you're not making uninformed, outsider based decisions or using insight or involvement and participation.
You're always trying to reduce vulnerabilities and you don't use degrading media imagery of people.
So those are the professional principles in a sense, that are largely drawn from development work,
how you do things well in community development work.
So there's really other, if you like, the Big Ten principles that drive the ethics and that see humanitarians setting out their ethics at the moment.
And I just want to take a little detour to see if in these principles there is, in fact, an ethics creep of some kind.
Does the teleology of the person, which I am saying is the core end of any humanitarian action, is the path.
There is no political project, just the path. Does it actually creep into wider ethics around the Good Society?
And I think it possibly does. There is probably leakage and expansion and it's certainly been criticised many times for for
spreading out and perhaps having the seeds or the Trojan horse of three other big ethical projects.
And the first is peace. Is humanitarian ethics also a peace ethic that has a project to reduce violence in our species?
Is it actually setting out really as well to make us more peaceful?
And I think this is an interesting point.
And there's, as you know, a whole new wave of current theses that conflict is reducing and you can share in incidents space that conflicts are done.
But our conflict loss as a species may well be being overcome.
And this is Steven Pinker on Human Security Report and all sorts of other people arguing this point.
And they accredit a lot of this to humanitarian actually, and to the new great global humanitarian industry that I spoke about at the beginning.
That is, in a sense, putting a reductive pressure on violence around the world, trying, in effect, to stop it.
Is that true? I don't think most humanitarians are out to reduce violence.
They're out to limit it. But there's no doubt that in the process they are probably reducing violence.
They are probably contributing to a culture of peace in certain parts of international politics.
There's also no doubt that they've had a real effect in reducing violence, not just limiting it, but really reducing it.
If you compare the Armenian experience and in what's probably, you know,
one of the most brutal state formations of modern times, the creation of modern Turkey, and you compare that with Darfur.
So it's a very similar strategy that you terrorise people when you kick them
out and you hope that the sun and the first and the starvation does the rest,
which was a quote from the Turkish communiques at the time.
Now, it did do the rest in Armenia because there was no one to pick up in Turkey,
to pick up all the Armenians and put them in IDP camps and save their lives in Darfur.
That didn't happen. IDP camps were set up and many lives which would have been lost in 1919 in Turkey in a sense, were saved in Darfur much later.
So there is no doubt that humanity has a reducing the incidence of of death and violence, I think.
But I am not sure that the project itself is about peace.
But some humanitarians may hope that it is. The second area that may see some ethics creep in the project is, of course,
liberal development because not all humanitarian agencies are ICRC and that central frontier.
Now all development agencies are also doing humanitarian work there, what we call multi mandate agencies.
So they actually espouse and seek the good society a much wider project of progress around liberal democracy in a sense.
And there's no doubt that a lot of the work they do and the six professional principles of the Code of Conduct and Capacity Building,
inclusion and participation. In in humanitarian work is part of a development project.
So the ethic may well wonder that way quite a lot.
And of course, the third area where humanitarian ethics may enter into a much wider global ethic is
the area of justice because of its determined link to law and humanitarian norms.
Humanitarian laws mean that humanitarian action is also about justice around crimes against the person.
So the telos of the person inevitably involves some kind of notion of justice.
When it's tied to law and law like a it becomes a humanitarian means.
And so humanitarian ethics is not just concerned with the protection and assistance of the person,
but also with a much wider global project of restorative justice and standard setting around behaviour.
So this may not be ethics creep across the whole area, but I think there's no doubt that there is some ethical carry, if you like,
or continuity between the strict humanitarian ethic and these other three things of peace, liberal development and particularly justice.
I think just to move on and think about categories of ethical problems in humanitarian action,
I think it's fair to say, and I'm just going to sort of list a few that I've heard,
most of which I hope to really drill down on in the next year and really categorise
a typology of key ethical problems that humanitarian agencies feel they face.
But probably the biggest moral fear of humanitarian agencies is this idea of doing more harm than good.
That's the big moral angst. That's probably what sort of keeps them up at night more than anything else.
And of course, it's not a new fear. Whenever you're trying to help someone, you run that risk.
As a famous clip from a fourth century desert father, call them.
You know, I think he's called partnerships.
And he was one of these guys that sat on the end of a pole, set up a tree or lived in a cave and just looked wisely upon the world.
And when people came to talking about, you know, helping other people, he sort of knew them through his long Monty Python esque beard.
He muttered Many a time, have I see him down by the River Man and get stuck in the mud,
and several other men rushing to help him and in helping him, pushing him even further into the mud.
And we know this is a problem that if you can rush to help people in that process of help, there is a potential for making things worse.
And that is probably the big moral anxiety of humanitarian workers.
But if I could list that, you know, some of their key problems that they present as I'm hearing them at the moment,
the first would be an obvious one around triage, in a sense, decisions around widespread need and limited resources.
The natural problem of any person trying to meet needs with limited resources,
a sort of triage problem of ethics that we would expect in the NHS as well or anywhere else.
Then there are more technical ones to do with the nature of emergency work in distant places and covering large areas of ground,
which is a sort of speed quality. Trade-off So humanitarians were worried about not meeting that standard,
this ethically okay to drop standards sometimes to prioritise speed in response of some kind, even if it's an imperfect response.
So you get that kind of professional ethical worry as well.
Then you get a lot of that multi mandate worry. I talked about where you have an agency which might be like Oxfam or Save the Children,
which like the NHS is running an ambulance service and a big public health service.
And how do they play off those two internal mandates?
You know, how do they resource them? How do they, when they're running their emergency vet,
not talk about why do human rights and education and other things they care about normally that it might be being attacked or whatever.
Then there is a in a sense the big clusters of ethical problems that you hear agencies talk about most in the media.
I suppose the first one is that of co-option, this real anxiety that they are going to be co-opted by power in a war and that humanitarian
aid is going to be instrumentalized towards other ends than their loss of the parcel,
if you like. And this is I mean, several examples would be Hutu extremists in the Goma camps in 1994,
95, when humanitarians are feeding a campus a quarter of a million people.
Fled the RPF victory in Rwanda at the end of the genocide.
And in that camp, the Hutu extremists are actually using those resources,
using those social organisation to gain control, rearm, re-establish a force that could hopefully try and attack again.
So is humanitarian aid being co-opted,
instrumentalized into a wider political project that the humanitarians don't never intend and have no interest in their right to be engaged in?
And you see that, of course, too, in the parties debate in Afghanistan, the same kind of thing.
And the whole anxiety about being force multipliers for counterinsurgency by nature and WAM strategies in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere.
And you see it in northern Uganda, in Darfur,
two in humanitarian agencies and national anchor feeling very co-opted into strategies of concentration of populations
in warring areas that have very significant military and political strategy and advantage to them as well,
in terms of creating controllable ghettos and draining the whatever it is, the fish from the sea or whatever.
In counterinsurgency theory, coercion is the next big ethical area.
They worry about that they will be coerced and forced to work in limited areas, which have nothing to do with being in proportion,
in proportion to need, but only in proportion to the preference of one of the parties.
And this has been felt very strongly lately in Pakistan in mixed emergencies, where you have floods or whatever,
in the areas of conflict where agencies have felt absolutely coerced into only going,
where the government wants them to go or being prevented from going,
where it may be that insurgents or movements against the government are suffering.
So extraordinary problems of coercion that raise ethical issues about agency presence and agency options to deal with that.
And then, of course, there's the by standing anxiety, there is the knocking on the door.
And actually it's there's the option, the powerlessness,
the ethical problems that come from powerlessness and trying to decide with real conscience when that powerlessness is inevitable and there's nothing
you can do or whether there is something you could do and you're not doing it and you're ending up being a bystander who should be doing something.
So bystander problems then, of course, problems of Justice Depot's career at the International Criminal Court, doing things in Uganda and Darfur.
Should humanitarian agencies be be cooperating them?
Should they be glad that justice is being enforced?
Or is justice creating human humanitarian backlash and real problems by its new assertiveness in such wars?
And then there's the old, old problem, too, around advocacy and around balancing words and deeds in humanitarian action.
And when is the time to speak out when you're seeing such terrible things and you know things and,
you know, Ethiopians are being resettled from the highlands when,
you know, people are being massacred and killed, when, you know, the government is diverting aid or whatever.
When do you speak out? When do you keep quiet? When do you prioritise words over staying on the ground?
When do you risk being thrown out? That's another very common dilemma that agencies would feel.
And that whole area, the next one of when your aid might be feeding a war.
I mean,
so much of the critique of humanitarian aid in the last the popular critique has been that sort of stupid laissez strapline of aid extends wars.
Aid prolongs wars, as if that was a simple calculation and as if it was a calculation that was being made by aid agencies and sales,
and they could just step back, not give any aid, and the war would stop. That's another one.
How do you know where your aid is being diverted, used badly,
and you have to stop it and when you can stand up to power in order to stop some of that.
So what are your red lines, in other words? And when might you stay and go and what are your exit lines?
And then finally, of course, the whole area of quality is an ethical issue to be a humanitarian agency.
It doesn't just mean you get out there, you have an aeroplane, you have a white Toyota, you can get there and you stop being good.
You have to be good enough at doing what you're doing. G.K. Chesterton famously wrote once that if something's worth.
Think it's worth doing badly. And that's true up to a point.
But there comes a point when it's not worth doing badly.
And when you do it badly, you should either get out of the way and let somebody else do it or not do it so badly.
And that whole point about quality is a big, big problem for aid agencies, and it's a big problem for the free market and aid agencies.
But anyone can start an NGO. We can all self mandate ourselves and go to Bosnia, go to Sri Lanka, go to whatever we want.
Quality becomes a really big ethical issue in humanitarian work.
So just to just to conclude and then I hope we can talk about some of this,
none of these types of ethical problems are unusual or especially problematic.
I mean,
I think aid agency people feel they have very special moral dilemmas because a lot of the situations they work in are very extreme and brutal and
highly politicised and highly media tight sometimes and incredibly uncomfortable to suddenly arrive in and start trying to have an effective.
But really, none of these ethical problems are unusual or unique, and they arise in many professions and many areas of moral life.
You could be having those dilemmas in the NHS, you could be having them in business,
in a mining company or in banking or in many areas of professional life.
You could certainly be having them as a military professional or as a lawyer,
and you should be having them as a journalist as well, quite a lot of them as well.
So I'm encouraged, I think, from my initial look that these are not exceptional, unique problems.
A lot of ethicists have worked on these kind of issues before. They can be spelt out and and worked through.
And the encouraging thing, as I said at the beginning, the fact remains that more people than ever before are being protected and assisted in war.
So this ethical project is having an ethical effect and agencies are making conscious moral choices all the time.
They are being ethical or trying to act ethically and having ethical discussions and using ethical frameworks to try and work out what to do.
But a lot of the choices they make are ones that leave them feeling very uncomfortable rather than very wrong.
And I think very often this feeling of discomfort, which is not surprising in a lot of the situations they face, they misread into feeling wrong.
But actually I think they're feeling very uncomfortable, which is natural in a lot of these situations rather than being very wrong.
And this is not surprising, I think, when you consider the enormous powers and forces that are really dominating their choices in in a war.
So I think just moving forward and this is what I hope we'll be looking at in our research here over the next year, is there are three key areas,
I think, for agencies to focus on when they do ethics and they try and deal with that catalogue of problems and how many more or less there are.
And the first is responsibility analysis.
It's incredibly important, as we know in ethics, to look at who has responsibility for what in any given situation.
And there's a tendency, I think, in Western aid agencies to colonise responsibility and say, oh,
we're responsible for everything that happens in this war, we should have stopped this, we should help that.
And it's simply not true or possible. And one of the major steps to take is to look at who's responsible for what violation.
If there's a policy of rape or an epidemic of rape in the DRC, who who is truly responsible for that?
And, you know, you always responding to that, but you're not primarily responsible for it.
And it would be the same if governments decide to create ghettos in Darfur or Sri Lanka.
You didn't create those ghettos. Therefore, you're not responsible for the same responsibility.
Analysis is very important. The second area, of course, is really developing a proper approach to what ethicists would call due deliberation.
But you really have to think through these problems properly and you have to show that
you've thought through them and you have to think through them with the right people,
asking the right people involving the right people.
And therefore, in any situation, you have to be clear as an agency, if your intention is just a strict moral philosophy,
if you like your intention in that situation, what are you trying to achieve?
What is your telos, your end? What do you know about the situation?
What you need to know more about to make a better decision? What don't you know?
What could you know? What could you never name? And then what is your capability?
What are you really capable of doing? Because all of us can. Be judged as morally responsible or culpable on what we are able to do or not.
So taking that very seriously and then also being very serious about mitigating the worst effects of decisions you make that you can't avoid.
So deliberation, I think, is something that is being done in agencies,
but I think it could be done a bit more consciously and with a bit more skills and ethical language.
And the final thing, I think. Is going back to Aristotle probably is the cultivation of an organisational culture that really cultivates
the humanitarian virtues and we probably need to understand a bit more about what humanitarian virtues are,
because they won't just be humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence.
There'll be ways of listening to ways of working with people. And I think I'm interested to see if we can use virtue theory a bit more and think
about humanitarian virtues and cultivate humanitarians in line with these virtues.
So they are making balanced decisions.
And whether or not the idea of organisational conscience can also play a part so that if you're working for, say,
the children somewhere and you're faced with a difficult decision, as you often are, you can honestly think, what does the organisation do here?
What's my organisational conscience?
Tell me, what do I know about how we work in these situations, the choices we are likely to make and whose organisational conscience in some way.
And that of course in virtually three terms means cultivating and educating people in ethics, in the virtues, in moral judgement.
And I think agencies need to take that seriously and look at cases that have before talked to people about history,
talk through decisions that need to be made,
anticipate them and in a sense, get ethically fit before they have to ask people to go into very difficult situations.
So just to conclude, finally, I'm getting back to this research we're trying to do like over the next year, our purpose in 2012.
And we have promised to work with these agencies and deliver the first text on humanitarian ethics by the end of 2012.
I think we want to help humanity nations become more routinely and more deeply ethically capable organisations.
We want to help them be able to identify and deliberate ethical problems and to communicate and account for their choices.
I think one of the most important things is this if humanitarian aid goes on getting bigger and becomes a sort of global welfare project,
which it could well do, it's very important that humanitarian leaders are accountable to people that give them money here out of their own pockets,
to governments that give them money and to people they work with so they can explain their actions ethically.
And that's what we'll be trying to do over the next year here at Enoch.
So this time next year I hope I have something concrete to report. But since I set out the ground on how I understand humanitarian ethics,
how I think humanitarian agencies understand it, and where the key challenges are,
and I hope if I talk again this time next year, nice book in my hands will have all the answers and how they can be ethical in the best sense.
Thank you.