By Sebastian Hughes, Jianwei Liu, Etta Greenhalgh, Ane Echebarrieta, Derry Jay

Our exhibition draws on Fechter’s (2016) ‘Aid Work as Moral Labour’. This is the idea that aid work involves continuous negotiation among aid workers about what the right thing to do is in morally complex situations. Moral labour is a continuous cognitive and emotional effort, making moral trade-offs in the absence of clean choices. Following Fechter (2016), our game shows that the value of moral labour lies in its performance. Aid workers must continually work through moral tensions and demonstrate this labour regardless of whether their efforts produce tangible results. Throughout the game players will have to make moral decisions just as aid workers do, and this replicates the moral labour that aid workers constantly perform every day. The game is an insight into how moral labour is performed and gives players the chance to experience the moral dilemmas aid workers must constantly face day to day working in aid work. 

Through the topic ‘professions of doing good’ we have come to understand that humanitarianism is a highly nuanced field where achieving unequivocally ‘good’ outcomes is not always possible. This requires aid workers to make difficult decisions, which may oppose their personal moral values, but maintain their professionalism and neutrality. Our game demonstrates this complexity by presenting players with real-life humanitarian dilemmas. The game is designed for a minimum of two and a maximum of four participants, who may choose to play individually or in pairs. The players roll a dice to move across the board, landing on different spaces that may require them to roll again, move backwards or draw a question card. This card will consist of a humanitarian dilemma alongside two solutions from which the player must choose. Once chosen, the player turns over the card to reveal that one option represents the actions of a good ‘aid worker’, typically prioritising neutrality, fairness, or the greatest benefit for the largest number of people. The other option reflects a more morally driven, empathetic response. Depending on their choice, players receive ‘impact’ points, making them the ‘better aid worker’, or ‘moral’ points, making them the ‘more moral individual’. These two scores are deliberately opposed to each other, reflecting the double predicament that aid workers face every day.

However, there is no overall winner, as maintaining a completely clear conscience in aid work is often difficult and complex. We designed this to represent the realities of humanitarian practice where there are rarely clear victories and decisions often involve difficult trade-offs. This encourages the players to reflect on the limitations of humanitarian action and question how much ‘good’ can really be achieved.

Humanitarian aid is usually regarded as providing direct assistance to those in need. However, behind each distribution lies a quieter form of work that constantly weighs between fairness, compassion and sustainability. It is the invisible weight that accompanies every act of aid, yet it is rarely named or acknowledged. Anthropologists such as Fassin (2012) and Ticktin (2011) demonstrate how aid workers are trapped in structural contradictions: be fair, but integrate into interpersonal relationships; maximise the impact, but face personal pain. Every decision comes at a price, which is recorded as guilt, exhaustion or collusion in secret. Over time, these accumulated trade-offs reshape how workers see themselves and the systems they serve. Moral labour is not a personal failing of workers who struggle to cope. It is a structural feature of humanitarian systems that push impossible choices onto frontline staff while offering little recognition or support. Naming it as labour — unpaid and largely invisible — is the first step toward taking its costs seriously.

As we have established, the work of humanitarianism frequently presents aid workers with moral dilemmas to navigate. Often the ‘appropriate’ decision for an aid worker—at least according to the industry standards—doesn’t immediately appear the most moral. However, choosing that which seems moral will almost always face ramifications. Our ‘chance cards’ are an attempt to illustrate some of the dilemmas aid workers encounter and the consequences of each choice, some drawing on real-life ethnographic examples such as the attached scenario regarding distributing shoes (Trundle, 2012). 

We decided that our board game should lack a clear end, effectively an infinite loop that could in theory be played forever. This is to convey the challenging reality facing aid workers that, in spite of all their moral (and physical) labour, their contribution seldom produces any clear perceivable impact (Fetcher, 2016; Redfield, 2005). Fetcher notes how international aid companies deliberately set goals that are over-ambitious and unlikely to be realised. If significant steps are made toward these goals, the administrators are satisfied. For the aid workers on the ground, though, these impossible targets create a constant feeling of underachievement as their best efforts ultimately fail to live up to public and personal expectations. Similarly, Redfield (2005) speaks of how aid doctors operate in a system wherein crisis is normalised and temporary fixes are prioritised over long-term planning. The work of humanitarian aid is never-ending and rarely comes with a sense of closure or achievement. As such, neither does our board game; it’s an endless (somewhat unrewarding) loop imitating that of real-life aid work. On a meta level, our recreational board game is a metaphor for this normalisation of crisis, as our peers play along jovially, responding to real-life dilemmas in aid work from the comfort of our classroom. 

Bibliography 

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

Fechter, A. M. 2016. ‘Aid Work as Moral Labour’, Critique of Anthropology, 36(3), pp. 228–243.

Redfield, P. 2005. Doctors, borders, and life in crisis. Cultural anthropology, 20(3), pp.328–361.

Ticktin, M. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Trundle, C. 2012. ‘The Transformation of Compassion and the Ethics of Interaction within Charity Practices’, in Venkatesan, S. and Yarrow, T. (eds) Differentiating Development: Beyond an Anthropology of Critique. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 210–226. 

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