1.1 Social Origins of Famine

An undercurrent of popular resistance in rich countries tends to curtail development aid to the Global South. Nevertheless, the sums the humanitarian sector raised after the 2004 tsunami catastrophe – so considerable that there were difficulties effectively deploying them – illustrate the public’s greater willingness to alleviate suffering in times of acute emergency.Footnote ¹ The resulting discrepancy between transnational approaches to development, on the one hand, and disaster relief, on the other, emerges from moral assumptions about causality and economic ones about terminability. The sympathy for those affected by exceptional catastrophes is paralleled in domestic politics, where governments tend to make greater efforts to combat famine than they do in dealing with everyday hunger and malnutrition.Footnote ² However, compared to eruptive disasters like earthquakes, famine is an insidious slow-onset emergency that tends to evolve incrementally in a succession of calamities with a variety of intersecting causes. Famine is, therefore, a complex crisis of subsistence and survival that reveals vulnerabilities in the social order.Footnote ³

The processes of famine are triggered by external and sometimes internal shocks rather than arising by ‘spontaneous combustion’. At the same time, its causes are embedded in the economic, social, and political fabric of a society.Footnote ⁴ Socio-economic indicators are therefore more reliable than satellite technology or hydrological instruments for the assessment of famine, although artificial intelligence may combine such indicators in powerful ways in the future.Footnote ⁵ Consequently, natural anomalies such as exceptional droughts or floods need not result in widespread mortality. They may have disastrous and at times global effects on food production and vulnerable populations, but afflicted societies may nonetheless be resilient enough to absorb shocks, cope, and recover without major demographic effects. Thus, the tens of millions who have perished from famine in centuries past may have represented a largely avoidable tragedy caused by the inadequate performance of public institutions and markets.Footnote ⁶

Amartya Sen’s ground-breaking economic studies have contributed insights into the social conditionality of famine in regard to modern exchange economies. According to Sen, mass starvation is not ‘the last and most dreadful mode by which nature represses a redundant population’, as Malthus believed.Footnote ⁷ Rather, starvation results from the failure of governance or from purposeful decisions, whatever hardships nature may impose on livelihoods. As Sen has demonstrated, there need not even be an overall ‘food availability decline’ in order for a famine to emerge. The lack of financial or legal entitlement to vital amounts of food suffices to cause starvation in certain groups.Footnote ⁸

In this perspective, public action or inaction that results in people dying from epidemics of hunger or famine may be a consequence of (a) adherence to inappropriate entitlement patterns; (b) questionable economic doctrines; (c) irresponsibility; or (d) corruption. It may also be a side effect or a weapon of war. Whether famine is due to systemic malfunction or intentional abuse, officials tend to gloss over it or blame nature. However, Sen argues that democracy and famine are incompatible. According to him, a free press and a pluralistic political system are ‘the best early-warning system a country threatened by famines can have’.Footnote ⁹ Democratic governments cannot afford to ignore such warnings without incurring political repercussions, and so they engage the apparatus and resources of the state to prevent large-scale starvation.

Sen’s argument combines a rational theory of government with an assumption derived from natural law that there exists a commonly shared understanding of general needs and rights.Footnote ¹⁰ Although the extent to which popular consensus on the unacceptability of famine may impact democratic politics varies, depending on the organisation of the political system, the dynamics of the public sphere, and the nature of historical experience, such impact is generally believed to have a preventative effect. Even under repressive regimes, the activism of opposition groups or the government’s attempt to maintain popular support may entail a similar tendency.Footnote ¹¹ From this perspective, famine results from stunted patterns of reciprocity or their absence, namely, from the relative insensitivity of authoritarian or colonial regimes to popular acclaim as opposed to the ‘moral economy of democracy’.Footnote ¹² The decreasing significance of poor harvests for the emergence of famine in the twentieth century and the increasing likelihood that starvation is a consequence of war or ideological projects are attributable – apart from technological and material factors – to the spread of democracy.Footnote ¹³

In the case of India, Sen points out that dedicated public policy has averted the threat of famine since independence, whereas under the British, famine had been endemic. Acknowledging the immediate pull effect on food that a cash flow to affected populations has, as through public employment programmes or direct disbursals, Sen remains ambiguous about relief-in-kind. The provision of food may compensate for malfunctioning markets, but administrative and logistic capacity is presupposed. However, where markets fail, governments also tend to be dysfunctional.Footnote ¹⁴

Ultimately, Sen’s approach faces the dilemma that undemocratic governments do exist. Intergovernmental bodies and voluntary agenciesFootnote ¹⁵ from abroad may be more committed to saving lives than authoritarian governments, although they lack a formal mandate to act on behalf of those starving. Outsiders may also be engaged in hegemonic projects for which their humanitarian ideas and practices offer a partial remedy. From a practical point of view, therefore, international relief organisations, with their ability to draw attention to emergencies and their capacity for material intervention on the supply-side, remain crucial to the alleviation of suffering.Footnote ¹⁶

Sen has been accused of representing an agenda along Keynesian lines by proposing public works projects in times of crisis. The economic and legal (rather than political) understanding suggested by the entitlement approach, and its neglect of public relief and charity, has been cited as failing to adequately take human responsibility into account. Some authors have contrasted the legalistic view of entitlements with the assertion of provisions through active negotiation of societal rules. In accordance with E. P. Thompson’s moral economy of the ‘crowd’, this includes collective action and unruly behaviour. Sen’s analysis disregards ‘extra-entitlement transfers’, such as looting, that leave those who are well-off particularly vulnerable.Footnote ¹⁷

Building on Sen, Alex de Waal has introduced the idea of a political anti-famine contract that he links to a popular movement’s assertion of rights vis-à-vis a reluctant government. It is similar to the notion of a ‘moral economy’, although it excludes law-breaking and violent behaviour from consideration as a legitimate means of protest. While such analytical perspectives yield a more nuanced picture, the ‘political voice’ of the underprivileged is inherent in ‘Sen’s law’ of a nexus between democracy and the prevention of famine, even though the resulting administrative measures for subsistence may appear managerial.Footnote ¹⁸

Another criticism accuses Sen of failing to regard organised violence and intentional starvation.Footnote ¹⁹ Ever since antiquity blockades, scorched earth policies, and other ‘faminogenic actions’ have been deliberately used as instruments to subdue and kill.Footnote ²⁰ The emergence in modern times of ‘total war’ has aggravated these practices. For example, the ‘Hunger Plan’ of the German occupiers and their withdrawal of food from the Russian population caused four to seven million people to starve to death in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944.Footnote ²¹ Warlords in our times continue to deliberately create food shortages in order to starve target populations as part of the repertoire of genocide.Footnote ²² Democracies have also routinely used the withholding of food as a tool of warfare or part of sanctions imposed on what they considered ‘rogue states’, and continue to do so.Footnote ²³ While the purposeful starving of civilians was ruled a war crime by the end of the twentieth century,Footnote ²⁴ there continue to be instances of war, civil strife, and economic blockade that raise the issue of food supply, which Sen does not seem to find problematical. Moreover, Sen does not systematically discuss the reverse situation, where food may be used as a tool in power struggles by providing nourishment to select populations. Instead, he sees this as a positive force in democratic competition. However, the provision of food is routinely used in different ways: it may serve a country’s interests abroad, or it may be co-opted by authoritarian regimes and unholy alliances. The US ‘Food for Peace’ programme was a policy instrument that created loyalty throughout the Cold War and continues to serve US foreign interests today, while recipient authorities, for example in Sudan, have a long record of appropriating food aid for their own purposes. The distribution of aid may be correctly or incorrectly attributed to foreign leaders like Reagan or Gaddafi; or elites in recipient countries may not acknowledge the source of the aid and try to take control of it themselves. As a Sudanese official lamented: ‘Rather than the family seeing me as the main breadwinner, now they see another important person coming in at the time of my inability to play that role.’Footnote ²⁵ It is a neglected aspect of Thompson’s work that, apart from demands from below, the moral economy encompasses a dimension through which the provider of food symbolically assumes a parental role. As a manifestation of an asymmetrical power relationship, the origin of relief supplies is highly significant for both the feeder and the fed. At the same time, the source of the gift may be understood in different ways and may be subject to power struggles. The control of the ‘last mile’ in the aid chain is decisive for whose stomach will be relieved, and it allows for a strong claim of paternalistic credit vis-à-vis the final recipients.

Sen does not treat mass atrocities or the deliberate use of power, for example, in the negotiation of rules or through violent actions, nor does he consider how paternal food providers wield power. However, all these scenarios may be understood as the manipulation of entitlement patterns.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, entitlement to food, even when it is contested, remains significant for individual chances of survival under varying conditions. Thus, food deliveries may be perceived as charitable aid alongside the notion of entitlement, thereby creating a moral economy of provision.

Objection has been made to Sen’s supposed failure to capture essential triggers of contemporary famines. Stephen Devereux argues that ‘new famines’ (i.e., since the 1980s) may originate from unconventional factors such as epidemic diseases (HIV/AIDS), flawed political liberalisation and economic reform processes, tensions between governments and donors, or international sanctions. He suggests that the paradigm shift in famine studies from Malthusian food production failure over to Sen’s entitlement and market failure should be complemented by another shift that would encompass failures of accountability and lapses in humanitarian responses. This would switch the focus from natural and economic factors to a political orientation that recognises ‘complex emergencies’.Footnote ²⁷

Since famines today are less widespread and severe than in the past, there are controversies over which cases should actually be classified as famines. Devereux concedes that, while the entitlement approach refers primarily to access to food through market mechanisms, it may also be applied to the spheres of production and transfer (the latter with particular affinity to politics and ‘new famines’).Footnote ²⁸ However, his suggestion disregards the coping strategies of the starving, the significance of which is encapsulated in the observation that ‘relief is generally merely a footnote to the story of how people survive famine’.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, the shift towards failures of response and the raising of questions such as ‘who allowed the famine to happen?’ ignores Sen’s analysis of the significance of different political regimes for the emergence and prevention of famine, and his transfer-oriented recommendation for public policy.Footnote ³⁰

Sen’s approach may be more robust than some of his critics like to believe. A weakness of his perspective remains an entrenchment in the paradigm of the nation-state, since it fails to take international conflicts and capabilities into account. The weight of these factors may increase in a globalising world, although they have already been significant in the past and are certain to remain so in times of a re-emergence of nationalism. While Devereux’s suggestions may stimulate further research, his model seems to unduly endogenise the provision of foreign aid, making any absence of humanitarian action appear as a trigger of famine, rather than as a failure of its remedy.Footnote ³¹ Despite the advancement of a permanent ‘aid industry’ and the rise of ‘global governance’ as a buzzword of international relations, humanitarian assistance may still be best understood as the response to an external crisis, not a safety net to be taken for granted. The realisation that certain emergency structures such as relief camps and distribution centres disrupt social life should encourage the critical examination of humanitarian efforts.Footnote ³²

1.2 The Moral Economy of Aid

Humanity and impartiality are the main principles of humanitarianism. They were formally established by the Red Cross and Red Crescent movements and have long since been adopted by the humanitarian sector as a whole. Together they form the backbone of the imperative of assistance, whereas other values, such as neutrality, unity, and independence, address operational means to achieve those two ends.Footnote ³³ While humanity and impartiality may emanate from a specific tradition, as with the Red Cross, or a particular consequentialist utilitarian ethic, as in the case of Singer, they also mirror the human condition more broadly and constitute ‘the precepts of many religions and moral codes’.Footnote ³⁴ Both as ideas and in practice, these principles preceded the establishment of the Red Cross, although they have not always been standards of humanitarian efforts.Footnote ³⁵ Together humanity and impartiality suggest an active, needs-based, universal approach to the provision of relief and the prevention of suffering. This is also made clear by the fact that the Red Cross, and the codifier of its principles, Jean Pictet, define impartiality as encompassing the dimensions of non-discrimination and proportionality.

Providing aid to distant strangers has emerged from this broader ethical pedigree as the vaunted ideal of humanitarianism over the past 250 years. The same ideal is also prominent in the hagiographic narratives that sometimes displace accounts of actual practice. However, the extent to which the ideal is pursued and its significance for the provision of aid is controversial. A recent study of the ‘projectification’ of the humanitarian field urges us ‘to look beyond the content of ideas towards the way they are interpreted in practice and implemented, and the way resources associated with them are allocated’.Footnote ³⁶ In fact, the historical record of humanitarian efforts is one of both inclusion and exclusion. Even professional aid workers tend to feel greater attachment to specific individuals, such as their colleagues or patients, rather than being able to cherish generic humanity.Footnote ³⁷ In practice, ‘no one can feel all the suffering in the world with equal force’, and humanitarianism is characterised by its ‘selective patterns’.Footnote ³⁸ Even Singer admits the proposition that distance ought not matter for the obligation to help may be counter-intuitive. He therefore calls for a new reflective morality to supersede evolutionary-bred community ethics.Footnote ³⁹ At the same time, humanity is also an abstraction that glosses over existing racial and other prejudices, and prevalent gender norms, all of which frequently have a bearing on how aid causes are presented and addressed.

The discrepancy between theoretical outlines and practices can be seen from the approaches taken by aid providers themselves. In-group solidarity and special relationships have always been significant motivations, which under conditions of distress tend to morph into humanitarian assistance. Partly overlapping this phenomenon is the uncoordinated division of labour – or even competition – between humanitarian initiatives that leaves the needs of different groups of people addressed unevenly. In addition to avowed divergence from basic humanitarian norms, there are more or less subtle, unconscious departures as a consequence of personal and institutionalised biases. These issues all ensue from the conditionality of human compassion, for which universal humanity frequently serves as a grand narrative, while active sympathy draws on a recipient’s credibility, reputation, or similitude, and on strategic expectations of the donor.

Apart from the varying extent to which humanitarian efforts embrace the ideals of serving humanity and impartiality, their application is necessarily subject to external constraints. Humanitarian agents constantly struggle with insufficient means, with the logistic difficulties of reaching those suffering most, and with vested public and private interests seeking to manipulate aid. Such difficulties make the practice of humanitarian ethics ‘profoundly interpretive rather than enactive’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Humanitarian ideals can be translated into meaningful precepts only when directed towards ‘a second-best world based on hard-headed assessments of needs and options’.Footnote ⁴¹

Attempts to act under the banner of humanity and impartiality are therefore compromised by the concrete political and economic circumstances surrounding them. The humanitarian sector must seek to ward off political influences in order to safeguard a ‘humanitarian space’ (both virtual and actual) in which its own principled logic of humanity and impartiality can prevail. As such space depends on a ruler’s circumscription and on donors who may impose restrictive agendas, humanitarian action is caught in an insoluble dilemma.Footnote ⁴² The political exploitation of aid, rather than being an anomaly, is its ‘principal condition of existence’: it necessitates agreements with which all players can live.Footnote ⁴³

The economic challenge humanitarian efforts face is two-fold. They must (a) generate adequate resources for any aid emergency and (b) apportion these resources in a fair manner to fulfil the needs of individuals. However, the economic means provided by the voluntary and public sector for humanitarian responses are invariably insufficient for saving all the lives that could be preserved and reducing all the suffering that could be ameliorated. Due to these limitations, therefore, as well as delays in response, earmarking, and logistical bottlenecks, the distribution of aid tends to be uneven and sporadic, often failing to adequately supply all those who are in need. In practice, the economic constraints under which humanitarian efforts operate require choices across emergencies and among the people affected in any given crisis.

The process by which a relief agent adjusts a particular aid approach to the political and financial predicaments on the ground is key to understanding humanitarianism. We call the mechanisms of facilitating the supply of aid and aligning it with demand along such lines the moral economy. This concept exhibits many parallels to the market economy, including its dependence on preferences, its political embeddedness, and the risk of failure. However, unlike the marketplace and its material incentives, the moral economy of humanitarian efforts is determined by alternative ways of ‘“utility maximisation” through the construction of altruistic meaning for economic transactions’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The ‘moral’ component is thereby not something that is uneconomic or laudable in itself. Rather, what is assumed as moral may find approval; on the other hand it may appear naive, parochial, or patently unethical as it reaches out to the wider world. The ‘moral’ may impose the ideas of the powerful on others, or it may emerge from a dialogue among stakeholders. Morality and the emotional forces that support it will vary according to what individuals and groups believe is required of them and what they can afford. Such a subjective understanding of socially situated morals underlies the conversion of material resources into ‘moral capital’ through philanthropic acts.Footnote ⁴⁵

Compassion, as an emotional sentiment that yields moral agency, involves both heart and mind. ‘A sharp, skeptical intelligence’, according to a major work on moral imagination, has been seen as ‘required to ensure the proper exercise of that sentiment’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the moral economy, supply and demand are thus variables that proceed through a ‘dispassionate and cold calculation which alone can be efficient enough to be real compassion’, that is, through the filter of humanitarian donors and agents.Footnote ⁴⁷ Supply draws on the economic sphere, demand on an assessment of legitimate needs and the feasibility of providing relief. Both dimensions are characterised by radically unequal access to resources, and both depend on the recognition of moral claims. Supply is contingent on the response of a donor who voluntarily shares assets and may feel rewarded for giving by a ‘warm glow’ of self-satisfaction, or, in accordance with Marcel Mauss’ pivotal analysis, might benefit in various ways from a demonstration of power.Footnote ⁴⁸ Likewise, effective demand is donor-driven.Footnote ⁴⁹ It involves means testing or acknowledging entitlement, rather than being based on unfiltered requests by the needy. While responses to need may emerge from a dialogue with beneficiaries, they may also be founded on assumptions sustained by the ‘monologue’ of an external donor or relief agency.Footnote ⁵⁰

From a philosophical point of view, the stringent obligation to save people’s lives appears proportional to the effectiveness of the means available.Footnote ⁵¹ This amounts to a call for historical investigation. At the same time, the finite quantity of relief supplies requires an examination of the mechanisms by which precedence among aid causes is established. Luc Boltanski outlines the general predicament as follows: ‘The central problem confronted by a politics of pity is actually the excess of unfortunates. There are too many of them. Not only self-evidently within the domain of action (which requires a ranking and the definition of priorities), but also in the domain of representation: media space is not unlimited and cannot be entirely given over to showing misfortune.’Footnote ⁵²

The connotation of the term pity is problematic, but it is not as easily distinguished from compassion as may be assumed. In our context, pity indicates the painful emotion aroused by contemplating the undeserved misfortune of another being. The issue of justice implicit in this assessment is something philosophers seek to retain in the modern framing of compassion.Footnote ⁵³ In practice, voluntary organisations and governments need to deal with the moral economies of those who donate or pay taxes under certain assumptions and who have limited patience with objects of compassion. As a consequence, relief organisations sometimes downplay their altruistic motivations and emphasise self-interest to generarate a greater response.

The ways in which universal, in-group, or self-interested arguments and practices create moral reciprocity under particular historical circumstances (or fail to do so) helps explain the driving forces of humanitarianism. The strength of moral commitment may not ultimately be ‘a matter of physical distance per se, but rather of relationships that are strongly although contingently connected to it: relationships of family, community, country, and the like’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The advance of transnational patterns of interaction owes much to such relations. Thus, although expats living abroad might appear to act transnationally in dealings with their home country, their motivation may be entirely national.

According to conventional wisdom, charity begins at home. In the nineteenth century, Dickens denounced humanitarianism across borders and oceans as a self-celebratory ‘telescopic philanthropy’, driven by the elite’s imperial and cosmopolitan interest.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whatever their rationale, to provide aid remotely may conflict with notions of moral economy that are held by the ‘crowd’ at home. The linkage of relief causes to pre-existing interests across borders presents an alternative to both abstract universalism and tangible communitarianism. Such a middle way can sustain action and offer the possibility of eventually recasting aid to include wider groups.Footnote ⁵⁶ On the other hand, there is evidence of a humanitarianism that transcends both spatial and social divisions, although the logic it follows depends on the responding philanthropist or humanitarian intermediary. Hence, the moral economy approach acknowledges that aid to strangers will often yield gratifying outcomes for donors, irrespective of distance. This challenges ideas of universality and self-interest.

Likewise, individual needs are not easily weighed against one another. Their transformation into effective aid demands requires ‘priority regimes’, that is, the concerns privileged in specific humanitarian settings.Footnote ⁵⁷ The traditional ideal of humanitarianism is to respond to needs, and so its first priority is not cost-effectiveness. The ideal has been compared with Thompson’s moral economy of provision for displaying an ‘egalitarian sense of prioritization’ grounded in feelings about human suffering, rather than material advantage.Footnote ⁵⁸ The ‘ethics of refusal’ practiced by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is even more reluctant to accept market rationality, engaging instead in outspoken political action against the logic of producing the most good with limited means.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, there remains the constant ‘problem of picking without discriminating’ that cannot be circumvented by principled rejection of utilitarian economics.Footnote ⁶⁰ Patient compliance with the humanitarian regime, according to Didier Fassin, has become a controversial, barely conceded selection criterion for MSF, incorporating economic rationality through ‘moral judgments (about who were the “good patients” to be trusted)’.Footnote ⁶¹

While Singer and Pictet represent the different ethical stances of maximising doing good, as opposed to responding to individual needs, they both point to the difficulty of applying humanitarian principles where resources are limited. This raises issues of non-discrimination and proportionality, and ultimately of triage, that is, the appropriate selection of aid recipients.Footnote ⁶² Singer suggests prioritising ‘younger, healthier people’, as they need less assistance and greater numbers can be helped; directing aid to food producers may also multiply the benefits of aid. The exclusion of other groups facing starvation, in Singer’s view, would not pose a genuine ethical dilemma as long as the relief effort observes the goal of preventing as many people as possible from starving. At the same time, he endorses the conditioning of aid by tying it to population control.Footnote ⁶³ Pictet, in speaking of the frequent exceptions made by medical workers who cannot cure all those in need of treatment, suggests that priority be given in accordance with prevailing cultural standards, for example ‘to those who have family responsibilities rather than to those who do not; to the young instead of to the old; to women instead of men’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Pursuing the ideal of humanity, vulnerability becomes a dominant norm in accordance with which agencies target their aid. They apply shifting principles and procedures to determine eligible groups, quantities, modalities, timing, and specific purposes of aid, and seek to ‘minimize “exclusion errors” while keeping “inclusion errors” within reasonable limits’.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, societal norms and power structures may clash, as when recipient communities prioritise feeding their elders over the children targeted by aid programmes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Based on its practical experience, the United Nations World Food Programme recommends an approach that balances a concern for the poorest with a broader territorial or community-orientation by involving recipients, relying on efficient transfer methods, and avoiding expensive or unfeasible targeting strategies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has also been a ‘new model of moral triage based on human rights and good governance’ that has exerted considerable influence on aid agencies.Footnote ⁶⁸

Thus, choices determine aid eligibility across humanitarian platforms, based on different relief agents’ priority regimes and pragmatic considerations: their templates of suffering, victimhood, reproductive value, and gender, on the one hand, and their perceived options under economic and cultural constraints, on the other. The prevalent utilitarian public health approach seeks to minimise excess mortality, giving preference to sufferers with higher chances of survival if they receive relief, and neglecting those requiring extensive treatment.Footnote ⁶⁹ Some moral philosophers suggest that decisions be made by dividing expected aggregate moral value by expected aggregate cost.Footnote ⁷⁰ A current training manual for aid workers acknowledges the moral quagmire: ‘When weighing numerous considerations – including the feasibility, maximum opportunity benefit, minimum opportunity cost, maximum effectiveness, maximum cost-effectiveness, and timeliness of various intervention options – technical questions can quickly morph into major ethical dilemmas.’Footnote ⁷¹

Fassin, the humanitarian scholar who has used the term moral economy extensively, has anticipated our suggestion that moral economy refers to the allocation of scarce aid resources. However, his definition and predominant use of the concept assumes ‘economy’ to be an organising principle in general, which he then applies to morality and its constituent emotions and values, without further regard to economy as the sphere of production and distribution of goods and services.Footnote ⁷² Such a view has been criticised as confusing and redundant, making moral economy akin to the wider notion of culture.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast to Fassin’s vague conception, we see moral economy as a tool able to clarify the motivation behind a particular allotment of resources for humanitarian purposes. Three dimensions of the aid process characterise this concern: calls for aid, practical arrangements for allocation, and accounting for what has been achieved.Footnote ⁷⁴ Research has tended to neglect appeals and accounting in favour of broad narratives of humanitarian ideals and action in the field, whether in (conventional) heroic terms, or in (rarer) critical fashion.Footnote ⁷⁵

The present study updates and reconfigures moral economy as a tool for understanding transnational charity between the poles of the ideals held and the practices applied, that is, its system of triage. It stresses the choices and rationale used by aid providers in appealing to donors, deploying their resources, and documenting their efforts. This approach concerns both the ‘macro triage’ of identifying a larger aid cause and triage in its established sense of assessing priorities among the needy on the ground.Footnote ⁷⁶ We also reference two alternative, although not mutually exclusive, ways of understanding moral economy, despite the fact that the term itself does not appear in our primary sources.

First, with regard to the religious dimensions of humanitarian action, we examine instances reminiscent of the predominantly faith-based conceptualisation of ‘moral œconomy’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was presupposed at the time that there was a divine order given to the world, including the notion that there would be ‘an exact recompence for the virtuous, and a suitable vengeance for the wicked’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Echoing biblical notions of reward and punishment, the grace bestowed for acts of dutiful or supererogatory beneficence was often believed to be higher than the normal return. Aspects of this approach continue to resound behind certain twentieth-century secular variants.

Second, one of the prominent themes throughout this volume is the moral economic view that entitlement to subsistence is a natural law and human right.Footnote ⁷⁸ Singer postulates this as an imperative for anyone with financial means to act. Sen problematises the same notion with regard to the materialisation of entitlements under different political regimes. Thompson has traced entitlements in British customary law, citing the riots that took place when such entitlements were denied (particularly against the backdrop of the modern market economy).Footnote ⁷⁹ In the sphere of humanitarianism, the view that suffering people are entitled to aid is ubiquitous, although it is usually unclear what that means. On the other hand, the notion that they are entitled to riot is not widespread. In fact, elites far removed from a humanitarian disaster have often accepted their obligation to provide relief assistance, not only because they felt that it was the right thing to do for the distressed, but because it would maintain order and prevent social upheaval.Footnote ⁸⁰