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Don’t Just Do It

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The leader of the UK’s Labour Party just took action. “I would, of course, do the right thing and step down.”  This is, of course, politics. Kier Starmer’s catchy response to accusations he broke Covid lockdown rules was delivered in order to contrast his integrity with the Prime Minister’s refusal to hold himself to account. 

Forget about the recent plan to send single male migrants to Rwanda, or even Brexit, the British government’s most dangerous manoeuvring comes in the form of a single, innocuous word: “job”.  As in “But I think the best thing I can do now is, having settled the fine, is focus on the job in hand.” Faced with a police fine for having broken Covid rules (see “Partygate” for those lucky enough not to follow British politics), the party line was clear: the Prime Minister wanted to “deliver on the priorities of the British people”, he was “keen to get back to the job”, and the British people wanted to see the Tory party “getting on with the job”. 

This line of argument recalls the well-worn path of politicians, corporations, the Catholic church and, sometimes, just about all of us:  the good I do buys me some space for the bad.  It’s like carbon offsetting for sins.

Let’s skip back five years.  Not long after the World Humanitarian Summit, I was talking to a leader in our sector, a vocal proponent of transferring power to local non-governmental organizations (LNGOs).  “Kevin” was an enthusiastic supporter of the Grand Bargain, especially the commitment to deliver a fat chunk of funding directly to local organizations.  Turns out, Kevin’s commitment involved a commitment to the idea of localization rather than to an actual substantial shift of responsibility and financial resources.  Turns out, his views spoke for much of the sector.  Turns out, there was a caveat.  The sector’s inequitably powerful and overly Western contingent can bask in the noble glow of being champions of localization while effectively blocking it.

The INGO Kevin worked for – a major player – was committed to the Grand Bargain. Yet, its uppermost commitment is understood as being to people, not the Bargain.  Fair enough. But this ‘higher’ commitment has been interpreted to mean that Kevin’s INGO should operationalize localization only if it did not diminish the quality or quantity of aid, and that Kevin’s INGO should be the judge of this potential diminishment. 

This was the Grand Bargain’s ideological equivalent of fine print. So much for the slogan says humanitarian work should be “as local as possible and as international as necessary”. There’s a lot of ‘devil’ in the detail of that last bit.” But let’s not enter the “INGO vs LNGO: who can do it better?” debate. The more critical issue is that the arguments of both sides – the pros and cons of local action – share the same underlying logic. This is the logic of effectiveness. Is aid really only about who can do the job better?

Back to the British PM. The danger in Boris Johnson’s declaration recalls the danger we as leaders perpetrate and perpetuate upon our own humanitarian sector.  We remove annoying obstacles to our business by rendering ethical principles invisible.  The Kevins of our sector can talk endlessly about doing things the right way, about one day doing things in a ‘righter’ way (new evidence-based guidelines are being developed by our global task force!), and about doing things in a ‘righter’ way than local organizations (after all, we must build their capacity on the new evidence-based guidelines).

What the Kevins do not want to talk about is doing the right thing.

Johnson’s apology for transgressions effectively shreds the uppermost responsibility of leadership – to champion the ideals, aspirations, and ethical principles which guide actions, and which unite societies even where there are strong disagreements on the ‘how’ level. Neither British politics nor humanitarian action would be well-served by moral purity, yet the power of both are gutted by excluding ethics from deliberation and decision. We need to think about the politics that has girded decades of constant, directive paternalism; and the presumption this status quo can be justified on the basis of effectiveness and actions.  The ethical cost is too high, for instance to the principle of humanity.

People matter because they are not static vessels of need to be filled by our action. Human solidarity is impossible without recognition of the other’s human sovereignty. Being more capable than local NGOs sounds like a logic we tossed out 60 years ago (and it’s an assumption of dubious accuracy as well).  Would it have been OK for Britain to maintain rule over Kenya or Sierra Leone on the basis of Her Majesty’s greater technical and economic capacity?  That sounds offensive. Why?  Because there are principles more important than doing a good job.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The ethics of turning bad money into good?

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Let’s start with recent content: the hubbub surrounding Oxycontin-tainted donations from the Sackler Foundation “does not threaten but actually safeguards the commonplace acceptance of funding from tainted sources.”  That makes funding an ethical issue.

Accepting a donation constitutes action; and in the Sackler case the action constitutes one half of a symbiotic relationship between public do-goodery and private do-not-so-goodery.  That is to say, the ethical issue is a vexing one. As the New York Time’s art critic Roberta Smith points out (discussing the Sackler story), “this is the way museums survive and that rich people do, in fact, assuage their guilt by kind of giving back.”  Or, as one expert explained donors give in order to “shift attention from business practices that may strike some as unsavory.”

Hardly breaking news.  Yet a story, a situation, that the humanitarian sector too easily ignores. Are we really so willing to play the Marc Cohen of the foreign aid world?  The Winston Wolfe? Hired by donors to ensure that our life-saving programs cleanse the bloody muck out of their expensive cars?

Q1. Humanitarians worry all the time about not getting coopted or instrumentalized by political actors in war zone, so why are we such quiet customers in a market where the purveyors of opioids or violence or inequality can purchase their exoneration?  

Q2. Are we only cleaning up the muck, or enabling it?  Considering everything else the Saudis are dropping on Yemen, their dropping of $1B of humanitarian aid over the past two years is not simply hypocrisy.  

I know what you are thinking. Marc Cohen? The Wolf? That’s too harsh. Well, yes and no. We humanitarians do have good intentions on our side. Not so sure about Cohen or Wolf. Yet practice would suggest that we humanitarians regularly purchase our own forgiveness, that of both our donor public (relatively easy, but ??) and ourselves (much harder).  We are agency and donor rolled into one, where our good works or intentions are used to justify our compromised choices and harmful consequences.  

Look at the backlash against MP David Lammy’s bang-on criticism of Comic Relief’s celebrity ambassador Stacey Dooley use of the impoverished, pathetic-black-child-in-white-savior’s-arms trope.  As Dooley herself answers, Comic Relief funding has “saved” kids’ lives, and that presumably shuts down Lammy as if his criticism were killing babies somewhere in the world.  Judging by public comments, most agreed with Dooley and Comic Relief, failing to register Dooley’s contribution to the perpetuation of stereotypes (and media treatment of it) that undergird the very poverty of the child in her arms.

The sector cannot afford to ignore such avoidable cases of moral compromise, but on a more fundamental level, can it afford a more ethically strict fundraising code?  Purity would come at a high cost. I think that most of us accept that the principles of humanitarian fundraising must exclude the worst offenses and embrace considerable compromise in order for our programs and for our salaries to exist. Regardless, this needs much more deliberation and visibility within agencies.  Are we happy with our choices?  Are we concerned that times are changing?

The ethical risk here is deceptive and increasingly costly.  These funds pay for operations and corrode our moral authority, which often serves as a basis for action. (Let’s sidestep the question of whether humanitarians overestimate their own moral legitimacy.).  Good enough for the goose must be good enough for the gander.  If we are to raise our voice in frustration and pain at the deliberate destruction of human lives and human communities, then we must maintain a legitimacy that is grounded in standing on principle, lest the states and armed groups perpetrating these atrocities explain that they too must compromise in order to safeguard their vital interests.  Can we really protest the rising realpolitik sacrifice of ideals at the altar of national self-interest and political expediency while turning a mostly blind eye to the sources of our funding? Perhaps not a moral equivalence, but nonetheless a moral parallel that increasingly runs the risk of being called out by the very progressives who have supported our cause.

There is another option, of course.  As Marvel superheroes have done, perhaps we should acknowledge our own moral complexity and abdicate from our self-appointed role as global moral governor.  In other words, the sector could put the denunciatory finger of J’accuse into its pockets, allowing populations in crisis to issue their own denunciatory accusations, organize their own protests and take power against their own violators. It could be open about its own difficult compromises.  Note how this would reduce the reputational risk to the sector and at the same time protect humanitarian ideals by neither conceitedly nor paternalistically standing upon the pedestal of moral superiority. 

Critique of Aid

From good money to bad

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Ethics post #4

Money, scandal and the Royal Family …  we all love a headline with some spectacle, don’t we? No hint of sex but plenty of blood and potential for voyeurism as we watch the Sackler name hemorrhage its wealth-bought nobility. Plenty of outrage and righteousness as well, as we feed on charges that Sackler fortunes were considerably enriched by unleashing an opioid addiction epidemic.  

Spectacle, though, seems almost definitionally concerned with the tip of the iceberg. As museums say no to the Sacklers, humanitarians should pay attention, particularly to what lies beneath the surface.

The Sacklers were no small donors, charitably contributing piles of wampum to acquisitions and exhibitions across the major museums of the West. Their philanthropy helped establish a great deal of beauty in the world.  One common view is that the ends justify the means – ignore where the money came from as long as it is not illegal or scandalous (and hence reduce future donations).  After all, museums are purposed to house artistic endeavor, not advance one or another of thousands of social causes. In this view, the refusal of Sackler funding does not mean morally cleaner art; it means less art and less public accessibility to art.

And then there is the other view. Renowned photographer Nan Goldin fingered the Sackler family due to her own addiction to opioids, threatening to pull her work out of museums and staging protests. The story flared across the media. Donations from the Sacklers thus moved from philanthropic monuments to scandalous gestures (reputational risks).  Even so, for many museums the money proves too substantial to walk the path of refusal.

Humanitarian agencies are similarly thought of as public goods and moral actors.  They often act pragmatically or in institutional self-interest and they often act on the general moral principle of not taking dirty money.  Further, humanitarian power to act depends heavily upon moral legitimacy, and this prompts a more specific moral principle that often guides agency donor policy: whether or not there is a direct connection of the wealth being donated to the suffering of people affected by crisis. It is easy to understand why a health NGO might have more concern with accepting a grant from the pre-spectacle Sacklers than would, say, an environmental agency. 

Here is a first chunk of submerged iceberg. As I’ve blogged recently, our heightened awareness of the causes of crisis requires a new equation in humanitarian donor policy. “Given its increasingly clear role in the conflict and suffering to which we respond … is an enormous chunk of our support produced in the factories of inequality?” Otherwise said, what of the responsibility to interrogate the consequences on inequality of the business behind hedge fund philanthropy?  And if not inequality, perhaps the destruction of the environment or contribution to climate change?  Or maybe the uber-profitable generation of democracy-killing echo chambers and election fraud? 

This is where the spectacle above comes in.  Because what we have in that headline is not a museum, but the British Royal Family (the Prince’s Trust) cutting ties with the Sacklers. Now, I don’t want to pick on the Monarchy just to make a point (or maybe I do), but their wealth has a particular history, one fused with England’s colonial legacy of violence and destruction. The latter would seem to dwarf even the horrors of opioid addiction.  So what does it tell us when the human embodiment of Empire decides that Sackler money is too dirty?

It tells us that the vilification of the Sacklers does not threaten but actually safeguards the commonplace acceptance of funding from tainted sources. It installs a process whereby demonization of the most pathological masks the pathology of the norm.  At best, this marks the triumph of what Hannah Arendt might label ‘lesser evils.’  It seems more likely, however, that the spectacle of this headline marks a textbook example of how power works to preserve the status quo.  The Sacklers now define and embody the rule; they become not just the devil we know, but the way we picture the devil, the standard of what we relegate to devildom.  It may mean a little less art, but it does not herald a new ethical scrutiny of the way questionable money pays for seemingly unquestionable good works.

Stay tuned. Time to question the unquestionable? The second chunk of the submerged iceberg may be even more concerning.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 3.

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Not completely out of work mode over the holidays, I hunted down this scene from Spectre, where James Bond meets his love-interest-to-be (Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann). The writers introduce her via a cinematic masterclass in cutting the cloth of a character in only a few strokes.  First the visuals. She’s stunning, chic and exudes self-sufficiency to the point of frostiness. To top it off, she’s French.  Thus far: necessary but not sufficient.  How to signal her utter exceptionality?  From the mouth of Bond: “How does one train at Oxford and the Sorbonne, become a consultant, spend two years with Médecins sans Frontières … and end up here.”

A wave of disappointment. In the U.S. alone, Spectre opened in 3500 theatres. My elite club was now registering Kardashian appeal. OK, pride swelled my ego, but I didn’t really want to admit it.

It made sense.  MSFness as a character prop. MSFness as a signifier of a cool, rebellious commitment to ideals.  MSFness as the goop of the beautiful and the anointed. This MSFness that I hold so dear, my own Ferrari of humanitarian cred, increasingly bears resemblance to the sort of acquisition Choire Sicha finds in personal consumption. “Polo shirts, cars, houses, children, purebred dogs, washing machines, golf clubs, boats. These are things we buy as a shortcut to an identity.”  We must add to that the things we do, because in modern society we don’t just hold jobs and take holidays, we consume them, with a meaninfgul life reformulated as an accumulation of purchases and experiences.

Humanitarianess. No less than James Bond was hooked. So was I. So am I. We need to talk about this from an ethical perspective: the role played by humanitarian action as the personal champion of my self-image. This is my exploitation of humanitarianism’s winning formula in the competition for remarkability.  Among other traits, this is my self-curated individuality and selflessness – my ‘sacrificing’ a more common career that would have brought far greater financial reward.  But how can it be selfless if it goes so far to defining my self?

And let’s not be so negative. Work that matters.  Making a difference. Saving the world or just saving somebody. A contribution to the good of humanity. The admiration of those we admire. The praise of family and politicians and donors and beneficiaries. How much is this worth?  What price can be put on personal enrichment and contentedness? Better yet, how much should I be willing to pay for a life of purpose?  Seems a bargain now two generations (in my family) removed from a belief in God that might have conveyed similar spiritual fulfilment. Oh, and it’s lot cheaper than psychotherapy or a swish yoga retreat.

Since Henri Dunant this selfishness was certainly always present. Times, though, are changing, and humanitarianism is arguably ever more co-opted by the modern zeitgeist.  Does the next generation not require a more individualized, tangible participation in the good cause? Do they not possess a thirst to be seen embracing all the right thirsts?  Swipe right for humanitarian action. Can you name a more effective signifier of virtue?  Here is Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org, speaking at a Davos panel hosted by IRIN: “Employees are the new humanitarians.… The number one attribute that millennials look for in their job is to have purpose. And companies need to give them that outlet for purpose.”

This is one example of what the IRIN article labels ‘the new players’, an assortment of newcomers to the humanitarian table who are “unapologetically redefining what it means to be humanitarian.”  A large part of me cringes, wanting to seal myself off in the comfort of humanitarianism’s exceptionality, in my club’s exclusivity.  Corporate humanitarians indeed! Yet I stop with the snobbery: we are not that different when it comes to the quest for purpose. 

Perhaps the more important question is whether this redefinition of humanitarians requires a similar redefinition of humanitarianism.  What happens if this changing of the guard exposes the sector’s ugly secret, the danger that my work has always been (ponderously) about me, then multiplied by the number of humanitarians?  

Even if that pushes cynicism too far, the point is the potential disruption of the charity model upon which the sector rests.  This life of purpose challenges the selflessness of our motivation and its insistence that benefits accrue unilaterally to the recipients of our beneficence.  Aid is not supposed to be self-interested.  Sure, we will admit that aid jobs earn us a decent wage and bring travel to exotic locations, but we treat those benefits more like incidentals.  We do not allow them to undermine the force of the charity model, and we rather easily sink into our faith in compassion as the ‘prime mover’ of our work.

The principle of humanity is compassion and it is definitive. As the sole motivation of humanitarian action it functions to distinguish it from other forms of relief aid. That ethical core needs to be discussed and it needs to change. In Madeleine Swann’s life prop, we can see that the ethics of humanitarian action must include a recognition of the dividends accruing to the humanitarian, and that nowadays act as a tax paid to us (and our organizations and donors) by the denigration of the ‘beneficiary’ to the lowly status of victim in need of being saved.  As I have written elsewhere, these are “the deeply engrained inequities of the Western charity model – plastering hierarchies such as rich/poor or developed/needy and giver/receiver or saviour/beggar upon nations, communities and people.” 

What might a better ethical model look like if not the charity model?  Perhaps it is useful (i.e., perhaps it helps deconstruct humanitarian power) to reconceptualize humanitarian action as an exchange, a transaction.  Not mere embodiments of compassion, but humanitarian action as an expression of mutual self-interest.

Critique of Aid

A new humanitarian Ethics? Blog 2

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[Updated 15 Nov 2018 to clarify that The 80,000 Hours is an organization of which there is a Cambridge club.  Apologies.]

The notion that humanitarian action must be ethical and that humanitarian action must be effective make for complicated bedfellows. As my recent paper argues, it seems a common trap for humanitarians work so hard on effective aid that its ethical character gets ignored.  For example, the need to act now now now that justifies, in seeming perpetuity, sidestepping downward accountability to local people.  Further and even more difficult from an ethical standpoint, accountability to the communities where the organization is not present: decision-making as to who will live or die . . .  is an inherently abusive power when it remains unaccountable for its […] determination of who will and (especially) who will not receive aid (p. 28). So it was incredibly refreshing to speak to a group of Cambridge students who have placed this challenge front and center in their lives.

Enter The 80,000 Hours:  Cambridge club!  That number represents the number of hours in a career.  The question the students here ask themselves – how to make those hours count the most for the good.  This is their quest for effective altruism.   They are working through the puzzle of how to be effective, such as by picking the most promising causes and working on the right problems.  They’ve even come up with some criteria to consider in making these career (or volunteering) decisions: “Working on a cause is likely to be high impact to the extent that it is:

  • Great in scale (it affects many people’s lives, by a great amount)
  • Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and
  • Highly solvable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).”

Of course, being somewhat more jaded than the average member of Generation Z, I force fed them a heaping dose of my Debbie Downer alter ego.  And you know what? Thankfully, I don’t think it made a dent.

Mostly, I tried to convey the profound difficulty in identifying the best way to do things right and, more importantly, the most right things to do.  I spoke a great deal about the narrowness of our inquiry – evidence that might show activity X worked in doing Y, but does not in any way consider the unintended consequences or the opportunity costs.  I spoke about the deep biases in the way that we assess/perceive a given action as effective, and the even deeper bias involved in deciding upon the right thing to do.  I described our from viewing effectiveness through our humanitarian lens, which explains why people in long-term crisis (e.g., the now-worn example of the refugee who has spent her entire lifetime in Dadaab camp) do not feel that aid has done a good job of meeting their needs and yet the agency reports on that aid will show that it was a rousingly effective success.  Targets met.

Their questions showed a personal commitment to thinking about this quest for effective altruism.  One question in particular left me thinking.  A young medical student posed two possible futures for himself.  He could become an emergency doctor à la MSF – head out into the world to treat people in crisis.  But he asked if that was not too selfish, because he could work as plastic surgeon and make lots of money and achieve a greater quantity of good by donating half his earnings to an effective organization.  Which path, he asked.  I didn’t know how to answer (which didn’t stop me) and I still don’t know.

 

The discussion did not hit a dead end.  When pushed, I had to admit that constant critical questioning of our aid actions can be paralyzing, just as Do No Harm was paralyzing.  For me, the way forward is to press ahead, recognizing that harm will be done: an iterative process of taking the best decisions possible (humanity and impartiality at the fore) and then assessing again and again. But this is an iterative process that I found easier to declare than to operationalize.  The excitement to act holds a powerful allure: to act too often, though, without attention to bias, long-term effects, opportunity costs, negative consequences and the like.

To the students at Cambridge I counselled restraint.  Not restraint in pressing forward.  But restraint in the personal investment of humanitarians in their own actions; an investment that soon overtakes their ability or desire to question it much beyond an immediately useful analysis of whether it ‘worked’, whatever that means.

On the late train home to London it dawned on me that the central ethical issue of the evening’s discussion had absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of our humanitarian work today.  The faces of those students are the faces of tomorrow. We talk easily about the ethical responsibility to bequeath future generations, for example, a liveable planet. Do we humanitarians ever talk about our responsibility to the next generation of humanitarians?  To bequeath to them a sector in which the culture has not just rid itself of top-down programming and #Aidtoo violations, but is a culture in which the 80,000 hours are as effective and ethical as they can be because the culture is one of humanitarians asking themselves and acting upon the hard questions?