This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian and the original article can be found on their site.
By Abby Stoddard
As of this writing, dozens of major humanitarian organisations are in legal limbo in Gaza, their registrations revoked by Israel for refusing to hand over personal data on their Palestinian staff, and saved from full expulsion only by a last-minute Supreme Court injunction.
Their pushback is justified. In the deadliest operating environment for aid workers in the world, where more than 500 Palestinian aid workers have been killed since the conflict began, furnishing that information to a party to the conflict could put staff at further risk. Yet these organisations may soon face a wrenching choice: comply, or watch the people they serve lose access to half of Gaza’s food assistance and 60% of its functioning field hospitals.
Dilemmas like these are pervasive in humanitarian action: Taliban officials inform your organisation that all female staff must be dismissed or you will lose your registration to operate in Afghanistan. Agree, and you will be complicit in a misogynist government’s repression of Afghan women; disagree, and whole families and communities will suffer. In Somalia, community gatekeepers tell your food distribution team that operations can proceed but only using a list of recipients they will provide, excluding some of the most in need. Accept, and food reaches some people who need it. Refuse, and it reaches none.
Like all dilemmas, they involve a choice between bad options, and whatever is decided will be the wrong call to half the people in the room.
Decisions are also about to get harder. The brutal funding cuts accelerated by the dismantling of USAID means aid organisations must choose which programmes to cut, which populations to abandon, and which operational compromises to accept in order to survive.
When principles collide
The four universally recognised humanitarian principles (humanity, neutrality, impartiality, independence) do not resolve dilemmas as much as they create them.
The principle of impartiality says aid should reach those in greatest need, without discrimination. The principle of humanity says suffering demands a response. What does impartiality require when the only path to reaching people runs through a gatekeeping structure that will distort who gets help? What does humanity require when maintaining operations under Taliban restrictions means abandoning Afghan women – both as professional colleagues and as the only conduit to female aid recipients? A dilemma, by definition, is a choice between bad options. The continual, vexing trade-offs are not a failure of humanitarian principles; they are the defining condition of humanitarian work.
The value – and limits – of ethical frameworks
Humanitarian ethics, like all ethics, is cleaved by two opposing instincts about what it means to be good: those primarily concerned with doing good by achieving effective outcomes, and those that place greater emphasis on being good – acting from the right motives according to the right principles. The former tradition, consequentialism, holds that the ethical act is one that produces the greatest benefit for the greatest number. The latter, deontology, rooted in Kantian philosophy, insists that the action itself can be moral or immoral regardless of the outcome; that the means are no less important than ends.
Both frameworks hold some truth but fail to provide a complete answer. Pure deontology offers no guidance on what to do when the consequence of refusing to violate your principles is that people suffer and die who you might otherwise have helped.
What would a person of good character do? What is the best way to proceed given we can’t know the outcomes or be sure of what’s right and what’s wrong in every instance?
Consequentialism asks what course of action produces the best outcomes. But outcomes are genuinely uncertain.
Virtue ethics asks a different question altogether: What would a person of good character do? What is the best way to proceed given we can’t know the outcomes or be sure of what’s right and what’s wrong in every instance? Virtue ethics re-centres attention on the decision-maker rather than the rule or the calculation. It doesn’t solve the dilemma, but just asks you to face it with integrity. Feminist ethics of care focuses on concrete relationships and responsibilities, concerned with how to help the most vulnerable in specific contexts.
None of these frameworks provides automatic answers, but they can be useful as alternative lenses through which to view the question before making a decision.
How “good” decisions are made
Dilemmas get routed through committees, escalated up the leadership chain, or left to languish in endless debate in the hope of a consensus that will never come. But not deciding is itself a decision, and delay has its own costs: Opportunities close, situations deteriorate, and the unresolved question festers into discord and division among staff.
Good humanitarian decisions are ultimately made by individuals, but not in isolation. They should involve consultation with a diversity of opinions and an examination of the problem from multiple angles, but the actual judgment and accountability should ideally rest with a person.
It also requires resisting the related temptation of virtue signalling. The hardest decisions are rarely the ones that look principled from a distance. They are the ones where the principled-looking option and the most harmful option can be difficult to tell apart.
The organisational trap
The only time you can be sure you are making the wrong ethical choice is when your decision benefits your organisation before the people it exists to serve. Organisations have survival instincts, and the people that are employed by them have incentives to confuse organisational interests with operational principles.
An ethics of professionalism inhabits the space where personal and collective values overlap but transcend the parochial interests of both. It is not identified with a particular employer. Being a doctor is a profession, and this identity typically supersedes affiliation with any particular practice or hospital. In the same way, humanitarian professionals owe their primary obligation not to their organisation but to the affected people their work is meant to serve.
The only time you can be sure you are making the wrong ethical choice is when your decision benefits your organisation before the people it exists to serve.
This is what distinguishes genuine professional ethics from institutional self-interest dressed as principle. And it is why the hardest decisions are usually made well by individuals who have genuinely internalised this obligation, not by committees seeking institutional cover. They are acting in their profession, not a job.
Choosing well: A tool for decision-making in humanitarian dilemmas
This is the challenge that prompted Nigel Timmins and Manisha Thomas of Humanitarian Outcomes to develop a decision-making guide and framework for humanitarian organisations called No Easy Choice.
The framework doesn’t attempt to resolve dilemmas algorithmically, which would be to misunderstand the nature of the problem entirely. Instead, it structures the process of thinking them through: surfacing competing considerations, interrogating the reasoning, and ensuring that decision-makers have genuinely engaged with the hardest parts before committing to a course of action. The goal is not to make difficult choices easier, but to make them better: arrived at through rigorous deliberation, with individuals who are then prepared to own the outcome.
The tool has been tested with practitioners working in Afghanistan, Libya, and Myanmar. Scaling it further is the next step – one that requires sustained investment.
The premise is simple but worth stating plainly: The quality of humanitarian decisions improves when decision-makers consult broadly and think rigorously. Good process supports good judgment. It does not replace it.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
Further reading
Read more on this topic from Humanitarian Outcomes by visiting No easy choice: A humanitarian’s guide to ethical, principled decision making.