Antinomies of generosity

Geoforum 38 (2007) 366–378 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Antinomies of generosity Moral geographies and post-tsunami aid in Southeast Asia Benedikt Korf Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Roxby Building, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom Received 16 November 2005; received in revised form 25 September 2006

Abstract The Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 generated a wave of private donations from Western countries – a paradigmatic case of generosity. However, more than a year after, a number of evaluation studies conclude that post-tsunami aid has achieved ambivalent results and that recipients of aid felt excluded from the reconstruction process, reduced to passive observers. This paper argues that there is a link between the abundance of generosity and the practices of aid: the practices of gift giving after the tsunami have developed a humiliating force for those who were at the recipient end of the gift chain, because the marketing of Western generosity by media and aid agencies reinforced those affected by the tsunami as ‘‘pure’’ victims, as ‘‘bare life’’ – passive recipients devoid of their status as fellow citizens on this planet. In a second step, the paper discusses the meta-ethics of these practices of generosity, thinking about the ambivalences inherent in bridging distance in encountering the ‘‘distant’’ other in our aid practices. Various forms of virtue ethics reflect this emphasis on the generous person, while neglecting the perspective of the person in need, and therefore implicitly reproduce those asymmetries of gift giving. In contrast to these conceptions, I want to argue that we need to ground our duty to help distant sufferers in their moral entitlement to be aided. This requires a meta-ethical approach that seeks a combination of a theory of justice with virtue ethics. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Moral geographies; Generosity; Gift; Entitlement; Tsunami; Sri Lanka

1. Vanishing distance? Three weeks after the Indian Ocean Tsunami devastated the coasts on Southeast Asia and East Africa, Ulrich Beck wrote in the Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung that ‘‘distance’’ was among the first casualties of the tsunami (Beck, 2005): cosmopolitanism and global mobility, especially in the form of global tourism, made the tsunami a personally experienced event beyond all geographical and social scales and borders. In our ‘‘World Risk Society’’ (Beck, 1999), Beck suggested, everybody tacitly knew that the face of this tragedy could have been mine. The enormous press coverage of the disaster brought Westerners (‘‘us’’) closer to the distant strangers in the tsunami affected areas (‘‘them’’). The large

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number of European victims made a distant catastrophe ‘‘our’’ own one and brought it closer to ‘‘our’’ attention. The tsunami attracted incredible attention and concern precisely because Westerners were affected and the media effectively communicated this affectedness to the Westerners at home. This ‘‘vanishing distance’’, it appeared, nurtured an all-encompassing desire to do something – to show generosity and as a result, unprecedented amounts of private donations and public pledges for aid were given for the tsunami. More than a year later, the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC) – a consortium of aid agencies – published various reports, which enumerate a number of failures in the delivery and practices of post-tsunami aid (Cosgrave, 2006; Telford et al., 2006). In its preliminary report, it is written that ‘‘the international aid community as a whole undervalues the very important contribution of local

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communities to their own survival and recovery . . . The international media also overlook local actors and focus on international actors’’ (Cosgrave, 2006, p. 9). The report also found that it was television coverage rather than any more formal assessment of needs that provided the basis for funding decisions. Funding decisions were largely taken in response to domestic political pressure in donor countries rather than on the basis of formal needs assessment (p. 11). The report further notes a lack of involvement and consultation of people receiving aid. This is by no means a minor deficiency in the delivery of aid: other reports mention that important affected groups have been left out from receiving assistance, that compensation, construction work and livelihood support packages have been inadequate (ActionAid, 2006). ‘‘Eye on Aceh’’ reports that beneficiaries in Aceh felt excluded from the reconstruction process, reduced to passive observers (Eye on Aceh, 2006). This has created anxieties and frustration and fuelled jealousy and social conflict (Eye on Aceh, 2006; Korf, 2005). The tsunami was often considered as a ‘‘pure’’ force of nature – creating innocent victims regardless of age, class and ethnicity.1 As Margalit (2000) has argued, Nature does cause misery, but it can’t humiliate. Aid – gift giving - has the potential to humiliate. In German, the word ‘‘gift’’ means ‘‘poison’’ – gift giving can be a double-edged sword, if it is primarily driven by the self-congratulatory discussions of those providing generosity to others. I want to argue that the practices of gift giving after the tsunami have developed a humiliating force for those who were at the recipient end of the gift chain. It was humiliating, because the marketing of gift delivery by media and aid agencies reinforced those affected by the tsunami as ‘‘pure’’ victims, as ‘‘bare life’’ – passive recipients devoid of their status as fellow citizens on this planet. Gifts provided to ‘‘victims’’ of natural disasters, appear to be unconditional gifts, since the recipient is unable to reciprocate and thus cannot enter into gift relations. Gift giving, in this sense, can become an asymmetric, ambiguous relationship. At the same time, the donors still expected something in return – the expression of gratefulness from the recipients for their generosity. This was the breeding ground of what I have called the ‘‘tsunami after the tsunami’’ (Korf, 2005) – the global aid wave that hit the affected areas that attempted to translate Western generosity into practices of aid. In this paper, I want to do two things: first, sketch out the ‘‘moral landscape’’ (Driver, 1991; Philo, 1991) – a descriptive ethics – of gift giving in the post-tsunami context and second, reflect upon the meta-ethics of these prac-

1 This perception is, of course, contestable in view of the political economy of the tsunami (Keys et al., 2006) – the tsunami did discriminate (Frerks and Klem, 2005): most affected were poor fishing families and especially women who stayed at home during the disaster. This relates to the exposure to the disaster. But equally, the survivors of the tsunami had different capabilities to cope with the disaster: foreign tourists received much more support than local fishermen and foreigners did not lose all their livelihoods as many fishing families did.

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tices of generosity and what they contribute to debates on caring at a distance (Silk, 2000; Silk, 2004; Barnett, 2005b; Popke, 2006), the spatial scope of beneficence (Brock, 2005; Chatterjee, 2004; Smith, 1998), moral geographies (Lee and Smith, 2004; Proctor, 1998; Proctor and Smith, 1999; Sack, 1997; Smith, 2000) and geographies of responsibility (Massey, 2004). The central problem is that of bridging distance in encountering the ‘‘distant’’ other in our practices of post-disaster aid. Let me briefly sketch the argument: empirically, the ‘‘poisonous’’ gift of post-tsunami generosity has emerged from the over-attention towards the virtues of Western generosity, which has produced humiliating force upon the recipient of aid. Theoretically, this is reflected in various forms of virtue ethics that ground ethics in virtuous behaviour (which is by nature the behaviour of those who have the capacity to help), but not of the person in need. These ethical theories implicitly reproduce those asymmetries of gift giving. In contrast to these conceptions, I want to argue here that we need to ground our duty to help distant sufferers in their moral entitlement to be aided. This requires a meta-ethical approach that seeks a combination of a theory of justice with virtue ethics. 2. Generosity and the antinomies of gift giving Nigel Clark has observed the incredible hospitality extended by local people to their foreign visitors in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami – remarkable small acts of kindness and unconditional generosity: ‘‘a kind of give without take, generosity without expectation of any return, hospitality without limits and conditions’’ (Clark, 2005, p. 385). Iris Marion Young has developed the notion that it is in relations of asymmetrical reciprocity that ethical commitments reside (Young, 1997). For Young, it is those relationships that escape the logic of contracts and exchange altogether and by this the antinomies of (mutual) obligation. A number of scholars writing on ethical geographies have followed her Le´vinasian conception of ethics as unconditional responsibility for the other, defining asymmetries as a condition for ethical practice (Barnett, 2005a; Diprose, 2002; Howitt, 2002; Popke, 2003). Generosity, gift giving after the tsunami, could then be understood as a paradigmatic act of an a priori opening, a radical receptivity to the alterity of the other – a questioning of one’s own self because of the shock presented by the experiences of the other which are so divorced from our own ones. ‘‘Disasters and unconditional generosity, then, are both ways of being thrown off course, of being wrenched out of circuit . . .’’ (Clark, 2005, 385). In this sense, those local acts of hospitality and generosity may be considered truly ethical commitments – the experience of disaster threw lives together (Clark, 2005, p. 385). But does this receptivity also apply for the generous donations from the West? The unconditional generosity of the other – the distant others in the localities affected by the tsunami – moved quickly out of sight in the media reporting and public discourse in Western countries. The attention shifted to our

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generosity. The TEC report clearly shows how aid practices were tailored towards the donors in the West, not towards the local recipients.2 This section investigates the antinomies inherent in this second type of generosity – Western generosity towards the distant sufferers. This generosity is not established on the direct, bodily encounter between donor and recipient, but is mediated by aid brokers. This generosity comes in the form of an aid chain involving a chain of agents to deliver those gifts from the ‘‘donor’’ to the ‘‘recipient’’ and to translate those gifts into ‘‘relief’’, ‘‘aid’’ and ‘‘development.’’ 2.1. Aid as gift Generosity towards a suffering other – in distant places – mostly comes in the form of giving gifts – material or monetary. In traditional societies, gift giving, as Marcel Mauss ([1925] 1990) attempted to show in his classic study, depended on reciprocity, on the set-up of a chain of relations: the recipient of a gift finds herself obliged to reciprocate. Developing Mauss’s idea further, Marshal Sahlins (1972) distinguished three types of gift exchanges, differentiating giving practices by the nature and degree of reciprocity: balanced, generalised and negative reciprocity. Mauss’s conception is ‘‘balanced’’ reciprocity, a type of giving among social equals. ‘‘Generalised’’ reciprocity emerges in societies with a high degree of social cohesion where the norm of reciprocity can be temporarily suspended or diffused through society, for example between generations. The third type of giving in Sahlins’ conception is ‘‘negative’’ reciprocity where the universal obligation to reciprocate no longer holds. This type of giving applies across a larger social divide and tends to be longer lasting – the recipient of this kind of gift rarely becomes donor in her lifetime (Hattori, 2001). Sahlins suggests that this introduces a new dynamic in the relations between donor and recipient, one that gradually affirms the social hierarchy over time (Sahlins, 1972, pp. 204–215). Hattori (2001) has subsumed foreign aid under this negative, unreciprocated gift. He suggests that the lack of reciprocity in aid relations reinvigorates the symbolic domination of the West towards the ‘‘developing’’ world. Bourdieu calls symbolic domination a practice that signals social (or political) hierarchies and constitutes ‘‘the gentle invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone’’ (Bourdieu, 1990, 127, in Hattori (2001, 639)). In Bourdieu’s view, giving is an effective practice of symbolic domination, because it ‘‘involves the allocation of material goods that are in many cases needed . . . by recipients. In extending a gift, a donor transforms his or her status in the relationship from the dominant to the gen2

See also ‘‘The CARMA Report on Western media coverage of Humanitarian Disasters’’, published by Carma International (2006). The TEC report ‘‘Funding the tsunami response’’ (Flint and Goyder, 2006) states on its back cover: ‘‘Unfortunately, we do not know how generous the public was in the countries struck by the tsunami’’.

erous. In accepting such a gift (i.e. one that cannot be reciprocated) a recipient acquiesces in the social order that produced it: in other words, he or she becomes grateful’’ (Hattori, 2001, p. 640; emphasis in original). Equally, Jon Elster notes that gift giving can become a technique of domination and power – and can serve the interests of the donor against the interests of the recipient(s) (Elster, 1989, p. 58). One could argue, as Barnett (2005a) has done using Derrida’s analysis of the aporia of the gift (Derrida, 1992), that there is never a ‘‘pure’’, unreciprocated gift, because the act of giving itself is always enmeshed in a larger economy of debt and obligation.3 Gift-giving negates its own principle: ‘‘As soon as a gift is given knowingly as a gift, the subject of generosity is always anticipating a return, already taking credit of some sort, if only for being generous’’ (Barnett, 2005a, 13). This relationship between giving and receiving (or taking) inscribes the gift within a circuit of utilitarian exchange that it is supposed to overcome. In unequal reciprocity relations as pertinent in global aid, this expected return for the gift is the acknowledgement of the current order. Hattori summarizes this dynamic, again based on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination: ‘‘It is this active complicity on the part of the recipient that gives the practice of unreciprocated giving its social power . . . eventually naturalizing the material inequality between donor and recipient as the normal order of things . . . Giving is distinguished by strategic ambiguity and the power to transform a relation of domination into one of generosity and gratitude’’ (Hattori, 2001, 640; my emphasis). While many people in Europe might be willing to concede that institutionalized foreign aid – the paradigmatic example being the World Bank and IMF – is partly driven by Western self-interest and expresses symbolic as well as material domination, they are often less inclined to acknowledge a sense of self-interest and the symbolic power that private donations might entail. These are rather seen as a form of ‘‘pure’’ generosity and beneficence towards suffering others, given purely on altruistic grounds, especially after natural disasters, because they are given without expecting a return from those ‘‘innocent’’ victims of nature’s force: how could those victims return anything to the generous donors? I want to argue that victims can give something in return – the acknowledgement of generosity through the staging of gratitude. Through these practices, the gift relation in post-tsunami aid reproduces symbolically the economic and political (even moral?) domination by the West. Symbolic domination, I would argue, is constructed through the pretensions of our unconditional generosity – our ‘‘ethical commitment’’ towards distant sufferers – which is not unconditional at all, because we expect gratefulness in return. Even Sahlins’ ‘‘negative’’ reciprocity entails some kind of implicitly expected reciprocity as

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I thank one referee for helping me clarify this point.

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Derrida suggests – the donor will still expect something in return, even if it is only (being given) the feeling of being generous. This expected recognition of generosity that the recipient should give to the donor produces the humiliating force for the recipient. The staging of gratefulness is the reciprocated gift that the recipient returns to the donor in the gift chain. Manifestations of inequalities or asymmetries in social relations are paradigmatic cases of humiliation. The disaster cannot humiliate, aid can. Aid may humiliate when given as a gift, especially if this gift is given pretending to be without expectations of reciprocity – aid as a form of unconditional generosity – an unconditional opening towards the (distant) other, although there are hidden expectations of a return. The donor implicitly demands something back, an asymmetric reciprocity, so to say, which is expected to come as unconditional gratefulness from the side of the recipient. The gift is not unconditional. 2.2. The gift chain in post-tsunami aid What are the kinds of practices that translate this expectation of a return into the gift chain of post-tsunami aid? In the case of post-tsunami gift giving, we do not find a direct, bodily encounter between those who give gifts and those who receive it. This relationship is mediated through aid brokers (Bierschenk, 1988; Korf, 2004; Mosse, 2004; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Sogge, 2002). Aid brokers are all those agents that are involved in ‘‘brokering’’ the chain of relations from the donor to the ‘‘beneficiary,’’ including organisations, such as private charities, bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, state authorities, local NGOs, and individuals, such as foreign experts, local experts, traditional leaders, local politicians. In the post-tsunami context, another broker has been particularly prominent: the media, both local and foreign (Post, 2006). These aid brokers need to ensure that donors receive the remuneration of their generosity – in the form of unconditional gratefulness of the recipient. It is this pressure to satisfy the expectations of the donor that forces aid brokers into developing humiliating practices of relief for people affected by the tsunami. This pressure was exceptionally high in the case of tsunami aid due to the incredible amount of money donated by private donors – and matched by governmental pledges for additional aid money. The private donors were a very moody and capricious partner for the aid brokers – in view of the large donations, they expected visible and immediate results that demonstrated the effectiveness of their generosity. These private donors were consumers of generosity (Korf, 2006a) – they wanted to see their generosity flourish and materialise in a consumption good – they wanted to see outcomes of their generosity – and the remuneration for these – the return of gratefulness. The media assumed – in their own understanding – the role of monitor and arbitrator to ensure that ‘‘our’’ generosity found its way to alleviate the suffering of ‘‘them’’ – the distant others.

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The public in the West insisted in being shown how their generosity materialises in new schools, happy children, new boats with fishermen going out to sea again. These images sent a kind of gratefulness back to the donors. The amount of money donated to a large number of different, often small private charities and the high expectations – the demand to get something back in return – linked with these donations created a highly competitive market among private charities originating from the Western countries (Cosgrave, 2006). They had to compete for public attention through media coverage and they had to defend their ‘‘brand’’ because they all needed to produce these images of unconditional gratefulness and ‘‘success’’. In effect, this forced aid agencies to care more about domestic political pressure than local needs in deciding where to invest their money (Cosgrave, 2006). Media and aid agencies often entered into mutually beneficial agreements where aid agencies provided access to the field and media provided uncritical reporting in praise of the agency’s work (Post, 2006). Most undermining of the social esteem of tsunami ‘‘victims’’ were rituals and practices of relief delivery. The visual reproduction of ‘‘our’’ generosity and ‘‘their’’ gratefulness as a kind of consumption good required a number of practices, which have had humiliating effects for those who needed support after the tsunami. Aid brokers were under pressure to identify and focus funding on publicly attractive, easily marketable projects. In Sri Lanka, for example, aid agencies competed for rehabilitating destroyed orphanages and schools or handing over material (hence ‘‘visible’’) relief items or fishing boats (Korf, 2005). These projects allow charities to demonstrate progress visibly, to touch emotions and affections with Western donors and to produce a theatrical performance of gratefulness from the beneficiaries back to the donors. These performances come in the form of ‘‘posturing’’ (Nanthikesan, 2005) – aid agencies showing and emphasising the efforts and achievements of the gifts and of the aid brokers (for building up their brand). Posturing also requires rituals of ‘‘handing over’’ where gifts (e.g. houses, boats, relief items) are handed over to beneficiaries who then perform rituals of gratefulness – by bowing down, by performing plays, dances and songs for their guests and benefactors – or by smiling (eg school children receiving new uniforms and books). Often, delegations of visitors from Western countries representing private donors travelled to the tsunami affected areas in Sri Lanka to attend such handing over ceremonies and performances, allowing a direct bodily encounter between donors and recipients. Donors wanted to see their generosity flourish and recipients played into this game by preparing those theatrical performances, songs and dances for generous benefactors. By this, the symbolic domination and the asymmetries between donors and recipient were ritually reproduced. This tsunami tourism can be considered as the counterpart to rituals performed in Western countries in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami: TV shows and

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galas were also arranged involving songs, dances and other arts to stimulate ‘‘our’’ generosity to donate in the first instance. While at that time, the media brought images of those distant sufferers close to us through TV and newspaper images, tsunami tourism now allowed a few selected donors to perform a direct bodily encounter with the recipient of those gifts. These kinds of performances reproduce images of gratefulness and reinvigorate symbolic domination: it is foreign agencies that fix the disaster, that help helpless beneficiaries, that demonstrate their superiority and by this reproduce images of ‘‘underdevelopment’’ as a lack of indigenous potential. These practices of brokering the aid chains have encouraged private charities to overemphasis the agency of their foreign personnel, the effect their aid is having on ‘‘beneficiaries’’ and to downplay local agency (Cosgrave, 2006) or ignore it overall. Several reports emphasise the lack of consultation and communication with beneficiaries (ActionAid, 2006; Eye on Aceh, 2006; Korf, 2005; Cosgrave, 2006). Eye on Aceh describes how local people felt excluded from the reconstruction process, ‘‘reduced to the status of passive observers while others lay the foundations of their future’’ (Eye on Aceh, 2006, Executive Summary). The lack of consultation and involvement created anxieties and frustrations among ‘‘beneficiaries’’ when delays happened, design of construction work was inappropriate and flawed, but these flaws could have easily been avoided by consulting local people. This one-way communication from the foreign aid brokers down to the ‘‘beneficiaries’’ also undermined the social fabric. Since many private charities felt more accountable to their donors in the West than towards beneficiaries and local state authorities, aid was often unequally distributed fuelling social jealousy and creating potential tension between those displaced by the tsunami and others displaced by civil war (in Sri Lanka and Aceh, see Flint and Goyder, 2006; Eye on Aceh, 2006). Eye on Aceh also reports that the marginalisation of women in decision-making processes reinforced existing patterns of gender discrimination (Eye on Aceh, 2006, see also ActionAid, 2006). 2.3. Bare life I would argue that these practices in the aid chain have had humiliating effects for local agents. The exclusion of affected people from planning the reconstruction process and the performances of posturing have undermined their self-esteem, reducing them to pure passivity. Eye on Aceh (2006) reports about how recipients of aid felt forced into passivity. They are only invited to become active when they have to return the gift in performing the rituals of gratefulness. Here, we can see the ‘‘poison’’ of generous gifts as a symbolic expression of domination. In the micro-politics of aid giving, this is symbolised in the rituals of giving aid in ceremonies of ‘‘handing over’’ relief items to ‘‘victims’’. It is here that the humiliation happens – it is not the tsunami that made these persons ‘‘victims’’, it is during

the rituals of giving and of brokering aid in a one-directional way that they become victimised. By degrading those people affected by the tsunami to bare victims, we derail them from their political rights of being (equal) compatriots, of fellow human beings. What we see and reproduce is a kind of ‘‘bare life’’ (Agamben, 1998) – the ‘‘pure’’ victims of nature’s force. In a sense, this is the new homo sacer of Giorgio Agamben – the bare victim placed outside of the ˇ izˇek captures this paradox when he asserts polity. Slavoj Z that one is deprived of human rights when one is reduced to a ‘‘bare’’ human being (2005, p. 43) – or a bare victim – without citizenship rights, profession or identity other than this fuzzy victimhood. Victims become homo sacer, bare victims, just in the process of handing over, of reducing those persons to recipients (and nothing beyond). This ambivalence explicates the antinomies of generosity: Of course, private donors in the West did not intentionally want to create frustration among ‘‘recipients’’ or ‘‘beneficiaries’’ or humiliate them. However, the expectation of return created through the practices that made Western generosity a kind of consumption good has forced aid brokers into practices and performances that had to reproduce the donor-recipient asymmetry and that had to demonstrate the agency of foreign interventions as superior to local agency. While it seemed to be relatively easy to cash into the Western affections after the disaster, it was more difficult to translate such compassion, benevolence and generosity towards the suffering other into a constructive relationship of aiding. Donating – practising generosity as a global symbolic act of solidarity – appears to be manageable, but practising aid as an encounter is more difficult because it involves the activation of a relationship between self and other, between donor and recipient, a relationship that is mediated through aid brokers. The core problem with geographies of generosity is, I would argue, that they invigorate compassion and emotions as the core virtues that should ground ethical action. However, compassion is not per se something that is positive for the one who is the addressee of this compassion. Compassion creates asymmetric relations: it is born from a feeling of superiority (I feel relieved that I am not this other who suffers). Compassion is also asymmetric, because the giving self feels compassionate, is active, while the receiving other is pitied and thus passive. This asymmetry creates the antinomies between donor and beneficiary – as exposed in the gift relations of the aid chain. I want to suggest here that the core question in the aid relation is that of dignity, respect and recognition for the ‘‘recipient’’. A small anecdote may illustrate this desire for dignity and recognition: After Hurricane Katrina devastated the southern coasts of the US, Sri Lanka offered aid to the US. Even though it was only a small amount of money, this symbolic act was important for Sri Lanka to regain dignity and to escape from the status as a ‘‘pure’’ recipient country, as a victim country. Now, Sri Lanka had also become a donor country. It also showed how Sri Lanka could feel compassionate to Westerners, being

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generous, within their capabilities, to the distant needy, but also to rebalance the asymmetric relations that had developed after the tsunami, where Westerners were always donors and generous, and Asians were always recipients and forced to be grateful. This symbolic gift to suffering Americans was therefore a small act of reversal or subaltern undermining of the dominant donor–recipient relation pertinent in global aid. 3. Caring at a distance? The antinomies of gift giving experienced in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami expose to us the difficulties of caring at a distance (Barnett, 2005b; Silk, 2000, 2004), the challenges of developing a spatial scope of beneficence (Brock, 2005; Chatterjee, 2004; Corbridge, 1993, 1998; Smith, 1998, 2000) and of geographies of responsibility on a global scale (Massey, 2004; Popke, 2003). These observations are important to reflect critically upon our ethical conceptions of what and how we should give to distant sufferers. In moral philosophy, the general intuition of the debate on the spatial scope of beneficence can be summarised as follows: ‘‘Intuitively, we seem to have stronger obligations to those who are physically or affectively near than to those who are remote. Distance seems to set moral boundaries, and distant strangers are accorded minimal moral concern’’ (Chatterjee, 2004, pp. 1–2). In classical moral philosophy, these debates emerged after a huge natural disaster, the deathly Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed thousands of people. This event urged philosophers at the time to rethink the sources of good and evil (Chester, 1998) and the moral obligations arising from this. The position of a partial ethics was taken by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiment ([1759] 2002) and by Jean–Jacques Rousseau. They were moral sceptics endorsing the view that our moral obligations were limited with regard to the distant needy. On the other side of the debate stood the encyclope´distes, such as Diderot and Schopenhauer, who argued that reason had to control emotions of selfishness and that a moral person would need to put himself or herself in the shoes of the other (Ritter, 2004). In those days, abilities to alleviate distant suffering were much more limited than they are in the 21st century. Adam Smith and Schopenhauer were particularly concerned about moral sentiments more than actions towards distant others. From these debates about moral sentiment grew a humanitarian discourse: Lester (2002) has shown how in the 19th century, a kind of colonial humanitarianism developed with a sense of responsibility for the plight of distant strangers. In the 21st century, spatial distance has become much more fluid: life-styles have become more cosmopolitan, global tourism has brought large numbers of Westerners into remote places where they personally experience an encoun-

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ter with distant others. The modern media provide detailed images of remote places and bring these distant places closer to us – at least on the TV screen. Our ability not only to be compassionate about distant suffering, but to act across those distances and alleviate suffering, has increased tremendously compared to what was possible for Adam Smith and his compatriots. But is this new dynamic in scale and distance reflected in our ethical reflections and theories that debate our obligations towards distant sufferers? The question today, it seems, is not so much ‘‘whether or not’’ we ought to care about and provide aid to distant sufferers, but rather ‘‘how much’’ and ‘‘in which way’’. 3.1. Universal responsibility versus relational care David Smith has lucidly discussed the tacit tension between ethical theories that emphasise the role of passion, emotions and partiality in grounding ethical commitment and those philosophers who have, following the Enlightenment tradition, emphasised impartial rationality and the concept of justice (Smith, 1998; Smith, 2000). Smith argues that exploring the possibility of extending the scope of care, in a spirit of impartiality, exposes questions concerning spatial relationships, human similarity and care as a moral value. There is a certain danger that these debates are reproducing oppositional binaries of justice/care, universal/particular, impartiality/partiality. One of the most radical positions in favour of a universal obligation towards the distant other has been formulated by Singer (1972, p. 23): ‘‘If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.’’ Singer pleads for a spatially, temporally and emotionally dis-embedded impartial ethics of global responsibility. Singer’s utilitarianism is consequentialist in its endeavour to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. And if we can give to alleviate world hunger, the expected increase in happiness will, probably, be much higher than the relatively small increments of happiness that derive from consuming it for luxury items in the West. This is the basic intuition of Singer’s ethical claim. However, as Singer himself concedes, this kind of ethics is extremely demanding for the ethical subject, because it implies that we cannot value care, responsibilities and affection to our closest family any different than our obligations to any distant (unknown) needy in foreign countries. It appears that Singer mistrusts emotions and compassion as a guide to moral actions, because this could incline us to care more about those who are (socially and spatially) near to us. Singer separates the obligation to help from our compassion and relates obligations to consequences of our actions, which are dis-embedded from time-space context. In his conception, ethics is based on rational principles, not emotions. Our obligation towards the distant other

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originates from the other’s unconditional claims towards those who are able to provide action that is alleviating suffering. Singer’s ethics postulates moral claims, which are probably impossible to fulfil in reality. This form of utilitarianism, Onara O’Neill argues, strains and overloads our moral duties (O’Neill, 1996, p. 265). The postulate formulates the obligation, dis-embedded from a political context; it does not go into detail how this obligation is to be fulfilled in practice. Universalist claims such as those of Singer have come under increasing criticism especially from those Feminist scholars who have defended a care ethic as a privileged virtue. Feminist ethics may consider distance and difference as problematic precisely because of its emphasis on caring relationships. These feminists criticise utilitarianism and liberal moral philosophy for its individualist conception of the self. Feminists advocate a relational conception of the self. From our relations to others emerge our moral obligations of caring for those others, not from abstract principles of universalistic rights and duties. In Carol Gilligan’s (1982) psychologically-inspired theory of an ethic of care, care is partial for the needs and desires of those who are near to us and with whom we practise social relations in our normal social life. Only in our own social life and in relation to others near to us can we develop compassion and emotions of care and of responsibility to the other. Care ethics is inspired by an Aristotelian notion that we should not go beyond the social ties of family love and affections in our moral care, since otherwise, our family and social ties could become strained (Tronto, 1987). This notion of care ethic is influenced by a ‘relational’ concept of the self, being thoroughly interdependent and rooted in experiences of attachment and vulnerability. The ethic of care implies a sensitivity to the specificity of the needs of other people, but this value of care seems to mitigate against the extension of care to anonymous, distant others. The challenge for these conceptions is how to sustain such caring relations over large distances – caring at a distance. Noddings (1984) has differentiated between caring-for as direct, up close and practised through relationships of close proximity and caring-about which is indirect, mediated and undertaken over distance. In this reading, the gifts given as post-tsunami aid would be subsumed under caring-about. Noddings’s distinction suggests that caring-for is more authentic and more attentive to how caring is received by the cared-for (Barnett, 2005b, p. 590). This would imply that caring-about – distant others – was an ethically secondary practice. Similarly, Michael Slote’s differentiation between intimate caring – based on personal relations – and humanitarian caring – extended towards others one only knows about (Slote, 2000) reproduces this kind of hierarchy with intimate caring being the natural model and the extended care just being added on (Barnett, 2005b, p. 597). Noddings reinforces this hierarchy by saying that caring-about can be undertaken out of self-interested motivation, for example to be seen to be a good person.

Selma Sevenhuijsen defines caring as a practice, ‘‘an ability and willingness to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ needs and to take responsibility for these needs being met’’ (Sevenhuijsen, 1998, p. 83). In this respect, an ethic of care can be regarded as a ‘‘species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible’’ (Fisher and Tronto, 1990, p. 40). Sevenhuijsen develops the idea of a life-sustaining web as the core of feminist ethics as an existential situation of mutual dependency (Sevenhuijsen, 1998, p. 110; Haylett, 2003). From our practice of caring-for, we may develop an understanding of the needs and problems of distant needy as well (Clement, 1996). Mutual dependence and reciprocity may originate from the temporalities of caring: roles of carer and cared-for in intimate relations are likely to change over a human life course (McKie et al., 2002). The crux of the matter in an ethic of care is that regardless of the conceptual refinements developed by feminist scholars, the very concept of care anticipates that care as a sort of value cannot simply be aggregated and extended to just anyone (Barnett, 2005b, p. 597). David Smith has questioned Clement’s argument above pointing out that distant needy may require different forms of care and support than our close relations and friends (Smith, 1998). The image of the mother caring for her child implicit in the ethic of care may not be an appropriate analogy for the relations we encounter in caring at a distance, such as in post-disaster aid giving. In intimate caring-for, reciprocity and mutual dependency is easier developed – for example in concepts of welfare – than in the humanitarian caringabout relations with distant others. Smith (2000) argues that the imaginative geographies that underpin the problem of caring for distant others (not caring about) based on partiality and emotions of care may not be sufficient to ethically ground our responsibilities to care at a distance. Clive Barnett makes a valid point by saying that ‘‘we may have arrived at the point where we can see that impartial values of justice, equality and fairness, and partial values of care, concern and responsibility, might not be so easy to separate as the distinction between justice and care itself might imply’’ (Barnett, 2005b, p. 592). 4. Aid as an entitlement Our discussion so far, both on a descriptive and metaethical level, has revealed the problematic nature of grounding ethics on virtues of those who act ethically, because in the current global socio-economic and political structure, the role of being generous – on a global scale – is mostly confined to a small wealthy group of people in the West and rather reproduces the power relations of those global structures. As John Silk puts it: caring at a distance presumes ‘‘the constructions of Northern actors as carers who are active and generous and of Southern actors as cared for, passive and grateful’’ (Silk, 2004, p. 230). Such virtue ethics about the scope of beneficence of Northern

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actors then amounts to an ethics of the privileged. It is the Northern actors who, in effect, are called to decide how ethical they want to be and how they ought to spread their caring towards intimate and distant others. Doreen Massey has argued that there is a certain danger that such binaries reinscribe ‘‘place’’ – the local, the intimate – as per se positive, and (outer) ‘‘space’’ – the distant, the remote – as per se negative. Massey demonstrates that this does not necessarily have to be so. Place, the intimate, can be contested as well (Massey, 2004) – as can be the local ‘‘spaces’’ in which care is exercised. Caring-at-a-distance conceptions ground the ‘‘ought’’ in an ‘‘is,’’ the empirical notion of caring attitudes as positive virtues upon which broader ethical claims are grounded. We cannot simply derive sources of normativity, the ‘‘ought,’’ from the ‘‘is’’, the empirical world, for example by deriving ethical claims from our observation that we do care more for intimate others rather than for distant others. O’Neill (1996, p. 149) points out that those relations that nurture care can also trigger vices, such as neglect, deceit and betrayal. Caring can yield ambivalent results, especially when care is exercised through brokers or intermediaries. Therefore, O’Neill suggests that these contexts (of care, of family and friend relations) cannot be constitutive of those virtues. Rather, an ethical theory of global responsibility needs to take account of structural relations in our global world. This requires that we look at the perspective of those who receive aid, generosity and help as well – those who are cared about and cared for as distant sufferers. What claims can they ethically place towards us? There are several possibilities in grounding such moral entitlements of distant sufferers. Le´vinas grounds ethical responsibility as unconditional because of the fragility and alterity of the other, while a Rawlsian concept of justice derives entitlements from a social contract derived from the virtual deliberation upon a just society. O’Neill derives our moral duties towards others from our implicit a priori acceptance of their moral status. 4.1. Unconditional responsibility? Emmanuel Le´vinas builds the conditions of ethical practice on asymmetries; he suggests a kind of primordial, unconditional responsibility to the other – ethics is not thinkable without an asymmetric relation, in which the self is always responsible for the other (Le´vinas, 1969, 1992). Le´vinas derives the a priori responsibility for the other as subject, as a response to the unlimited entitlement embodied in the face of the other and his or her helplessness and vulnerability. This vulnerable face of the other requires my unconditional responsibility towards the other. This responsibility for the other is not reciprocal in the sense that the other would have or ought to have the same responsibility towards me. My responsibility towards the other is independent of the other’s responsibilities towards whomever. Le´vinas declares that this responsibility for the other is universal, i.e. it applies to everyone.

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Le´vinas’s concept demands an ethical opening towards the other, which puts the self into question as well. It is this unsettling of the self through the encounter with the fragility of the other that has found strong acclaim among poststructuralist scholars. The Le´vinasian conception of ethics requires an absolute negation of the self and acceptance of the infinite responsibility – beyond any first-person sense of shared ethical concern – brought about by our face-toface encounter with the absolute other. Le´vinas grounds ethics in the acceptance of a boundless obligation towards the other: My vis-a`-vis – the individual other – is a person so incalculable in his or her individuality that I am presented with the demand to render help infinitely. Can we really transfer these theologically derived imperatives to the context of human inter-personal relations or our responsibilities to intimate and distant others? In a Le´vinasian sense, ethical responsibility is prior to any material or spatial asymmetries in the world-as-lived, and as such, a Le´vinasian responsibility urges us towards an a priori opening, a receptivity towards the other as a non-reciprocal move. This a priori opening and receptivity to the other – if translated into worldly practices – could provide some breathing space – to slow down the accelerating force of the modern aid business as Peter Sloterdijk suggests (Sloterdijk, 1989) – and deepen our encounter with the other, thereby attenuating feelings of humiliation in our encounter with the other. Le´vinas’s (1969, 1981) phenomenology of care locates the encounter between the self and the other as the basis for the generous relation to the other prior to the calculative exchange of the gift: it is based on a notion of subjectivity that is ‘‘the always-already responsibility to and for the Other, prior to any calculation or reflection by a selfconscious subject’’ (Barnett, 2005a, p. 9; my emphasis). Hence, one could argue that generosity as affection, as a lived, spontaneous expression of the encounter with the other, with his or her vulnerability and fragility, is a pure act, but becomes contaminated through the economising of the gift relation that may emerge thereafter. Clark (2005) seems to argue along those lines when he emphasises that we were thrown off course by the tsunami as an event. I would concede that there is something in this argument. However, I would argue that this differentiation may be partly misleading when talking about generosity and the global aid chain. At the end of the day, the person receiving aid through those gift relations involving a return does not have anything from this initial purity of generosity as it is theorised by Le´vinas as a theological principle, because in the world-as-lived of the global aid chain, there is never a direct, corporeal or bodily encounter between donor and recipient.4 Three aspects may further complicate the applicability of a Le´vinasian concept for our empirical problem of 4

I thank Nigel Clark and one referee for helping me sort out these different dimensions of generosity and the gift, even though we may differ in our views on this point.

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aid-as-a-gift. First, Le´vinas grounds our ethical responsibility in the model of an individualised encounter. We have seen, however, that in post-disaster aid, there is often not a direct individual, corporeal encounter with the other, at least not between donor and recipient, but it is mediated through brokers, other agents and institutions. This complicates the tracing of moral responsibilities along the aid chain. Second, a Le´vinasian concept takes again the perspective of a seemingly individualised ethical deliberation of the one who disposes of the capabilities to act ethically. ˇ izˇek asserts in this respect, rightly I suppose, that Slavoj Z Le´vinas’s concept of unconditional responsibility for the other reincarnates social privilege for a certain group or class of people, namely those who have the material means and the capabilities to be responsible and who embody this privilege of being responsible (Zˇizˇek, 2005, 37). Although for Le´vinas, I suppose, this a priori opening defines any moral agent, it is only the privileged that can translate this a priori receptivity in concrete worldly practices of care. Third, there may be conflicting responsibilities towards different others – which of these are to be catered for and on what ground is such a decision to be taken? Honouring Le´vinas’s singular responsibility to a concrete other would threaten injustice by ignoring the claims of other subjects (Barnett, 2005a, p. 16). Le´vinas adds a second dimension here – the neutral observer, whose perspective constitutes an authority to decide fairly in case of a conflict between a number of different duties to care (for different others). In this sense, Le´vinas’s authority of a generalised third – the authority of fairness – represents the ‘‘moral point of view’’ as embodied in abstract concepts of justice (Honneth, 1995). This is the tension that Le´vinas spells out in his ethics: on the one hand, there is the a priori infinite and asymmetrical responsibility for the well-being of the individual other; on the other hand, there is the reciprocal duty to treat everyone equally. This tension permeates all morally relevant conflicts – and includes the moral question of giving to distant strangers. Jacques Derrida captures this tension between principles of arbitration or justice that require to treat everybody equally, and the receptivity to the individual other that urges us to acknowledge the otherness of the person (Derrida, 1990). For Derrida, this tension represents two different moral orientations – that of law and of goodness. The normative sphere of equal treatment (justice, fairness) as applied in formal laws encounters again and again concrete cases that demand the acknowledgement of individual well-being and otherness, not equal treatment. This perspective change bears something violent insofar as it must transpire without any legitimation in a comprehensive idea of the moral (Honneth, 1995, p. 315). Any idealised purity of unconditional responsibility or generosity is – and needs to be – undone by the imperative to become effective for generalised others (Barnett, 2005a). And this ‘‘corruption’’ (Barnett, 2005a, p. 17) is itself an ethical imperative (Derrida, 2000, p. 79). But then, we need

to think about aid in terms of rights and laws in this postKantian sense that make aid effective for the needy others. 4.2. Entitlements as claims of justice Normatively, entitlements can also be grounded in a framework of justice using a Rawlsian kind of thought experiment, which forces the privileged to think themselves as the non-privileged, the (potential) recipient. Corbridge has summarised this Rawlsian intuition as follows (1998, p. 37): ‘‘there are good reasons for attending to their needs and rights as fellow human beings in a manner that will make calls upon ‘‘our’’ resources and entitlements’’. From this perspective, the moral or ethical dimension of generosity in giving to those in need partly collapses, at least from a normative standpoint. Caring about the entitlements of fellow human beings is something different than caring for and acting benevolently on (behalf of) vulnerable victims. Taking this normative perspective may also place us in a better position to rethink the practicalities of aiding, understood more as joint, shared engagement than as an ethical act of benevolence. Such relational ethics on equal footing gives dignity to those who receive. They do not receive a gift, but an entitlement – a claim which is independent of the generosity – and thus the virtuous acts – of the donor. A theory of justice as developed by Rawls (1971) would allow us to bring in the contingencies of our place in this network of relations and the ethical implications arising out of this. David Smith has argued that the place of birth determines already a large part of the life of an individual, and also the probability of this individual being in a situation where he or she will need help, support or care (Smith, 1998). This intuition can be translated into the Rawlsian thought experiment of the original position where we are forced to deliberate upon a just social structure (here: the relations involved in giving aid to those in need) behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which position we would, ourselves, hold in this global society. This deliberation is virtual, not real, but this virtual deliberation allows us to consider a situation where agents who are ignorant about their position in their society deliberate about just social structures of the very society. While Rawls has only applied this to nations, Stuart Corbridge has summarised a globalised intuition of Rawls’ original position as follows:5 5 It needs to be noted that Rawls himself, was much less radical when it comes to international relations. In his book The Law of Peoples (Rawls, 1999), he does not consider a thought experiment involving all human beings of the globe, but restricts this thought experiment to the leaders of the nations only and lets them deliberate about the relations among nations, not among global citizens (Chatterjee, 2004). This limits the rights that can be derived from such a philosophical thought experiment in the global realm and essentialises the paradigm of national sovereignty.

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‘‘Imagine the rich and the powerful are not yet already the rich and the powerful and that the chance of becoming one of the rich or the powerful is far less than the chance of becoming one of the poor and dispossessed’’ (Corbridge, 1993, p. 464). This Rawlsian type of thought experiment would force us to imagine the situation of the other in relation to the self and other selves. In this situation, rational agents would set the standards for a just (global) society, that would guarantee at least minimal standards of freedom, dignity and basic needs fulfilment. In this thought experiment, donors in the West would need to imagine how they would like to be treated or helped as ‘‘victims’’ of a tsunami, since in the thought experiment, the donor could also become the recipient – ‘‘we’’ could be ‘‘them’’. The needs, desires and anxieties of those who are now our distant needy could then be our own ones, for example those needs of tsunami affected populations in Sri Lanka. This Rawlsian kind of reasoning becomes more convincing, when understood as relational ethics, which combines justice with care. A Rawlsian conception of aid relations would start looking at the entitlements of those in need first, thereby overcoming the asymmetries of Le´vinas’s unconditional responsibilities. It would require a more symmetrical relation between those who are able to give and those who are in need, and it would balance the aesthetics of benevolence (the virtuous act of giving) and the ethics of giving, namely the relational process of giving. Such relational ethics, derived from a theory of justice would not reduce aid ‘‘recipients’’ to bare life, to a homo sacer, those living beings placed outside of our political space, but to compatriots with entitlements towards those who are in a position to give and help. Entitlements of those in need are placed side by side with the duties of those who are in a position to help. Again, the principal intuition behind this conception of aid relations is that those who are in a position to give or help have to acknowledge their contingent privilege of being born into conditions, which made this ability to help feasible in the first instance (Corbridge, 1993, 1998; Smith, 1998). This is different from Le´vinas’s unconditional responsibility, which is based on the vulnerability, the fragility of the other and thus on the asymmetries involved that make the other different and that are prior to the world-as-lived. One might object against this aid-as-entitlement concept, that it also constructs asymmetric relations between donors and recipients. After all, it is again the social privilege that grounds the duty or responsibility to help, even if in an entitlement regime, the individualised encounter emphasised by Le´vinas, is transformed into a structural mechanism of entitlements with a rights-duties dialectic. I would argue, though, that it does make a difference. While we cannot even out the a priori asymmetry between the privileged and the less privileged, an entitlement regime transforms a beggar or victim to a rightful claimant. Being a rightful claimant to support is something qualitatively very different than being a recipient that simply receives a

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gift from a generous person. (This is analogous, I presume, to the argument in Western societies for a welfare system as against a system of private charity and philanthropy). In an aid-as-entitlement regime, the donation (or imposed tax) is a duty imposed upon the privileged by the rights-duties dialectic established as a law or structural mechanism. In the case of aid-as-a-gift, the donation is the generosity of the privileged individual making her the good, virtuous person, but depersonalising the vulnerable. 4.3. Structural and virtuous duties Onara O’Neill tries to overcome the universal-particular or justice-care binary from a Kantian perspective, which emphasises obligation and duties. She places these two conceptions centre-stage in her own concept of morality (O’Neill, 1986; O’Neill, 1996). O’Neill suggests that we should afford equal moral status to distant others because we presume their status as moral agents in our everyday activities. To recognise someone as in need requires a cognition of this person as a sentient, intelligent human being with whom we share the planet. From this human sameness rather than from the fragility and alterity of the other does O’Neill derive ethical duties. This means that ‘‘we will owe it [moral concern] to strangers as well as to familiars, and to distant strangers as well as to those who are near at hand’’ (O’Neill, 2000, p. 196). O’Neill differentiates these duties according to their completeness and scope: she distinguishes between strong, universal (rights-based) duties and weaker (virtue-based) duties. The latter are not compulsory, but commendable. The stronger duties are collective duties – their implementation is a precondition for a socially and politically just social system. Those duties and the related rights are therefore universal. The weaker, virtue-based duties, on the other hand, address the individual and focus on beneficence, generosity and care towards those in need, but those virtue-based duties are not rights-based entitlements that needy people could claim from others; they are given out of virtue, not judicial obligation. Rights-based, collective duties are therefore primary to the individual, virtue-based duties, since only when rights-based duties are established to safeguard socially and politically just structures can virtue ethics achieve very much. In unjust social systems, virtues cannot make much change. On the other hand, it may also be argued that in such unjust situations, virtues are becoming even more important to alleviate at least the most debilitating plights of those in need. But it is to be emphasised that in O’Neill’s conception, the collective duties are categorical duties, addressed at the social institutions of a collective, while virtues are facultative for individuals and their ethical practice. 4.4. Operationalising the entitlement concept Onara O’Neill’s differentiation of collective duties as a priori to individual duties is a particularly useful concept

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for thinking about post-disaster aid. If we ground postdisaster aid on the entitlement of the distant sufferer to assistance independent from the virtues of potential donors, we will need an institutional form that separates aid from the generosity of donating. In principle, this would make the entitlement holder independent from the Western donor. This could be accomplished, for example, by developing a global emergency fund, which may be based on global taxation, a pooling of private donations given for emergencies or other sources of income. Assistance from this fund would be given based on needs of the sufferer. This would also make aid brokers independent from the mood of private donors and as a result, they could develop practices that are not humiliating, because they are accountable primarily towards the entitlement holders (and the administrators of this fund). This would also even out the asymmetries in private donations and public pledges that have been given for different natural disasters due to very different media responses. In particular, it would open up spaces of relative passivity and separation as a precondition for an opening towards the other, which acknowledges the agency and capabilities of the one in need and enables a hearing and acknowledging of the expressions of needs (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Barnett, 2005b). Of course, such institutionalised forms of post-disaster aid are, in principle, also prone to humiliating practices. Bureaucratic procedures, corruption and clientelism may again produce asymmetries between fund administrators, aid brokers and entitlement holders. Here, virtue ethics play a role in grounding the individual responsibility – in this case for the aid broker, not the donor – to the suffering other in the bodily encounter opened in the spaces of practised aid and in the complexity that this encounter entails, which forecloses simple principles of ethical conduct (Korf, 2004, 2006b). 5. The gift of post-disaster aid The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote that to achieve development is not possible without insulting those who are supposed to be developed, since those who want to develop the (under)developed other implicitly look down on the other, who is ‘‘less’’ developed (Sloterdijk, 2000, p. 30). Similarly, the generosity of aid giving to vulnerable tsunami victims easily creates asymmetries of relations and a patronising care or responsibility of those who give for those who receive. In the case of ‘‘natural’’ disasters, this asymmetric relationship may be even ‘‘purer’’ than in development aid, because those affected by a ‘‘natural’’ event can easily be viewed as ‘‘innocent victims.’’ In natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami, victims are ‘‘pure’’, not contaminated by human evil, as is the case with ‘‘victims’’ of civil war (Biser, 2005). Generosity and care appears to be a ‘‘pure’’ act, devoid of ‘‘dirty’’ politics. Grounding our ethical commitment towards distant others on a concept of virtue ethics reproduces global power

relations, because it conceptualises ethical commitment as a virtue of the one who is able to care-for, care-about or give to distant sufferers. But are those gifts to the distant sufferer the generosity of the donor – and could the donor possibly refuse the donation if she did not feel compassion for a distant sufferer in a particular circumstance? This is not an easy question, but seen from the volatility of Western willingness to donate at different occasions – compare the quantity of donations and the extent of compassion celebrated in the media after the Indian Ocean Tsunami and after the earthquake in South Asia in October 2005 – this would point us to the problematic that a virtue-based ethical concept makes the recipient dependent on the mood of the potential donor. Of course, Le´vinas reminds us that our responsibility is to be unconditional and therefore, we cannot anticipate a return. But Le´vinas still points to responsibilities of individuals towards other individuals. However, gift relations involve more than individual agents, they involve aid brokers, global institutions of aid and development and state authorities. We need to differentiate between those who care-about – i.e. people in the West donating money – and those agents, eg aid brokers – that translate this caring-about into a caring-for the distant sufferer. It is between aid brokers and recipients of aid where bodily, face-to-face encounters in the gift chain mostly takes place. O’Neill’s concept is useful here because she differentiates between those structural duties that need to set up the system right and places virtuous duties as important, but secondary. I have argued that these virtuous practices then become central for the aid brokers and their direct encounter with the persons in need. It is here that Marc Auge´’s sense for the other becomes central (Auge´, 1998). O’Neill’s concept allows us to bring some concept of justice back into the equation, which would give the distant sufferer a higher moral ground in his or her claims towards the potential donors. This allows a conception which combines justice and care. We should ground global moral responsibilities on structural duties, which are based on entitlements of those in need. These entitlements are grounded in a theory of (global) justice. However, for those involved in direct bodily encounters, virtues of care or a Le´vinasian opening are essential ethical principles upon which such practices should be grounded. But these practices will have to be embodied by the aid brokers – in a sense to open up and put oneself into question when working with the other in need. This may result in a kind of ‘‘autonomy-compatible’’ assistance which would overcome the paradox of aid that the one who assists tacitly undermines the autonomy of the assisted (Ellerman, 2005). Jacques Derrida has rightly pointed out the productive tension between the non-reciprocal, unconditional responsibility to the individual other and the principle of equality applicable to the generalised other that is grounded in conceptions of justice. These tensions come to the fore as soon as those principles are implemented and in this process

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potentially can transpire into a form of violence (Derrida, 1990). We cannot escape this potential violence inherent in universal principles, but equally, we should not leave our collective global responsibility to alleviate suffering to be subjected to the unreliable forces of compassion and of incomplete virtues of agents who have the unrewarded privilege of being born into a place, which makes them more likely to be able to practise individual virtues of responsibilities towards distant sufferers than those who are unfortunate enough to be born into less privileged places. Acknowledgements This is a revised version of papers presented at the RGSIBG Annual Conference, London August 31 – September 02, 2005 and at a conference on Moral Economy at Lancaster University, August 25–27, 2005. Valuable comments from Nigel Clark, Andrew Davies, Des Gasper, Tomohisa Hattori, three anonymous referees and Katie Willis as editor on various versions and parts of the paper are gratefully acknowledged. References ActionAid, 2006. Tsunami Response. A Human Rights Assessment. London, ActionAid. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford CA. Auge´, M., 1998. A Sense for the other (A. Jacobs, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Barnett, C., 2005a. Ways of relating: hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness. Progress in Human Geography 29 (1), 5–21. Barnett, C., 2005b. Who cares? In: Cloke, P., Crang, P., Goodwin, M. (Eds.), Introducing Human Geography, Second ed. Hodder Arnold, London, pp. 588–601. Beck, U., 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge, Polity. Beck, U., 2005. Das Ende der Anderen. Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung (14 January). . Bierschenk, T., 1988. Development projects as arena of negotiation for strategic groups: a case study from rural Benin. Sociologia Ruralis 28 (2–3), 146–160. Biser, E., 2005. Der gefa¨hrdete Garten. Rheinischer Merkur 3 (20 January), 25. Brock, G., 2005. Does obligation diminish with distance? Ethics, Place and Environment 8, 3–20. Carma International, 2006. The CARMA Report on Western Media Coverage of Humanitarian Disasters. CARMA International. Chatterjee, D.K., 2004. The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy. Cambridge University Press, New York. Chester, D.K., 1998. The theodicy of natural disasters. Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (4), 485–505. Clark, N., 2005. Disaster and generosity. Geographical Journal 171, 384– 386. Clement, G., 1996. Care, Autonomy and Justice: Feminism and the Ethic of Care. Westview Press, Oxford. Corbridge, S., 1993. Marxisms, modernities and moralities: development praxis and the claims of distant strangers. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11, 449–472. Corbridge, S., 1998. Development ethics: distance, difference, plausibility. Ethics, Place and Environment 1 (1), 35–53. Cosgrave, J., 2006. Tsunami Evaluation Coalition: Initial Findings. Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, London.

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