Archipelagic Imperatives: Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800

ended

Why does humanitarianism take the form of an archipelago, an aggregation of “single issues,” selective, resistant to generalization, and even at times inconsistent? In order to answer this question, which is crucial to, but has been sidelined in histories of humanitarianism, the project develops a novel approach. This approach homes in on the rupture of humanitarian morality with quotidian moral norms and values. For this purpose, the project investigates the history of a particular moral norm, the imperative of saving lives from shipwreck, that emerged in the ambit of volunteer lifeboat movements from the 1820s onward. Such movements had emerged first in Britain and the Netherlands, then elsewhere, most prominently France and Germany. The imperative in question took the form of a novel unconditional norm that demanded taking counterintuitive risks in order to save lives. Previously, assistance to the shipwrecked had been situational. Moral detachment from suffering had been recognized as a value. Existential risk had constituted an exemption from lifesaving duty. Lifeboat movements overturned this quotidian moral rationale. This shift was neither determined by economic incentives nor by technological or legal innovation. The saving of lives from shipwreck thus provides an ideal laboratory, with a rich and varied source base, for understanding humanitarian-moral innovation on its own terms. The intervention of the project is twofold. On the plane of historical knowledge, it provides a model for the deep contextual analysis of moral culture in terms of the emergence, sustenance, representation, and insular distinctness of humanitarian imperatives. On the plane of theoretical knowledge, the project develops innovative answers to questions of moral theory, especially about the generality of norms and the conflicted relation of humanitarianism and everyday morality. The project develops novel methodological tools for combining moral theorizing and historical research.