At one of the Sanguine Mirage workshops in October 2022, several participants suggested that the consideration of ethics might offer practical help in resolving some of the core dilemmas relating to humanitarian principles that humanitarian organizations face in conflict contexts.
A sense of what McGowan et al. refer to as an ‘ethics gap’ – a failure to subject proposed actions to a structured ethical decision-making process – emerged during workshop discussions. In recent months, debates in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Ukraine have considered the role of ethics in helping to resolve the dilemmas of humanitarian organizations. There is no indication, however, that these debates are being conducted in a structured and transparent manner. Indeed, as McGowan et al. point out, there is no established practice among major humanitarian organizations to subject the dilemmas they confront to a structured ethical decision-making process.
The most comprehensive overview of ethics in humanitarian action is Hugo Slim’s 2015 book Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster. It lays out the large number of ‘values’ – Slim identifies no fewer than 33 – that are asserted by humanitarians as justification for their decisions. The book also points out that, apart from the ‘humanitarian imperative’, there is no agreed hierarchy of these values and no agreed framework for resolving the dilemmas relating to humanitarian principles that managers of humanitarian operations regularly tackle. Indeed, humanitarian organizations, at the headquarter level, typically ignore questions on these dilemmas, leaving them to field managers to resolve as best they can.
Developing ethical decision-making frameworks
Ethical decision-making can provide a framework that looks at all the critical issues that influence both long- and short-term outcomes for recipients of assistance in conflict contexts. Ethical frameworks are increasingly being used in other sectors, such as healthcare, to challenge those providing assistance to consider all the factors that make for an ethical choice. These processes do not, as is sometimes claimed, provide a single ‘right’ answer. Rather they ensure that decision-makers are confronted with and able to work through the likely consequences of their decisions. Equally, these processes do not add an additional time-consuming bureaucratic requirement. Rather, they can replace the unstructured and typically fractious discussions that can rage for months, both within organizations and between partners in joint operations.
Ethical decision-making processes can provide a values-based and systematic alternative to unstructured discussions between directors, senior staff and executive boards over difficult policy decisions.
Current approaches to analysis and decision-making in humanitarian action have an ethics gap, which could be usefully filled by more structured deliberative processes and supported by greater ethical expertise.
Different ethical theories and traditions offer different ways of looking at ethical problems. Consequentialist approaches are concerned with the ethical outcomes of actions and weigh up the different amounts of good and bad that result. This tradition (also known as utilitarian) should be the starting point for humanitarian ethics. This approach measures the likely outcome of pursuing the humanitarian imperative to act to save lives and alleviate suffering against possible harms arising from that action. However, the ethics literature also points out that while utilitarian calculations are important, they should not be the sole method. McGowan et al. recommend four complementary approaches for addressing the ethical gap in humanitarian action:
- Fostering a culture of ethical deliberation and compromise;
- Providing institutional support to all staff including training;
- Using decision-making tools and frameworks; and
- Supporting staff in moral distress.
This paper briefly examines two models that might provide inspiration for the development of an ethical decision-making framework for use in humanitarian action during armed conflict.
Eight key questions (8KQ)
Professor William Hawk developed a framework of ‘eight key questions’ (8KQ) to be considered when exploring ethical choices. In a joint paper with Peter Mulrean, Hawk suggests how the US government might use the 8KQ approach to evaluate ethical choices in its foreign policy dilemmas. In conversations with Hawk and Mulrean, the authors of this paper have explored how a similar framework might be used to consider dilemmas confronting humanitarian organizations.
8KQ is based on extensive research on how the brain makes decisions and is designed to disrupt and interrogate quick, ‘biased’ intuitions through reflection at the decision point. The eight areas of inquiry – fairness, outcomes, responsibility, character, liberty, empathy, authority and rights – have been identified in research as the range of moral considerations needed to form the basis of an ethical decision.
Hawk and Mulrean’s paper sets out the important elements of 8KQ and suggests questions that may be posed in relation to each one. For instance, in relation to ‘fairness’, they ask: ‘What decision results in an equitable approach, balancing all legitimate interests?’
The 8KQ are not designed to elicit one group or region’s ethics. The assumption is that every society is composed of persons who are concerned with ‘fairness’, ‘outcomes’ or ‘responsibility’. Even though there may be significantly different expressions or practices by peoples and groups. The eight questions evoke universal ethical concerns. For example, all societies recognize some ‘authority’ as ethically relevant, even though they may differ on which authority is legitimate. The claim is that humans in every society demonstrate concern for the eight different ethical variables even though they express these concerns in significantly different, sometimes apparently contradictory, practices and behaviours.
The purpose of the 8KQ strategy is not only to elicit questions that bring to the surface differing ethical expressions but, by ensuring that the process is conducted in groups composed of divergent perspectives, to create the informed dialogue needed to openly discuss ethical differences. The 8KQ approach does not so much advocate for ethical values as provide the context in which differences in ethical value practice and behaviour are expressed. It is the open inquiry of those real differences that creates the situation in which challenges and dilemmas can be best addressed. If humanitarians adopted the 8KQ strategy as part of a structured ethical decision-making process involving all relevant stakeholders, they could never address dilemmas without the voices of those directly involved being heard because they, too, are engaged in the process.
Leadership, ethics and governance systems (LEGS)
One sector that already makes considerable use of ethical frameworks is healthcare. In the medical world, it has been beneficial to include someone with expertise in ethics in the decision-making process.
Dr Joseph Mfutso Bengu, a professor of bioethics in Malawi, in an article written with two colleagues, advocates a process in which systems providing social services, such as health or education, should build on the idea that there are three key pillars of leadership, ethics and governance for each system.
The effectiveness of leadership and governance systems that include ethical decision-making processes highlights some of the weaknesses of the international humanitarian system, where leadership and governance are both diffuse and siloed.
Leadership relates to integrity and responsiveness to contexts and pressures; the ethics pillar is associated with an investment in the promotion and practice of virtues and moral reasoning skills; while governance relates to issues of prioritizing, monitoring performance, transparency, accountability and external social control.
The relevance of these pillars to humanitarian action is self-evident. The effectiveness of leadership and governance systems that include ethical decision-making processes highlights some of the weaknesses of the international humanitarian system, where leadership and governance are both diffuse and siloed. It is clear that there is a need for much more consideration of interests of affected people and communities in war-torn states and that these are prioritized over those of the states and organizations offering their help.
How can ethical decision-making processes be introduced?
Recognition by humanitarian organizations, alongside the emergency relief coordinator (ERC), of the existence of the ethics gap is the first step in establishing an ethical decision-making process. It can be argued that the humanitarian principles themselves provide the ethical framework for humanitarian action during armed conflict. However, as has been shown above, much humanitarian action today takes place in situations where belligerents prevent impartial operations by neutral organizations. It is precisely in such situations that an ethical decision-making process becomes valuable.
To initiate the process, large organizations should invest in ethical expertise; smaller ones could share expert ethical resources. The most important activity to be subjected to an ethical decision-making process may be the development by the humanitarian country team (HCT) of the annual humanitarian response plan (HRP) for each affected country. Training of staff for participation in this work would need to be targeted at those taking part in the development of HRPs.
