Project description
Why did we ever come to rescue the shipwrecked?
In the 19th century, the danger of shipwreck was an accepted way of life. Ever considered the counterintuitive risks involved in saving people from a sinking ship? The EU-funded AISLES project will investigate the volunteer lifeboat movements from the 1820s. Up until then, assistance to the shipwrecked had been situational and the moral detachment from suffering had been recognised as a value. But the lifeboat movements reversed this moral rationale. The aim of this research is to understand humanitarian moral innovation. It will provide a model for the deep contextual analysis of moral culture in terms of the emergence, sustenance, representation and insular distinctness of humanitarian imperatives. The project’s findings will assist in answering questions of moral theory as regards the conflicted relations of humanitarianism and everyday morality.
Objective
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.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
10117 Berlin
Germany