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In this view, the refusal of Sackler funding does not mean morally cleaner art; it means less art and less public accessibility to art. Renowned photographer Nan Goldin fingered the Sackler family due to her own addiction to opioids, threatening to pull her work out of museums and staging protests. Further, humanitarian power to act depends heavily upon moral legitimacy, and this prompts a more specific moral principle that often guides agency donor policy: whether or not there is a direct connection of the wealth being donated to the suffering of people affected by crisis. Now, I don’t want to pick on the Monarchy just to make a point (or maybe I do), but their wealth has a particular history, one fused with England’s colonial legacy of violence and destruction.

Not completely out of work mode over the holidays, I hunted down this scene from Spectre, where James Bond meets his love-interest-to-be (Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann). This MSFness that I hold so dear, my own Ferrari of humanitarian cred, increasingly bears resemblance to the sort of acquisition Choire Sicha finds in personal consumption. In Madeleine Swann’s life prop, we can see that the ethics of humanitarian action must include a recognition of the dividends accruing to the humanitarian, and that nowadays act as a tax paid to us (and our organizations and donors) by the denigration of the ‘beneficiary’ to the lowly status of victim in need of being saved. As I have written elsewhere, these are “the deeply engrained inequities of the Western charity model – plastering hierarchies such as rich/poor or developed/needy and giver/receiver or saviour/beggar upon nations, communities and people.

The notion that humanitarian action must be ethical and that humanitarian action must be effective make for complicated bedfellows. As my recent paper argues, it seems a common trap for humanitarians work so hard on effective aid that its ethical character gets ignored. I described our from viewing effectiveness through our humanitarian lens, which explains why people in long-term crisis (e.g., the now-worn example of the refugee who has spent her entire lifetime in Dadaab camp) do not feel that aid has done a good job of meeting their needs and yet the agency reports on that aid will show that it was a rousingly effective success. Aidtoo violations, but is a culture in which the 80,000 hours are as effective and ethical as they can be because the culture is one of humanitarians asking themselves and acting upon the hard questions?

It is a short distance but a long way back to Abuja, passing a dense chunk of Nigeria’s 185 million people on the way back to a city that seems thoroughly 2018, with its glitzy shopping malls, luxury cars and a family activity centre offering rental pedal-boat swans. Shouldn’t neutrality go beyond examining relationships with political and military actors in a given conflict and towards neutrality with respect to the conflict’s drivers? To what extent do our humanitarian works underwrite inequality (in Buffett’s terms: Do the answers delivered by the right hand purchase the destructive capacities of the left one? ). It suggests that supporting charitable work enables people (and governments) to do harm by helping them maintain their feeling and perception of being good.