{"id":2664,"date":"2024-11-25T22:32:43","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T22:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/anthropology-of-aid\/?page_id=2664"},"modified":"2024-11-25T22:49:34","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T22:49:34","slug":"2024-5-morally-speaking","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/anthropology-of-aid\/the-issues\/professions-of-doing-good\/2024-5-morally-speaking\/","title":{"rendered":"(2024-5) Morally Speaking…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Written by Mya Damah, Honey Fisher, Isla Lees, Eden Palterman, Scarlett Penn<\/p>\n

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The game we have created, \u2018Morally Speaking\u2026\u2019, is based on Fechter\u2019s work with moral labour (Fechter, 2016a), which engages in the role of the aid worker in unexpected ways in the concept of \u2018doing good\u2019. Moral Labour is a performance that Fechter describes in relation to \u201cmental efforts that may be required as an unwritten part of aid workers\u2019 contracts\u201d (p.241). Moral labour is seen as a sub-division of \u2018immaterial labour\u2019, a process with intangible products. As Fechter explains, \u201cthis 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\u201d (p.230).<\/p>\n

The types of moral labour we highlight within our game are \u2018moral distress\u2019, \u2018working commitments to the impossible\u2019, and \u2018moral entanglements at the professional margins\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

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Cambodia was the background context for our game. Through using websites such as Amnesty International (2023) and Fechter\u2019s ethnographic work, we created\u00a0real-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\u2019s rights, and natural disasters that have affected aid workers and recipients in camps.<\/p>\n

Our game is about players\u00a0navigating moral dilemmas that emerge in the field through embodying their assigned character profiles and evaluating other players\u2019 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\u2019s critique of past work that \u201coften more thoroughly covers the \u2018humanitarian imperative\u2019 but less extensively do they cover the understanding of aid and development assistance in moral frameworks of the gift or \u2018doing good\u2019\u201d (Fechter, 2016, p.228).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s position that \u201cbeing an aid worker means being placed in positions where one is called upon to perform moral labour\u2026this 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\u201d.<\/p>\n

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For example, our character Max, an expat who runs the monetary aspects of the NGO M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (MSF), could make a decision based on what\u2019s 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\u2019s politically neutral stance and will not want to upset the local governments and risk donor dropouts.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmoments of distress\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

We hope that this shows the paradoxes of the personal, the political and, the organisational within \u2018doing good\u2019, such as those Redfield (2006) explores through tensions within \u2018temoignage\u2019 and the hardships of those \u201cwho are struggling to reconcile these contrasting elements of their personal and professional selves\u201d (Fechter, 2016, p.229). The aspect of players presenting red and green counters, based on whether another character\u2019s decision in a \u2018moral dilemma\u2019, benefits or disadvantages their character, highlights this inherent conflict that efforts to do good create throughout different hierarchal levels in the company.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s discussion on the \u2018reflective but not participatory\u2019 nature of moral labour\u2019; exclusion of the aid recipient as active decision makers and how moral labour is \u201cheld exclusively among those making or in the process of making decisions to affect others- collective but doesn\u2019t include those actually affected by the morality of decisions.\u201d (Fechter, 2016, p.240).<\/p>\n

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 \u2018right thing to do\u2019. 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\u2019s argument that compassion is non-organic and entwined with undesirable outcomes: the \u201cdesires for progress in some places are, so often accompanied by comfort with other social wrongs\u201d (Berlant, 2004, p.5). Overall, morality in our game presents itself as the prioritisation of one need over another rather than a pure good.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Berlant, L. (2004) \u2018Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)\u2019, in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion<\/em>. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-13.<\/p>\n

(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\/<\/a>. (Accessed: 20.11.2024).<\/p>\n

Fechter, A.-M. (2016a). \u2018Aid work as moral labour\u2019 Critique of Anthropology,<\/em> 36 (3), pp. 228-243.<\/p>\n

Fechter, A.-M. (2016b). ‘\u2018Living well\u2019 while \u2018doing good\u2019? (missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work’. In\u00a0The personal and the professional in aid work.<\/em>\u00a0Routledge, pp. 89-105.<\/p>\n

Redfield, P. (2006) \u2018A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement\u2019, American Ethnologist<\/em>, 33(1), pp. 3\u201326.<\/p>\n

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Related<\/h1>\n\n

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Written by Nobusuke Akaike, Charlotte Antilogus, Bethany Croucher, Natalie, Kaza, Tilly Neville, Samson Page, and Madeleine Raggett.<\/p>\n

Aims<\/h1>\n

By the end of the lesson, students will understand:<\/p>\n