3. The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action

Do humanitarians seek to improve the human condition, the well-being of all humanity? Or do they seek to alleviate suffering, impartially, neutrally, and wherever it may occur? Or do they respond more specifically to “humanitarian emergencies,” seemingly sudden crises in which human conflict creates concentrated human suffering, in which, perhaps, suffering is so extreme as to be dehumanizing? The questions are “rhetorical” in that they do not admit of a precise answer, but they are not without consequences. There is no “objective” definition of humanitarian action. And humanitarian action today is motivated and oriented in all these ways. Yet the multiplicity of its sources and goals is sometimes a problem. It not only confuses academic analyses, it makes it harder for practical actors to agree on courses of action and schemes of evaluation. It informs tensions over whether humanitarian action should be fully embedded in a “human rights framework” or kept at a certain distance because of its special practical relationship to conflict and emergencies. It is central to the challenge of devising efficient approaches to action and effective approaches to evaluation in a field that is constituted on the basis of a moral imperative to act directly in response to fundamental values and urgent needs.