Relatively beyond the context of the philosophical debates of contemporary ethics, an intuitive and generic vision of the concept of « humanitarianism» has gradually imposed itself, with normativity claims, on the international juridical language and corpus. This paper seeks to decipher the theoretic presuppositions of this new intuitive moral ideal by analysing the notion of «humanity » which functions as an instance of moral appeal, as well as by discussing the problem concerning the classification of certain acts as «crimes against humanity». The paper finally directs the analysis towards the possibility of including the existence of extreme poverty in the world amongst these acts that are harmful to humanity.