Moral sentiments turn out to be an essential energy of contemporary politics: they nourish discourses and legitimize practices, especially when these are directed at the dispossessed and the dominated - who belong to a nearby world (the poor, sick foreigners, people homeless) or distant (the victims of hunger, epidemics, wars). By moral feelings we understand the emotions that lead us to the discomfort of others and make us want to correct it. They associate affections and values - sensitivity and altruism -, some derive the latter from the former, that is, the morality of feelings: therefore according to this philosophical tradition, the experience of suffering precedes the sense of good. Compassion fulfills the most complete form of this paradoxical combination between the heart and reason: it is the sympathy felt in the face of the misfortune of one's neighbor that produces moral indignation capable of generating an action that seeks to make it stop. In this way, faced with the man left for dead by thugs on the side of a road, the Good Samaritan of the Gospel is moved: he fills his belly, finds lodging and pays for him to receive care. This parable paradigmatically inaugurates a politics of compassion that irrigates Western morality far beyond Christian doctrine, which on the other hand does not hold a monopoly on concern for the misfortune of others. In this context, I propose to call humanitarian government the deployment of moral sentiments in contemporary policies. Government must be understood here in a broad sense, as the set of established devices and actions carried out to administer, regulate, favor the existence of human beings; The government includes, but exceeds, the intervention of the State, territorial collectivities, international organizations and, generally, political institutions.