Written by Mya Damah, Honey Fisher, Isla Lees, Eden Palterman, Scarlett Penn

The game we have created, ‘Morally Speaking…’, is based on Fechter’s work with moral labour (Fechter, 2016a), which engages in the role of the aid worker in unexpected ways in the concept of ‘doing good’. Moral Labour is a performance that Fechter describes in relation to “mental efforts that may be required as an unwritten part of aid workers’ contracts” (p.241). Moral labour is seen as a sub-division of ‘immaterial labour’, a process with intangible products. As Fechter explains, “this is specifically moral rather than emotional, intimate, or mental, as it engages with questions of what is the right course of action when faced with morally complex situations” (p.230).

The types of moral labour we highlight within our game are ‘moral distress’, ‘working commitments to the impossible’, and ‘moral entanglements at the professional margins’. Moral labour, unlike other forms of immaterial labour, seeks to explore the personal motivations and desires to do good. The game we created involves counters which materialises the debate around the best course of action to do good.

 

Cambodia was the background context for our game. Through using websites such as Amnesty International (2023) and Fechter’s ethnographic work, we created real-life contexts for moral dilemmas that aid workers might experience as they go through daily life. These contexts include the forced eviction crisis, indigenous people’s rights, and natural disasters that have affected aid workers and recipients in camps.

Our game is about players navigating moral dilemmas that emerge in the field through embodying their assigned character profiles and evaluating other players’ responses to these dilemmas. This places the moral dilemmas that humanitarian aid workers experiences as central to the discussions of humanitarian action as an active process, rather than an assumed and expected part of their job. We consider this a response to Fechter’s critique of past work that “often more thoroughly covers the ‘humanitarian imperative’ but less extensively do they cover the understanding of aid and development assistance in moral frameworks of the gift or ‘doing good’” (Fechter, 2016, p.228).

We hope to highlight the difficulty and labour in making moral decisions and how this moral labour is distributed as moral dilemmas have divergent impacts on people in different organisational roles and positionalities. Thus, we show how responses to dilemmas will never create a complete consensus within aid organisations. This builds from Fechter’s position that “being an aid worker means being placed in positions where one is called upon to perform moral labour…this moral labour also entails dealing with the possible consequences [conflicts] such as alienating colleagues or superiors and acknowledging the limits of their capacity to involve”.

For example, our character Max, an expat who runs the monetary aspects of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), could make a decision based on what’s financially favourable in his view. Charaya, the national aid worker in MSF, could morally disagree with this perspective based on her in-field experiences and relations. Equally, Charaya could decide to join people in the camp in a political protest which may upset Max as he relies on the organisation’s politically neutral stance and will not want to upset the local governments and risk donor dropouts.

Through discussing moral dilemmas as characters in our game and reflecting on how many red or green counters each player has at the end of the game, we provide players with experiences that place them into such entanglements allowing them to embody and thus better understand the contextualised weight of moral labour and the subsequent “moments of distress” (Fechter, 2016.p.231). This will encourage players to reflect on these differing relationships of agreement and disagreement within organisations and what this could mean for the morality and distribution of responsibility of real-life decisions made in the field.

We hope that this shows the paradoxes of the personal, the political and, the organisational within ‘doing good’, such as those Redfield (2006) explores through tensions within ‘temoignage’ and the hardships of those “who are struggling to reconcile these contrasting elements of their personal and professional selves” (Fechter, 2016, p.229). The aspect of players presenting red and green counters, based on whether another character’s decision in a ‘moral dilemma’, benefits or disadvantages their character, highlights this inherent conflict that efforts to do good create throughout different hierarchal levels in the company.

Upon reflection, we made the conscious decision to not include an aid recipient as one of our character profile cards. This is to highlight Fechter’s discussion on the ‘reflective but not participatory’ nature of moral labour’; exclusion of the aid recipient as active decision makers and how moral labour is “held exclusively among those making or in the process of making decisions to affect others- collective but doesn’t include those actually affected by the morality of decisions.” (Fechter, 2016, p.240).

In creating these experiences of moral distress and tension within our game, we outline our main argument that moral labour is central to the work of aid workers, although often overlooked, and is distributed unevenly across organisations, resulting in often conflicting definitions of the ‘right thing to do’. Doing good within a humanitarian aid role often looks messy and contested because doing what you think is right will upset someone else. This point links to Berlant’s argument that compassion is non-organic and entwined with undesirable outcomes: the “desires for progress in some places are, so often accompanied by comfort with other social wrongs” (Berlant, 2004, p.5). Overall, morality in our game presents itself as the prioritisation of one need over another rather than a pure good.

Bibliography

Berlant, L. (2004) ‘Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)’, in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-13.

(2023). Cambodia 2023. Amnesty International. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-east-asia-and-the-pacific/cambodia/report-cambodia/. (Accessed: 20.11.2024).

Fechter, A.-M. (2016a). ‘Aid work as moral labour’ Critique of Anthropology, 36 (3), pp. 228-243.

Fechter, A.-M. (2016b). ‘‘Living well’ while ‘doing good’? (missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work’. In The personal and the professional in aid work. Routledge, pp. 89-105.

Redfield, P. (2006) ‘A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement’, American Ethnologist, 33(1), pp. 3–26.

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Written by Nobusuke Akaike, Charlotte Antilogus, Bethany Croucher, Natalie, Kaza, Tilly Neville, Samson Page, and Madeleine Raggett.

Aims

By the end of the lesson, students will understand:

• That who people choose to help is based on their political assumptions of who they see as ‘in need’
• That we all have these biases and they have a considerable impact on our understanding of important ideas such as compassion
• That these biases and the choices based upon them are informed by global unequal power relations
• That this unequal power relation does not simply span between nations, but also within each nation, and can come in many forms
• That anthropology’s look at compassion is important in exposing these kinds of power relations and denaturalising the way we look at humanitarian action as a top-down viewpoint

Resources

• Example Google Docs Presentation – compassion SOAN beyond dev
• Computer, Projector and Screen
• Access to PowerPoint
• Mobile phone and access to wifi
• Mentimeter website (menti) – this is a website that allows students to input their answers anonymously to pre-designed questions. Answers can be made into mind maps or graphs which enables easy discussion about the question and encourages collaborative work.
• YouTube

Background (for teachers)

Scholars in anthropology and beyond complicate our understanding of compassion by relating it to the concepts of ‘pity’ and ‘inequality’, for example.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that compassion exists in a face-to-face situation and that pity arises in a more public, distant situation (Boltanski 1999). In other words, Arendt suggests that distance creates pity and not compassion.

Social anthropologist Didier Fassin (2012) argues that humanitarianism is always a mix of assistance and domination, of solidarity and inequality. In other words, Fassin shows that the compassion central to humanitarian action inherently consists of domination, inequality, and power.

Political and legal anthropologist Heath Cabot (2012) analyses how the process of becoming an asylum seeker in Greece is filled with uncertainty, with some being favoured unfairly over others. This humanitarian aid takes place in Greece which is seen as a ‘developed country’ and this reading therefore complicates the assumption humanitarianism only happens in developing countries.

Social anthropologist Miriam Ticktin (2006) ethnographically shows that medical aid reproduces inequalities, as migrants purposefully infect themselves with HIV to qualify as ‘good’ victims who deserve humanitarian compassion. Like Cabot’s work, this aid takes place in France, a developed country.

These two ethnographic examples illustrate the theoretical claims made by Fassin and Arendt. They show how compassion is political – it is enmeshed in global power relations and produced by cultural and political assumptions of who is ‘in need’ (and who is not).

Student Brief

Anthropology is the cross-cultural study of human society and culture. Its main aim is to question assumptions we may have of the world in order to understand ourselves and others better. Within this lesson we will look at compassion in relation to humanitarian aid anthropologically. Humanitarian aid is the material and logistical assistance offered to those in need of help and is often assumed to be given to developing countries from developed countries. The concept of ‘developing countries’ refers to countries with a low quality of life, less developed economy and diminished technological infrastructure relative to other more industrialized countries. Meanwhile ‘developed countries’ are considered to have a high quality of life, a developed economy and developed technological infrastructure. Using anthropological work on compassion we plan to complicate the assumption humanitarian aid only takes place in developing countries.

To prepare for this lesson, start thinking about how you understand ‘compassion’ and what other things you associate it with.

Sections 1 – 4

Section 1 – Outlining objectives

• Revisit Aims section.
• Briefly go over and clarify ‘developing’ vs ‘developed’ countries (BBC bitesize definition).

Section 2 – Exploring compassion

• Exploring how the class understands and defines compassion using the menti task below:
  • Menti Task 1: Each student comes up with three words for what they understand ‘compassion’ as (see below mind map with potential answers). You might expect answers such as love, sympathy, giving, kindness, etc.
  • Menti Task 2: group discussion – where does compassion come from? You might expect answers such as ‘from a feeling’, ‘from the heart’, etc.

• Then show that compassion is more that a ‘natural’ impulse or feeling:
  • Menti Task 3: group discussion, how would we choose to show our compassion? The students will debate how they would distribute £100? You might expect answers such as Oliver Twist and Annie receiving more of the £100 and Tony Stark and Homer Simpson receiving less. Teachers can change the characters to accommodate the specific interests of their students.
• Teachers will root these activities and the complication of compassion as natural in Arendt’s and Fassin’s understandings of the concept. Through this, students should reach the understanding that the decisions they have just made were based on preconceived ideas of what compassion is, and that this idea is more complicated than that.

Section 3 – Compassion beyond the developing world

• Now that the students have been introduced to how compassion is entangled within problems of inequality, use Ticktin and Cabot’s ethnographic examples to expand their understanding, by situating compassion within the developed world.
• To further illustrate Arendt and Fassin’s ideas in an age-friendly way, use the examples from the “barbiesavior” Instagram (below). This should engage them in how top-down patterns of aid may be problematic, or deemed patronising, as compassion is given to those considered in the poorest conditions. It also introduces them to colonialism, a key topic addressed in anthropology, as aid is often seen to be given to ‘third-world’ countries, despite being needed even within the UK.

 

    

Source: Instagram 2019

• Teachers should encourage the students to research and apply this to real-word topics, such as with the European migrant crisis. Note, this may contain distressing material so should be approached sensitively.

Section 4 – Summary

• Revisit the key points and learning objectives: repeat Menti task 1 to show how class understandings of compassion might have changed from their initial thoughts on the subject.
• Get into small groups to discuss how their understandings have changed, with each group then sharing with the class what they have learnt and taken away from the lesson. 

Bibliography

BarbieSavior (2021). Instagram. [online] www.instagram.com. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/barbiesavior/.

BBC Bitesize (2021). ‘Differences in levels of development between developing countries’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zt666sg/revision/1

Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant Suffering. [online] assets.cambridge.org. [online] Available at: https://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/59536/excerpt/9780521659536_excerpt.pdf.

Cabot, H. (2012) ‘The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the Greek Asylum Procedure’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), 35(1), pp. 11–29.

Child Poverty Action Group (2020). ‘Child poverty facts and figures’. [online] CPAG. Available at: https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

Fassin, D. (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2001) Critical Thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ticktin, M. (2006) ‘Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France’, American Ethnologist, 33(1), pp. 33–49.

UnicefUK (2012). ‘Pupils speak out about UK child poverty’. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBVYA-3ASt0

 

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