Description du projet
Pourquoi en sommes-nous venus à porter assistance aux naufragés?
Au 19e siècle, le risque de naufrage était une réalité acceptée. Avez-vous déjà songé aux risques contre-intuitifs qu’implique le fait de sauver des gens d’un navire qui coule? Le projet AISLES, financé par l’UE, se penchera sur les mouvements bénévoles de sauvetage en mer apparus à partir des années 1820. Jusqu’alors, l’assistance aux naufragés dépendait des circonstances et le détachement moral vis-à-vis de la souffrance avait été reconnu comme une valeur. Mais les mouvements de sauvetage en mer ont renversé cette logique morale. Le but de ces recherches est de comprendre l’innovation en matière de morale humanitaire. Elles fourniront un modèle pour l’analyse contextuelle approfondie de la culture morale en termes d’émergence, de subsistance, de représentation et de distinction insulaire des impératifs humanitaires. Les résultats du projet aideront à répondre aux questions de théorie morale concernant les relations conflictuelles entre l’humanitarisme et la moralité quotidienne.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitution d’accueil
10117 Berlin
Allemagne