In the past decades, the Mediterranean Sea has emerged as a complex humanitarian and political arena, entangling migrants, law enforcement, and NGOs in fraught, asymmetrical relationships. While investigations have explored the contribution of border policies and law enforcement agencies to border deaths, and of NGOs to people smuggling, they have not touched on ‘malpractice’ enacted by NGO’s engaged in providing humanitarian aid. In a context of rampant hostility to border-crossers, any and all attempts at maritime rescue and related practices of assistance are viewed as a form of moral surplus and, as such, necessarily good: “any kind of help,” the reasoning goes, “is better than nothing.” By this logic, which we term “the banality of good,” the possibility of malpractice by humanitarian actors themselves is unthinkable. Drawing from our own experience as researchers and activists embedded in NGOs aiding border-crossers from air, sea, and land, this paper sets out to trouble those assumptions by situating humanitarian action in relation to the racialized hierarchies inscribed in the borders of Europe. We explore how NGOs navigate the political and ethical tensions that arise from the absence of state protection of, and organized aid to, border-crossers in the Mediterranean Sea and borderlands. Attending to the affective experience of doubt, ethical quandary and, at times, guilt, we examine how the the practices and ideologies of the “banality of the good” lead aid workers to reproduce the very hierarchies of race and differential access to life that they set out to dismantle. Foregrounding the vulnerabilities involved in ethnographic research and its interlocutors, our study contributes to reasoning about how questions of care and responsibility intertwine, on the one hand, with the subjectivities of rescuers and activists, and, on the other hand, with broader European politics to shape the transcontinental arena of the Mediterranean.