slavery and sympathy

After writing yesterday about the moral questions raised by 'I heart Huckabees', I sat down to read a number of journal articles about the eighteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery. The historical development these articles are concerned with is this:
'An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750. Among the movements spawned by this new sensibility, the most spectacular was that to abolish slavery. Although its morality was often qustioned before 1750, slavery was routinely defended and hardly ever condemned outright, even by the most scrupulous moralists.' (Thomas Haskell, 'Capitalism and the Origin of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I', The American Historical Review Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 339.)
There are two main questions that this development of 'sensibility' raises for me (and the authors of the articles I'm reading). Firstly, where did this new sensibility - in a sense, a new moral parameter - come from? Secondly, why was it so selective? That is, why did humanitarian reformers, for the most part, expend enormous amounts of energy on the abolition of slavery, the reform of prisons and asylums, the improved treatment of indigenous peoples, while largely ignoring (or even worsening) the situation of the working poor in Britain itself?

There are a number of reductionistic answers to these questions. The hagiography that developed around the humanitarian reformers portrayed them as moral giants who were motivated by a new vision of compassion that came entirely from some source external to their historical context - either a new understanding of the gospel (for the evangelical reformers) or their own moral character (for the utilitarians and others). This hagiography failed to explain the selective nature of the reformers' compassion and was thoroughly attacked in the revisionist accounts of Marxists and others. In many of the revisionist accounts, the reformers acted primarily as agents for social control. As members of the growing middle class, they used the moral authority gained through the reform movements to establish social and cultural hegemony. Simultaneously, they supported the establishment of ever-tighter legal and social restrictions on the working poor. (Foucault, of course, argues that the humanitarian reform movements themselves acted to create these restrictions). In such accounts the reformers are either profoundly hypocritical or entirely self-deceived as to their own motives.

The articles that I am reading attempt to provide more balanced explanations of the reform movements that take both the economic, social and cultural context and the compassionate urges of the reformers seriously. This makes for better history than either the hagiographical or revisionist extremes. But it doesn't make for simple explanations! How easy to 'do good' within the parameters of our own understanding. How difficult to see the motives that drive us or the consequences that ensue.