1 Introduction

Poverty, degrading inequality, violence, environmental crises, and tyranny continue to afflict the world. In spite of humankind’s efforts, these five interrelated scourges are in many places more rather than less pronounced than they were a decade ago. Even in rich countries, poverty and inequality have increased. Efforts to understand and reduce these scourges have taken many forms. Moral reflection on the ends and means of “development,” where “development” most generically means beneficial societal change, is one important effort. Such moral reflection, which includes the assessment of the present and the envisioning of better futures, increasingly is called “international development ethics” or the “ethics of global development.”¹

    This volume is a work in global development ethics. It explains, justifies, applies, and extends ethical reflection on development goals, policies, projects, and institutions from the local to the global level.² The volume is a new statement of my views on development ethics, the capability approach, and deliberative democracy. Throughout, my aim is to move development ethics and the capability approach forward by working out and defending an agency‐focused version of capability ethics and applying it to the issues of consumption, hunger, governance, and globalization. Although at least portions of seven chapters appeared as earlier versions, I have revised – often radically – each of them to take account of recent literature, reflect changes in my thinking over the last fifteen years, respond to criticism of earlier work, and yield what I hope is a new and harmonious totality.

    Central to each of the book’s four parts and eleven chapters is my sympathetic and, at times, critical engagement with Amartya Sen’s “capability” approach to international development.³ Since my first encounter with Sen’s thought in the mid‐1970s, I have increasingly come to recognize, as Hilary Putnam puts it, “the importance of what [Sen] calls the ‘capabilities’ approach to welfare economics to perhaps the greatest problem facing humanity in our time, the problem of the immense disparities between richer and poorer parts of the globe.”⁴ Putnam continues: “At the heart of that [capabilities] approach is the realization that issues of development economics and issues of ethical theory simply cannot be kept apart.” The following pages will show that Sen’s linking of economics and ethics – and more generally of development studies and ethics – has inspired and stimulated me at each step in my own work in development ethics. My agency‐oriented perspective is an effort to build on, make explicit, and strengthen Sen’s recent turn to the ideals of public discussion and democratic participation as integral to freedom‐enhancing development.

    Much of my work since 1990 also has been a response to Martha Nussbaum’s articles and books on development and development ethics.⁵ Initially more sympathetic to Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach than I am now, throughout the present book I will note the increasing differences between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions and develop a perspective that, while closer to Sen’s, seeks to do justice to both versions. The most important of these differences, as I shall argue in Parts II and III, concerns Nussbaum’s proposal of a list of the ingredients in human flourishing and Sen’s qualified rejection of such a list in favor of a stronger role, than Nussbaum permits, for democratic decision. To mark differences between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s theories and for reasons that will become clear subsequently, I will follow development scholar Des Gasper and refer to Sen’s theory as the capability approach, Nussbaum’s perspective as the capabilities approach, and the family of approaches as the capability orientation.⁶

    To introduce the book as a whole, in this introductory chapter I weave together my own intellectual journey, what I understand to be the evolving stages of development ethics, and the rationale for the volume’s four Parts and ten remaining chapters. Other development ethicists, such as Sabina Alkire, Nigel Dower, Jay Drydyk, Des Gasper, Denis Goulet, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O’Neill, and Stephen Schwenke would tell different personal stories and provide somewhat different accounts of the evolution of development ethics. My personal trajectory is only one of the ways development ethics has evolved. For example, some development ethicists have not engaged Sen’s capability approach or have done so in ways that differ from my own.

Toward development ethics

In the spring of 1978, two Colorado State University colleagues, an economist and an historian, paid me an office visit that was to redirect my professional life.⁷ I had been teaching for twelve years in the Department of Philosophy at Colorado State University, my first position out of graduate school. The two colleagues came with good news and bad news.

    The good news was that they had just received a two‐year grant from the US Department of Education to establish a MA program in Comparative Rural Development, and that program was to include a graduate seminar in “Ethics and Rural Development.” The course was to treat the moral and value issues that emerge in Colorado’s impoverished rural and mountain towns as well as in CSU’s overseas projects in international rural development.⁸

    The bad news was that these colleagues wanted me to teach the course. Although flattered by the offer and attracted by the promise of a stipend, I responded incredulously. “You’ve got the wrong guy.” I knew nothing, I said, of rural life and mountain towns (except ski towns like Steamboat Springs). And my experience in the developing world was limited to a year in the early 1960s working with impoverished youth in Cleveland’s inner city and to a whirlwind family vacation in the early 1970s to Guaymas, Mexico. Specializing in philosophical ethics, metaethics, and Anglo‐American and European social‐political philosophy hardly qualified me to teach the course they proposed. My intellectual interests focused on the theories of justice of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, the social theory of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and the Yugoslav Praxis Group’s vision of democratic and market socialism.⁹ What did such philosophical views have to do with rural development – whatever that was – at home or abroad or with what were then dubbed “Third World” issues? I had my hands full trying to contribute to a dialogue between Anglo‐American and European social philosophy.

    My two colleagues, however, persisted. “Don’t worry (about your qualifications); you will team‐teach the course with two other CSU professors – an expert on India, who for several years has lived in India and Iran, and a professor of animal science, who has USAID‐funded projects throughout the developing world.”¹⁰ And, they continued, the need is great among both graduate students and their professors to address value and ethical questions. Faculty and students learn much about the science of development, such as the causes and effects of poverty, and they acquire the technical skills to install tube wells in Pakistan, set up credit unions in Nicaragua, or generate employment opportunities on Colorado’s western slope. But once on the job, a host of questions assail them for which they are ill prepared and have no ready answer: Am I doing more harm than good? What counts as harm and what counts as good? How much truth should I tell my funding agency, especially when they don’t want to hear it? Should I challenge my host country’s gender inequality or take refuge in “moral relativism?” Is my “development” work contributing to a tyranny’s legitimacy or to excessive US influence? How should we define development and how should we try to promote it? Who should answer these questions, what methods should they use, and what should they say?

    Still with misgivings, I accepted. The questions were important, and I might learn something. I would like to think that I also was disturbed that the world was beset by problems of deprivation and misery that moral reflection might help resolve. During an internship as a youth and community worker in Cleveland’s inner city in 1961–2, I had learned that local action coupled with governmental policy could make a difference – for good or ill – in people’s lives.

    When we three co‐teachers met to plan the new course, chaos ensued. The professor of animal science didn’t know what ethics had to do with (rural) development and improvement of cattle strains in Bulgaria. The scholar of Indian and Persian culture was worried about Northern and Western ethnocentrism. I couldn’t figure out what Rawls’s argument from the abstract and hypothetical standpoint of the “original position” had to do with practical ethics or with “development.” And what, I asked myself, was “development” anyway? Writings in development economics or development policy scarcely mentioned ethics. The philosophers I admired never talked about development. Given the abstract, otherworldly way in which even applied ethics and sociopolitical philosophy was done in those days, this state of affairs was probably a good thing.

    Only when the three of us discovered the work of development scholar and activist Denis Goulet and of sociologist Peter Berger did we begin to get some help on how we might proceed in our course. In different ways, both Goulet and Berger argued that ethics should be put on the development agenda – both for the sake of better development and for the sake of ethics.¹¹

    Since the early 1960s, Goulet – influenced by French economist Louis‐Joseph Lebret and development economists such as Benjamin Higgins, Albert Hirschman, and Gunnar Myrdal – had argued that “development needs to be redefined, demystified, and thrust into the arena of moral debate.”¹² Drawing on his training in continental philosophy, political science, and social planning as well as on his extensive grassroots experience in poor countries, Goulet – we discovered – was a pioneer in addressing “the ethical and value questions posed by development theory, planning, and practice.”¹³ One of the most important lessons we learned from Goulet, in such studies as The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development (1971), is that so‐called “development,” because of its costs in human suffering and loss of meaning, can amount to “anti‐development.” Similarly in the book Pyramids of Sacrifice (1974), a book that some of our Colorado State “development” colleagues had read, Peter Berger argued that so‐called “development” often sacrificed rather than benefited poor people and what was urgently needed was a marriage of political ethics and social change in the “Third World”:

This book deals with two topics that are intertwined throughout. One is Third World Development. The other is political ethics applied to social change. It seems to me that these two topics belong together. No humanly acceptable discussion of the anguishing problems of the world’s poverty can avoid ethical considerations. And no political ethics worthy of the name can avoid the centrally important case of the Third World.¹⁴

    With Goulet’s and Berger’s texts central to our planning and initial syllabus, we had valuable resources for getting ethics onto the agenda of development practitioners and policy analysts. But did philosophical ethics and sociopolitical philosophy have anything to contribute to “ethics and rural development” or – as we soon called it – “ethics and international development” or “development ethics”?

    In the 1970s three currents of Anglo‐American philosophy appeared promising for our work: John Rawls’s theory of justice; Peter Singer’s challenging argument that the affluent had a duty to aid famine victims, and the lifeboat ethics debate.

    The moral problem of world hunger and the ethics of famine relief were among the first practical issues that philosophers tackled after John Rawls’s pivotal 1971 study, A Theory of Justice,¹⁵ convinced them that reflection on normative issues should be part of the philosopher’s task. Although Rawls himself limited ethical analysis to abstract principles of distributive justice, applied philosophers addressed the ethical and conceptual aspects of a variety of practical problems and policies. In the same year that Rawls’s volume appeared, Peter Singer first wrote about famine in East Bengal (now Bangladesh)¹⁶ and, more generally, about “the obligations of the affluent to those in danger of starvation.”¹⁷ In his 1974 New York Times Magazine article, “Philosophers are Back on the Job,”¹⁸ Singer championed the philosophical turn to applied ethics, employing the ethics of famine relief as a leading example.

    Philosophers were back on the job because, as John Dewey had urged fifty years earlier in a statement that functions as one of this volume’s epigraphs, “philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”¹⁹ One of these human problems in the mid‐1970s was whether or not affluent countries and their citizens were in any way morally obligated to send food to famine victims in other countries. Is such aid morally required, admirable but not obligatory, or impermissible? For instance, the editors of a widely used anthology asked, “What moral responsibility do affluent nations (or those people in them) have to the starving masses?”²⁰ Peter Singer argued that such aid was obligatory and rich people commit moral wrong in refusing or neglecting to aid the starving poor. For, he asserted, “suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad” and “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”²¹ Finally, claiming that life‐saving and suffering‐reducing actions are indeed in our power, Singer concluded that famine relief is a moral obligation or duty and not a mere matter of charity. Even though such a duty might be at odds with our moral judgments and complacent consumption practices, we do grievous wrong in not donating to famine relief.

    Garrett Hardin, writing in 1974 in Psychology Today magazine, likewise argued against charitable aid.²² While Singer argued that moral duty, rather than charity, should be the basis for aid, Hardin argued that rich nations and individuals (living in lifeboats) have a duty not to help the needy (swimming in the sea). Aid would only worsen the problems of hunger, because it would result in more mouths to feed, and would cause other countries to become dependent on handouts rather than solving their own food and population problems.

    Throughout the 1970s (and on into the 1980s), often in response to Singer, on the one hand, and Hardin, on the other, many philosophers investigated whether there exists a positive moral obligation to aid distant and hungry people and, if so, what are its nature, justification, and limits.²³

    As we three CSU professors planned and then taught the nation’s (and perhaps the world’s) first philosophy course in “ethics and development,” we took full advantage of the Hardin–Singer debate and the philosophical discussion it had provoked. Something, however, was missing in this literature. Only gradually did we come to recognize that it was important to recast and enlarge this initial moral problematic. Preoccupied as they were with the task of justifying aid to distant people, philosophers paid scant attention to institutional and practical issues. In particular they almost totally ignored what happened to famine relief donations or food aid once they arrived in a stricken country. Did it go to the rich instead of its intended starving recipients? Did food aid glut the national and local markets with the result that food prices fell and local farmers suffered? Was food aid a cause of anti‐development in rural areas, perhaps blinding donors to structural injustice that caused the famine in the first place? Were foreign governmental aid agencies, such as USAID, or national programs of poverty alleviation more effective in reducing hunger than private donations to international NGOs? What role might different kinds of food aid have – in contrast to, say, different sorts of population control or agricultural development – in national efforts to reduce chronic deprivation and wrenching inequality? Do outside private and governmental aid sap a poor country’s commitment and initiative to confront its problems of hunger and other deprivations?

    It is true that Singer in his 1972 essay, and even more in later writings, made clear that what rich countries and individuals were obligated to do was to give that type of aid that was most likely to reduce starvation and death. Although in his initial essay Singer emphasized private donations to international NGOs such as the Bengal Relief Fund, he also stated that effective hunger‐reducing action occurred “either through orthodox methods of famine relief or through population control or both.”²⁴ In a 1977 “Postscript” to the initial article, which we used as a text in our CSU class, Singer conceded that if he were to rewrite the initial article, he would have emphasized – as means of reducing hunger – that international donors should require recipient governments to check population growth by such means as dispensing contraceptives and even performing sterilizations. In the same essay, Singer also mentions that a family’s economic security might be a factor in reducing the number of children, and this consideration prompts him to reflect further on how he would have rewritten his initial essay:

One other matter that I should now put forward slightly differently is that my argument does, of course, apply to assistance with development, particularly agricultural development, as well as to direct famine relief. Indeed, I think the former is usually the better long‐term investment. Although this was my view when I wrote the article, the fact that I started from a famine situation, where the need was for immediate food, has led some readers to suppose that the argument is only about giving food and not about other types of aid. This is quite mistaken, and my view is that the aid should be of whatever type is most effective.²⁵

We three CSU professors did miss or at least failed to appreciate Singer’s qualifications and his central point that rich nations and people had an obligation to help the global poor in the most effective way or ways possible. Even in my 1996 critique of Singer, I failed to acknowledge that, for Singer, what was most important was rich donor obligation, and that he was open to various ways in which individuals could fulfill that obligation.²⁶ Claiming no expertise in whether other types of aid are “better or worse than giving to Oxfam,”²⁷ Singer has more recently insisted, correctly I now believe, that critics are wrong in criticizing him for relying exclusively on private donations: “We should do our best to find out what will produce the best outcome, whether it is giving money, buying fair trade products, voting, joining an organization, or all of those things. Then we should do it.”²⁸

    Singer was right that what was needed – and what philosophers and other ethicists could contribute – was an ethics of aid, and that private donations of money and food could play a role. But my two CSU colleagues and I gradually came to see that such an ethic would be only one part of an ethics of and for national and local development. Singer had framed the issue in an incomplete way and one with potentially negative consequences for international development. We began to see four ways in which we should build on but go beyond Singer.

    First, except for a few remarks about how certain kinds of population control might contribute to the relief of hunger and other deprivations, Singer did not – and still does not – investigate the nature and relative effectiveness of actual policies, whether of Oxfam‐type famine relief, population control, or development assistance. Practitioners and policy analysts have a variety of approaches to each of these policies, but there is little in Singer to suggest these controversies or to take a position on them. We three professors designed our course to enable our students to understand and assess such diverse ends and means of international development as economic growth, growth with equity, and basic needs.

    Second, Singer’s focus was almost entirely on rich countries and their citizens and very minimally on what poor nations – their governments and civil societies – were doing or failing to do to solve their own problems. We became increasingly convinced that the question of international aid and responsibilities depended to a large extent on how national development was conceived and what developing nations were already doing (or failing to do) to bring about good or better development. Each country and region has a history of efforts to define and implement good development, and we believed it was important to understand and evaluate these endeavors before we could advocate some form of international assistance. Important examples would be Sen’s book on famines²⁹ and Jean Drèze and Sen’s analysis and evaluation of national efforts to combat hunger,³⁰ volumes that appeared before at least some of Singer’s writing on the ethics of combating hunger. Singer, of course, could say that such an investigation of national and local development efforts is permitted and even encouraged by investigating the most effective means to remedy deprivation. The fact that he, as a philosopher, did not investigate various national development efforts did not mean that nonphilosophers could not and should not do so. In contrast, we CSU professors and later development ethicists came to believe that ethicists – whether or not philosophers – should not stand aloof from institutional and policy analysis but should be part of interdisciplinary efforts to understand, assess, and improve national and local development.

    Third, Singer’s way of framing the ethics of food aid (and, more generally, the ethics of reducing deprivation in poor countries) emphasized that it was affluent countries and individuals who should be the agents in combating hunger and that poor governments and their citizens were but passive recipients. Singer, of course, could say that to the extent that national and local efforts in poor countries successfully relieved suffering, external agents should keep their hands off or find ways to help national agents become more effective. This response, however, converts the moral issue into a strategic one. In addition to the moral importance of the “best outcome” (with respect to preference satisfaction or relief of suffering), it is also crucial, we came to believe, to address the process by which the outcome is attained. Although in the late 1970s we did not have a clear grasp of the language of agency, with the help of thinkers like Denis Goulet and Paolo Freire we were aware that it was important that – where feasible – poor countries develop themselves rather than be the grateful or even deserving recipients of the actions of others. Although failing to recognize the complexity of Singer’s argument, Andrew Kuper sees this weakness in Singer’s approach: Singer has a “tendency to treat active individuals in developing countries almost wholly as recipients or moral patients. Poor people are neither powerless nor ignorant in respect of important problems and opportunities for action; they need to be addressed as agents, capable of independent action as well as cooperative assistance.”³¹

    Fourth, related to the last point, that what Goulet called “assistentialism” risked disrespecting and weakening the agency of the poor, we three CSU professors also worried that hunger, as terrible as it was, was not only bad in itself but was a symptom of deeper, more structural problems, such as maldistribution of wealth and power.³² As important as it was to relieve immediate suffering, it was also crucial for development ethics to criticize current institutional arrangements and to offer better alternatives. Even worse, in fulfilling obligations to alleviate immediate and individual misery, international donors and national agencies might inadvertently and even intentionally maintain a remediable system responsible for great deprivation. This is not to say that no famine relief of individuals is justified, but it is to warn that the good that comes from palliative remedies must be supplemented and sometimes outweighed by the greater good that comes from systemic change.³³ In Chapter 8, I return to these issues and work out in detail an agency‐based and systemic capability approach to world hunger and other deprivations.

    In summary, taking seriously Singer’s challenge that outsiders can and should help the global poor, in planning our course we sought to go beyond Singer and think through the policies and practices by which outsiders could help poor people relieve their own suffering, develop themselves, and improve their own institutions. There would be (and still is) much work to do before development would be part of the philosophical and ethical agenda the way that environment and animal welfare were beginning to be. We were, however, forging a vision about what our course and development ethics might be.³⁴ We were less concerned than Singer with foundational issues and more committed than Singer to an ethics that was interdisciplinary, institutionally and empirically informed, and policy‐relevant.³⁵

    Still harboring doubts that we could bring development and (philosophical) ethics into fruitful interaction, we launched our new graduate course – jointly listed in the curricular offerings of the Department of Philosophy and of International Education – in the fall of 1978. We put ethics explicitly on the agenda of development policy and practice by inviting CSU professors who had worked with development projects to describe to the class moral dilemmas they had confronted. After doing so, the guest lecturers then challenged the students (and faculty) to try to resolve the quandary, told what in fact they (the visiting professors) actually did, and led a discussion of whether they had done the right thing. An engineering professor recounted his failed efforts to get USAID to change its policy of sending more food aid than a nation could absorb and the related failure of the nation itself to keep food prices sufficiently high to enable local farmers to make a profit. An agricultural economics professor told of his worries, when working on credit unions in Nicaragua in the 1970s, that he was lending credibility to the Somoza dictatorship. Should he continue building credit unions that Nicaragua would need in any regime or should he resign and support the Sandinistas? I would later describe these and other practitioner moral dilemmas in articles in Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica and World Development in 1987 and 1991, respectively.³⁶

    In the same articles, I tried to capture our commitments – strengthened by the course itself – to put ethics on the development agenda. What was called for, I argued, was something more than foundational defenses of doing the right thing or the generation of a professional code of ethics that abstracted from the ambiguities that surround development work. If the urgent problems of development were to be confronted in a morally responsible way, then development agents would have to do more than offer abstract justifications of a duty to aid distant people, restrict their moral judgments to a local watering hole, or enshrine moral norms in an inflexible professional code. Many people working in the development trenches were becoming aware that ethical reflection that was “explicit, contextually sensitive, public, and engaged”³⁷ might help identify morally relevant features of a practical situation and guide tough choices.

Deepening and broadening development ethics: Costa Rica and the International Development Ethics Association

Despite the CSU course’s success during its initial years, it became increasingly clear that something was missing from the class and my work in this field. To make a contribution to this new activity, which we began to call “development ethics,” I gradually realized that I needed to live and work in a “developing country.” I would have to become less an “outsider” to what was increasingly called “the South,” given the pejorative connotations of “Third World.” Even as I explored the resources for engaging in development ethics of the European and North American philosophical traditions, I wanted to immerse myself in a culture with a different economic and political history than that of the USA and with intellectual and moral traditions that differed from the ones in which I had worked. To avoid narrowness and bias, I had to see the world with different lenses. Where and how should I do this?

    Unexpectedly and fortunately, doors soon opened for a sabbatical year in a developing country perfectly suited to my aims. Attending a 1984 conference in Costa Rica, I discovered at the University of Costa Rica an exciting group of philosophers interested in applied philosophy and development. I had organized an interdisciplinary workshop on “Ethics and Development” within the conference and had presented a paper arguing for a cross‐cultural development ethics. The Costa Rican philosophers urged me to return as a visiting professor and help them organize an international conference devoted to development ethics.

    Supported by a Fulbright Research Award to study “Ethical Issues in Costa Rican Development,” I returned to Costa Rica for twelve months in 1986–7. A recipient of $200 million a year in US aid, Costa Rica was becoming a showcase for Reagan‐style democratic capitalism and, unbeknownst to most, a launching pad for US‐backed Contras in their effort to undermine the Sandinista Revolution. Costa Rica’s long tradition of democratic institutions and pacifism was being strained by the build‐up of its Rural and Civil Guards. The press and universities were full of debates about the Costa Rican “path,” its differences from the rest of turbulent Central America, and the need to end conflicts in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

    During that year in Costa Rica, I learned much about the country and slowly evolved a more nuanced conception of the nature, tasks, methods, and limits of development ethics. From my philosophy and social science colleagues at the University of Costa Rica, I became apprized of Costa Rican and Latin American philosophical and ethical reflection on development. I learned, for example, that in 1974 the Third National Conference of Philosophy in Costa Rica had addressed the theme of “Philosophy and Development.” The late Roberto Murillo presented a paper in which he argued for the necessity of “a developed notion of development.”³⁸ Although no one used the concept of “development ethics,” some participants took up ethical issues and others discussed the role of philosophy in relation to development. For example, Claudio Gutiérrez treated the need for – but also the risks of – philosophy in Costa Rican development.³⁹

    In 1980, the Argentine philosopher Mario Bunge published Ciencia y desarrollo (Science and Development).⁴⁰ In this important book Bunge criticizes one‐sided concepts of development and proposes “authentic and sustained development,” which he calls “the integral conception of development.”⁴¹ In Bunge’s normative vision, integral development ought to be simultaneously biological, economic, political, and cultural.

    Bunge’s work influenced two of my new Costa Rican colleagues: E. Roy Ramírez and Luis Camacho. According to Ramírez, it is important to forge a new concept of development “in order not to confuse it with modernization” and “because it is preferable to decide things for ourselves than to have others decide them for us.”⁴² For Ramírez, “the great ethical impact” of Bunge’s approach is its

constant vigilance not to let forms of oppression pass for liberty, commercial pseudo‐culture and the consumption of fantasies for superior culture, diverse manifestations of plunder for progress. Superstition should not pass for rationality, economic inequalities for justice or fear for peace.⁴³

    Ramírez also offers an explicitly ethical critique of and alternative to what he called “technological determinism,” the belief that technology – whether imported or produced nationally – is both necessary and sufficient for development:

In the same way that development cannot be restricted to economic growth, so development cannot be reduced merely to a technological matter. It involves a culture’s identity, self‐confidence, important degrees of independence, the search for its own answers, the satisfaction of basic needs, an openness to the future, social and mental changes that transform members of a society capable of sustaining, at its own pace and by its own means, more human forms of life.⁴⁴

    Camacho also contributed to an ethics of science and technology (especially) in developing countries, evaluated different notions of crisis and development, and proposed relations between advanced countries and Third World countries, including the treatment of the problem of individual development within socioeconomic development.”⁴⁵ Both Ramírez, with emphasis on individual and national self‐determination and his reference to “mental” as well as social changes,” and Camacho, when he identifies the problem of “individual development” in the context of socioeconomic development, were intimating that development ethics should take up the issues of moral education and citizen agency and responsibilities.

    From my social science as well as philosophy colleagues and the vigorous debate in the press and frequent public conferences, I deepened my understanding of how an ethics of and for development must be closely linked – without either fusion or confusion – to the science, policy, and practice of development.⁴⁶ In order to understand different approaches to development and their interweaving of empirical and normative as well as theoretical and practical components, in my 1984 conference paper I had proposed the notion of a “development theory‐practice.” I now was able to illustrate my schematic framework with many Latin American examples of development “theory‐practices.” Initially published in Costa Rica as “La naturaleza y la práctica de una ética del desarrollo” (The Nature and Practice of Development Ethics), this essay – considerably expanded and updated – is Chapter 3 of the present volume.

    From my academic colleagues as well as my new friends in the various Costa Rican development ministries, and the US and Canadian embassies, field workers with the Inter‐American Foundation, and members of the Asociación Talamanqueña para Ecoturismo y Conservación, I learned about the dilemmas and challenges of putting development ideals into practice. From my soccer friends connected to the youth and professional teams of La Liga Deportiva Alajuelense, I experienced at first hand the norms that functioned in – some parts of – everyday Costa Rican life.⁴⁷

    During this Fulbright year in Costa Rica, the “Development Ethics Working Group,” which we had formed after the 1984 conference, transformed itself into the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA). Although the acronym represents the English word order, we always pronounced “IDEA,” which has the same meaning in English and in Spanish, as a word in Spanish (ee‐day‐ah). In June 1987, my Costa Rican colleagues and I mounted IDEA’s First International Conference on Ethics and Development. As my conference contribution, I presented some tentative conclusions about Costa Rican development in a paper entitled “Four Models of Costa Rican Development: Analysis and Ethical Evaluation.”⁴⁸ Finding strengths but also weaknesses in traditional Costa Rican social democracy, the already ascendant free‐market liberalism, and attempts to renovate social democracy, I argued for a fourth model that I called “just, participatory, ecodevelopment.” This explicitly normative vision, to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, was a moral pluralism that argued for the importance of basic human needs, democratic self‐determination and participation, respect for the natural world, and equal opportunity for self‐development. The emphasis on “democratic self‐determination” both emerged from dialogue with Ramírez and Camacho and my work on the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers and foreshadowed my current work on Sen’s concept of agency, Adela Cortina’s concept of self‐mastery (señorio), and deliberative democracy.

    Unlike many of their fellow Central Americans in the late 1980s, most Costa Ricans were by and large friendly to US visitors. Yet I repeatedly was asked (and asked myself) what business does someone – especially with a name similar to a frontiersman who died at the Alamo – from the United States – especially with its unsavory history of intervening in Latin American affairs – have in evaluating and proposing alternatives to Costa Rica’s development model? My answers to that question are reflected in my article “Insiders and Outsiders in International Development Ethics,” first published in Spanish in 1990 and in English in 1991. I argue that insiders to a culture – who may or may not be citizens or native born – have obvious advantages in understanding and evaluating their own culture and proposing better development paths. Yet their insider status can also blind them to certain realities and prevent them from facing up to the need for change and advocating a better development vision. In contrast, development ethicists who are cultural outsiders may contribute something to an “alien” society’s development dialogue and beneficial change. These outsider ethicists do have obvious disadvantages, such as ignorance, and temptations, such as arrogance and obsequiousness, compared to their insider counterparts. In the last analysis, it is up to the social insiders to decide on their development path. Yet, I argue, outsiders – or, better, a certain outsider‐insider hybrid – may play a valuable role in a group’s development. This “insider‐outsider mix” may clarify the society’s options, reflect the culture back to itself, synthesize disparate ideas or interject novel ones, and say what should be said but what insiders cannot say. I conclude by calling for a global ethic to be progressively fashioned by insider‐outsider hybrids from a variety of groups.⁴⁹

    My 1986–7 year in Costa Rica was also important for the movement and institutionalization of development ethics as well as for my own work. The first IDEA conference set the model for subsequent IDEA events: development practitioners and activists as well as academics from both North and South participated, and the participants together visited and scrutinized actual development projects or institutions. Moreover, the conference enabled a new group of development ethicists to meet and learn from the pioneer of development ethics, Denis Goulet, whose work had been pivotal ten years earlier in planning the Colorado State development ethics course. And it enabled Goulet, noted for his independent ways, to have an ongoing role in the institutionalization of a “discipline” or “field” that he had helped so much to identify and initiate.

    From this modest beginning in Costa Rica, IDEA was to grow steadily in numbers and global reach throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s before leveling off in the mid‐1990s. Although its core membership remained in the Americas, IDEA held or co‐sponsored conferences and workshops in Mexico (1989), the US (1991), Honduras (1992), Chile (1995), Scotland (1996), India (1997), Honduras (2002), Scotland (2004), and Uganda (2006). Just as my involvement with Costa Rica deepened my work in development ethics and gave me insight into perspectives from the South, so IDEA enabled me to broaden the scope of my work to other societies and dialogue partners.

    The current volume’s Part I is entitled “Development ethics.” The first essay, entitled “Agreements, Controversies, and Challenges,” seeks to capture and contribute to the current state of play of development ethics. Many of the questions and answers are the same ones that exercised many of us in the 1980s and became central to IDEA‐sponsored events. But there are new dimensions as well; one of them is the importance for development ethics of Amartya Sen and the capability approach.

Engaging the capability approach: ethical foundations

In order to understand and confront development’s quandaries, it is not enough to put ethics on the development agenda or to immerse oneself in another culture and intellectual milieu. It is also important to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of various development approaches or “theory‐practices,” decide which is the most promising, and advance it in both thought and action. A crucial part of that evaluative exercise is what Des Gasper calls the second stage of development ethics. For Gasper, the first stage is what I have called “putting ethics on the development agenda” and what he calls presenting “ethical concerns about development experiences and policies.”⁵⁰ Gasper’s second stage is the examination “of major valuative concepts and theories used to guide, interpret or critique those experiences and actions.”⁵¹

    Committed to the philosophical pragmatist notion that human achievement is fallible and the implication that any theory is revisable, I was aware that my tentative proposal of “just, participatory, ecodevelopment” was deficient in several ways: it needed greater specificity and clarity; it lacked decision procedures when its four principles clashed; and it also failed to discuss implementation. What exactly were human needs, what groups should practice democratic self‐determination, and what are its limits? What about those who want to use their freedom and reject the good life conceived as praxis?⁵² In the next five years or so following my return from Costa Rica, I had what I now see as a gradual intellectual conversion. I came to see the importance of Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s ethically based perspectives – both joint and separate – on international development.

    Amartya Sen, since the 1970s, and Martha Nussbaum, since the mid‐1980s, have been fashioning a new and important normative approach (Sen) or ethic (Nussbaum) for international development.⁵³ Global hunger and other severe deprivations, they argue, indicate conceptual and ethical failures as well as scientific, technical, and political ones. Sen, the Indian‐born economist, social choice theorist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate, had reflected critically on the moral concepts presupposed in development economics, policymaking, and social action. He also evolved an original normative outlook, articulated in 1999 for the general public in Development as Freedom, for the improvement of the theory and practice of international development.⁵⁴ Sen’s normative perspective owes much not only to Adam Smith and his concept of human freedom but also to the Aristotelian/Marxist tradition and its concept of human existence and well‐being. Sen’s reworking of this latter ethical tradition had been informed by dialogue with philosopher Martha Nussbaum.⁵⁵

    Nussbaum, a leading scholar of Greek thought, political philosopher, and public intellectual, coauthored with Sen an important paper⁵⁶ on national and global development ethics and with him edited and introduced a seminal anthology in development ethics, The Quality of Life.⁵⁷ Moreover, in a series of articles and in several books, Nussbaum compared Sen’s ideas with those of Aristotle, advocated what she called “Aristotelian moral inquiry” and “Aristotelian social democracy” as relevant for international development, and set forth her own robust version of the capability orientation. Although, as we shall see, significant theoretical differences increasingly exist between the two, Sen and Nussbaum’s collaboration as well as their individual work has contributed much to development ethics.

    I first read Sen in the mid‐1970s, but it was not until ten years later that I saw his relevance for development ethics. In an article written in 1989 and published in 1991,⁵⁸ I recognized Sen as “the most important practitioner of development ethics emerging from within economics in general and development economics in particular.”⁵⁹ I argued that Sen had increasingly taken up many of the questions of development ethics, and I emphasized that he had judged development economics mistaken when it made economic growth the end of development. “At best,” as I interpreted Sen, “economic growth is a means – and often not a very efficient means – for the goals of development.”⁶⁰ Economic development, he had argued, was only instrumentally about economic growth; its ultimate concern is or should be “what people can or cannot do, e.g., whether they can live long, escape avoidable morbidity, be well nourished, be able to read and write and communicate, take part in literary and scientific pursuits, and so forth.”⁶¹ I cited approvingly Sen’s remarks in which he explicitly linked his conception of development to that of Marx: “[development has to do] in Marx’s words, with ‘replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances.’ ”⁶² Sen’s underscoring the ideal of human agency in Marx strongly resonated with the interpretation of Marx I had found so attractive in the Yugoslav Praxis Group. In concluding my discussion of Sen, I challenged “the emerging field of development ethics . . . to grasp and assess Sen’s proposals.”⁶³

    During the next half‐dozen years I took up my own challenge and sought to clarify, compare, and evaluate both Sen’s and Nussbaum’s perspectives and especially their ethical component. Many in IDEA recognized the fact that since ethics was finally on the development agenda and philosophers were addressing development’s normative dimensions, it was time to bring some leading options – those stressing basic needs or human rights or valuable capabilities – in development ethics into critical engagement with each other. In a 1991 conference paper, I focused on Sen’s arguments that his capability approach both improved on a needs‐based approach and helped justify a rights‐based development ethic.⁶⁴ In two articles published subsequently, I expanded the original paper and compared Sen with Nussbaum, argued that their perspectives complemented each other, and contended that in fact Nussbaum had explicitly done what Sen had done only implicitly and should do explicitly – defend a definite list of valuable capabilities.⁶⁵

    Returning to Costa Rica in 1992, I lectured in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala on both Sen and Nussbaum. I also rewrote my Sen and Nussbaum articles in Spanish and adapted them to the Costa Rican and Central American political and intellectual context. The result, with a title due more to Nussbaum’s influence than to Sen’s, appeared in Costa Rica as Florecimiento humano y desarrollo internacional: La nueva ética de capacidades humanas (Human Flourishing and International Development: The New Ethic of Human Capabilities).⁶⁶

    The first two chapters (4 and 5) of Part II are substantial revisions of my 1991 and 1995 articles and the Costa Rican book. The new chapters, among other things, update the original articles. Not only has a substantial secondary literature emerged in the last decade, but also Sen’s and Nussbaum’s approaches have both evolved and increasingly diverged. In the early 1990s I stressed what the two had in common and interpreted Sen as implicitly proposing something close to Nussbaum’s explicit pluralistic conception of the good or flourishing human life. Now, in spite of ongoing shared commitments and concepts, Sen and Nussbaum, I argue in a completely new Chapter 6, have increasingly different normative outlooks. Sen’s rejection of a prescriptive list of valuable capabilities and functionings is part of his participatory and democratic turn. Nussbaum’s retention of a list, albeit in a somewhat more flexible form, is part of her view that philosophers (and constitutions) have important prescriptive roles to play. Furthermore, although both have learned from Aristotle, Sen emphasizes Aristotle’s critique of material goods as a means to minimally adequate well‐being while Nussbaum emphasizes Aristotle’s ideal of fully human flourishing. Although both continue to admire the work of John Rawls, in their recent writing they find stimulation in different aspects of Rawls’s perspective. Sen develops Rawls’s notion of “public reason” in the direction of public discussion and deliberative democracy. Nussbaum argues against many of Rawls’s conclusions in The Law of Peoples but substitutes Rawls’s notions of an overlapping consensus and political liberalism for her earlier proposal of a universal and comprehensive theory of human flourishing.

    Chapters 4–6 also differ from my earlier work in that I have changed my comparative assessments of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s versions of the capability orientation. Whereas earlier I was attracted to Nussbaum’s ideal of the good or flourishing human life and her list of its components, now I argue, especially in Chapter 6, that this approach has limitations. Whereas earlier I thought Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities as personal powers was unfortunately missing in Sen, now I argue that his notion of capability as opportunity or freedom does justice to personal traits as well as to environmental constraints and future possibilities. Whereas earlier I merely noted that Nussbaum lacked Sen’s notion of agency, I now see that this lacuna is a serious weakness in her approach and one reason for her failing to give sufficient weight to citizen participation and democratic decision‐making.

    Throughout Part II, I emphasize the evolution of Sen’s notion of agency from a theory of motivation, which makes room for altruistic action, to a normative ideal that affirms the importance of the individual and group freedom to deliberate, be architects of their own lives, and act to make a difference in the world. Related to the ideal of agency is that of empowerment, namely, those conditions and processes that enable individuals and groups to strengthen and exercise their agency.

    The three chapters in Part II, then, crystallize more than twenty years of my efforts to understand, probe, evaluate, and strengthen the capability orientation as an approach in development ethics. It became clear to me and to others, however, that such engagement with the capability orientation was not enough. To provide the critical confrontation that the perspective deserved, one should also apply and extend the approach as well as critically compare it with other perspectives. And, more generally, development ethics, whether working within a capability theory‐practice or not, should assess norms, policies, and institutions at all levels – local, societal, national, and global.

Strengthening and applying the capability approach

In 1993 I accepted the position of Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and the University’s School of Public Policy. In this interdisciplinary context, my academic work increasingly focused on applying development ethics and especially capability norms to various public problems and policies. I was convinced that the development ethicists could help policymakers, development workers, and community leaders understand and remedy pressing human problems. They could do so, however, only if they addressed their work to a variety of academic, professional, and public audiences. My new institutional context afforded ample opportunity for this work.⁶⁷

    The present volume’s Part III, “Strengthening and Applying the Capability Approach,” includes two chapters in which I apply development ethics and the capability approach to the urgent issues of, on the one hand, over‐consumption in the North (and the South) and, on the other hand, hunger and under‐consumption in the South (and the North). In Chapter 7, I engage the work of Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina and her proposal for an ethic of consumption.⁶⁸ Influenced by both Kant’s notion of moral autonomy and responsibility and by Habermas’s “discourse ethic,” Cortina criticizes my earlier attempt to apply the capability approach to consumption and offers an important alternative.

    Employing Sen’s notion of well‐being and a Nussbaum‐type list of features of human well‐being, in 1998 I had assessed the impact of US consumption choices on the well‐being of US consumers.⁶⁹ Although I still believe this account has some merit in appealing to the enlightened self‐interest of American and other affluent consumers, I now believe this prudential version of the capability approach to be seriously flawed as an ethic of consumption. It is especially weak in addressing the consumption choices of consumer‐citizens and governments in the light of the effects of these choices not only on one’s own well‐being but also on the environment, institutions, and especially the capabilities and agency of other people. Most problematic, as Cortina and Des Gasper both noted, was an absence of the consumption responsibilities of rich nations and individuals with respect to the developing world.⁷⁰

    In Chapter 7, I aim to develop a more adequate and complete capability approach to consumption by analyzing and evaluating Cortina’s ethics of consumption in the context of affluence in the North and deprivation in the South. Appropriately building on Sen’s concepts of agency and capability, Cortina skillfully supplements them with a Kantian notion of autonomy, a discourse ethics notion of dialogue, and an ideal of citizen responsibility. Such enrichment enables us to address the moral duties of rich countries and citizens (as well as developing world and global institutions) with respect to consumption choices and their impact, for both good and ill, on the developing world. What results is, I believe, a significantly strengthened capability view of ethical obligation in general and responsible consumption choice in particular. The capability approach, suitably strengthened, enables us to criticize – on moral as well as prudential grounds – over‐consumption in the North (and South). It also enables us to understand and reduce under‐consumption in the South (and the North), one effect of which is hunger and food insecurity.

    In Chapter 8, I build on and seek to advance my earlier work on a capability approach to world hunger by applying an agency‐oriented capability lens to understand and combat malnutrition and famine.⁷¹ If the problem in the North (and parts of the South) is often that people consume too much or the wrong things, the problem in the South (and parts of the North) is that the majority of people often lack access to those commodities needed for well‐being. Analyzing Sen and Jean Drèze’s work on hunger,⁷² I argue that development ethicists have several roles to play. They should evaluate the empirical categories employed to describe, explain, and forecast the data about hunger and famine. Moreover, these ethicists should assess and weigh the moral costs and benefits – which include economic and political costs and benefits – of various options for hunger‐reducing and famine‐eliminating policies and institutions. Most generally, development ethicists should make explicit and evaluate the normative assumptions and implications for nutritional well‐being and food security of competing development theory‐practices.

    Applying the capability approach and strengthening it with an explicit attention to the ideal of agency, I argue that relative emphasis should be shifted (1) from moral foundations to interpretative and strategic concepts, (2) from famine to persistent malnutrition, (3) from remedy to prevention, (4) from food availability to food entitlements, (5) from food and entitlements to capability and agency, and (6) from capability and agency to development as freedom. This last progression, I argue, will take us beyond even the best recent work on world hunger and development aid. Overall, the progression I favor conceives an ethics of food aid as a part of a more basic and inclusive ethics for development.

    Returning to Peter Singer’s challenge – which had motivated me almost twenty years earlier – that philosophers should address the realities of famine and the ethics of aid, I conclude that since the best long‐term cure for hunger is good national and global development, rich and poor nations alike (as well as international actors) should put emergency food aid in a developmental perspective and incorporate an ethics of famine relief into an international development ethics.

Democratizing and extending the capability approach and development ethics

It is important that development ethicists in general and those working within the capability orientation in particular pursue new directions. Without weakening the shared commitment to the theory and practice of poverty alleviation, development and capability ethicists should take up new topics ⁷³ (as well as revisit old ones), experiment with new methods, seek new theoretical and institutional alliances, and subject their work to both fresh theoretical and practical criticism. There are several reasons why development ethics should undertake new initiatives and take new directions. I argue in Chapter 2 that not only has the world changed in important ways since the origination of development ethics, but the field, in general, and the capability orientation, in particular, confront certain new dangers. Among these are dogmatism, cooptation by mainstream institutions, and a recent modishness concerning both development ethics and the capability approach.

    This account of new challenges for development ethics and the capability approach has informed the present book throughout. What Whitehead called the “adventure of ideas” lures us to find better solutions to old problems, avoid sterile scholasticism and false dichotomies, and forge inventive responses to new challenges.

    In both Parts II and III I begin charting new directions as I clarify and defend a distinctive agency‐focused version of the capability approach and apply it to the challenge of consumerism and world hunger. It is in Part IV’s three chapters, however, that I most explicitly explore new directions in development and capability ethics. In Chapter 9, “The Capability Approach and Deliberative Democracy,” I contend that democracy as public discussion is an important recent emphasis in Sen’s work and holds great promise for development theory, institutions, and practices. I argue that (1) Sen’s recent emphasis on citizen voice and public discussion is both important and underappreciated, and (2) the theory and practice of deliberative democracy strengthens Sen’s democratic turn and the capability orientation.

    In Chapter 10, I apply the agency‐focused and deliberative version of the capability approach to decision‐making in local or grassroots development. Building on some of Denis Goulet’s past work and Jay Drydyk’s current work, I analyze and evaluate Sabina Alkire’s approach to participation and offer an ideal that I call “deliberative participation.” Especially important in my own work is what I hope will be the fruitful interaction between the capability approach and the theory and practice of what Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright call “Empowered Participatory Governance” (EPG).⁷⁴ This approach to robust democracy emphasizes deliberation in all democratic bodies, the vertical integration of local and higher‐level bodies, and the integration of, on the one hand, personal/collective agency and, on the other hand, institutional design. EPG and other experiments in local democracy become one basis for responding to criticisms that my marriage of Sen’s democratic turn and deliberative democracy fails to protect basic entitlements, undermines autonomy, and is utopian. I also take the criticism that my agency‐oriented and democratic version of the capability approach uncritically assumes an unacceptable egalitarianism.

    In Chapter 11, the volume’s final chapter, I argue that development ethics should take up the new issue of globalization. Development ethicists should ethically assess the various faces of globalization. Eschewing those who either condemn all globalization or uncritically celebrate its achievements, I contend that the new global interconnectedness has been both bad and good for human beings and can be made significantly better. What is called for is that ethically concerned citizens and development ethicists appraise – in relation to what human individuals and communities can do and be – different sorts of global interaction and the institutional responses to these phenomena. Specifically I argue for both the democratization of globalization and the globalizing of democracy. The former would include morally acceptable and effective ways to democratize current global forces and institutions as well as morally acceptable (and unacceptable) ways to promote and deepen democracy on every level. What ties the three chapters of Part IV together is that they extend the capability approach by offering a concept of inclusive, wide‐ranging, and deliberative democracy as both a fundamental end and means of local, national, and global development.

    The volume as a whole, and especially the chapters in Parts III and IV, emphasizes the ideal and practice of deep and broad democracy, a thread that runs through my career as a teacher and scholar. From Reinhold Niebuhr, I learned (as an undergraduate in the late 1950s at DePauw University) that because people are good, democracy is possible; but because they are evil, democracy is necessary. From William Lee Miller at Yale Divinity School, I grasped the importance of public argument and citizen engagement for a democratic polity. In working with youth in Cleveland’s inner city in 1961–2, I tried to put into practice the new ideas of citizen participation that were soon to flower in the New Left. From Richard J. Bernstein, then of Yale’s Department of Philosophy, and his hero John Dewey, I grasped that philosophers should deal with human problems and that democracy was a way of life in which people deliberate together to solve common problems.⁷⁵ My work with Habermas in the mid‐1970s nurtured my commitments to the public sphere and the ideal of dialogue in which the only force was that of the better argument. The Yugoslav vision of democratic socialism led to my belief in the importance of multi‐leveled democratic self‐management. This volume culminates with a conception of deliberative democracy that I hope will play an important role in the further evolution of both development ethics and the capability orientation.

    To sum up this introductory chapter, the title of the present book – Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy – conveys the book’s main and distinctive themes. The four parts of the work represent the stages of development ethics, my professional trajectory in this field, and the organization of the following chapters. First, it was and remains important to get ethics on the development agenda, address the ethical dimension of development “theory‐practices,” and situate the contribution of development ethicists in relation to that of development academics, policy analysts, practitioners, and activists. Second, development ethics benefits from the clarification and evaluation of the normative foundations of the capability orientation and the strengthening of these foundations by an explicitly ethical ideal of human agency. Third, the volume moves development ethics forward by applying in novel ways the agency‐oriented capability approach to the challenges of Northern consumerism and Southern hunger. Finally, the changing world situation offers development ethics and the capability orientation new challenges, among which is that of showing that development on all levels must be democratic as well as poverty‐reducing and that democracy should be deliberative as well as electoral.

NOTES

For helpful comments on this chapter, I thank Sabina Alkire, David P. Crocker, Edna D. Crocker, Lawrence Crocker, Des Gasper, Verna Gehring, Xiaorong Li, Ingrid Robeyns, Stephen Schwenke, and Asunción St. Clair. A brief summary appears in David A. Crocker, “Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy – An Introduction,” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 26, 1/2 (2006), 21–7.

    1. Des Gasper offers a helpful working definition of “development ethics”: “Development ethics looks at meanings given to societal ‘development’ in the broad sense of progress or desirable change, at the types, distribution and significance of the costs and gains from major socioeconomic change, and at value conscious ways of thinking about and choosing between alternative paths and destinations. It aims to help in identifying, considering, and making ethical choices about societal ‘development,’ and in identifying and assessing the explicit and implicit ethical theories” (The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004], xi).

    2. As will become clear in this and the following chapter, one issue in development ethics is whether development ethicists should address beneficial social change in “developed” countries as well as “developing” ones. My own view is that development ethicists should evaluate social structures and seek better alternatives wherever serious unfreedoms – especially poverty and domination – exist.

    3. See especially Chapter 4 for Sen’s writings on or relevant to development and normative evaluation.

    4. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), vii–viii. I would amend Putnam’s comment, in a way I believe he would accept, so as to say that Sen’s perspective also helpfully contributes both to understanding the links between inequality, on the one hand, and deprivation, insecurity, and oppression, on the other, and to combating these interrelated human evils.

    5. See especially Chapter 4 for Nussbaum’s writings on the capabilities approach to global development.

    6. Gasper, The Ethics of Development, 183.

    7. David Rogers, then Assistant Professor of Economics; and Loren Crabtree, then Assistant Professor of History.

    8. The popular wisdom in those days, which I have not be able to confirm, was that Colorado State University received more financial support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) than did any other university. If true, such involvement in economic development would fit CSU’s tradition as a “land grant” university. The Morrill Act and the Land‐Grant Colleges Act of 1862 provided funding for institutions of higher learning in each state. The acts mandated that to take advantage of this funding a state would have to endow, support, and maintain “at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the State may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” (Morrill Act 1862, sec. 4: <http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/27.htm>). Opening its doors in 1879, CSU has continuously contributed to the socially beneficial application of scientific and liberal studies to agricultural and economic development.

    9. After completing in 1970 my PhD dissertation on “A Whiteheadian Theory of Intentions and Actions,” and influenced by Richard J. Bernstein and his book Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), I had become less interested in a non‐normative theory of individual action (What is the difference between my raising my hand and my hand going up?) and more interested in a normative theory for social action, or praxis. As a guest professor at the University of Munich in 1973–4, I worked on Habermas’s social theory and met with him several times. During that year, I became fascinated with the intellectual work and political dissent (in Tito’s Yugoslavia) of the Yugoslav philosophers and sociologists called the Praxis Group. My lecturing and writing about the Group culminated in my 1983 book Praxis and Democratic Socialism: The Critical Social Theory of Marković and Stojanović (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983).

    10. James W. Boyd, Professor of Philosophy, and Gerald M. Ward, Professor of Animal Science. In later years I team‐taught the course several times with Robert L. Zimdahl, Professor of Plant Pathology and Weed Science.

    11. For a more extensive discussion of Goulet and Berger, their role in the emergence of development ethics, and the earlier work that they draw on, see Chapter 2 below and David A. Crocker, “Toward Development Ethics,” World Development, 19, 5 (1991): 458–61. For recent assessments of Goulet’s contributions to development ethics, see Adela Cortina, “Ética del desarrollo: Un camino hacia la paz,” Sistema, 192 (May 2006): 3–17; and David A. Crocker, “Foreword,” in Denis Goulet, Development Ethics at Work: Explorations 1960–2002 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), xiv–xxix. See also Gasper, The Ethics of Development, 14–18; and Marta Pedrajas Herrero, “El desarrollo humano en la economía ética de Amartya Sen,” PhD dissertation, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Spain, 2005. Development ethicists around the world were saddened to hear that on December 26, 2006, Goulet lost a long battle with cancer.

    12. Denis Goulet, The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development (New York: Anthenaeum, 1971), xix.

    13. Denis Goulet, The Uncertain Promise: Value Conflicts in Technology Transfer (New York: IDOC / North America, 1977), 5.

    14. Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974), vii.

    15. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). A revised edition appeared in 1999, and a “restatement,” edited by Erin Kelly, appeared in 2001: John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

    16. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972): 229–43. Singer’s initial essay was written in 1971 and first appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972, the initial year of publication of what was to become the premier philosophical journal in applied ethics.

    17. Peter Singer, “Reconsidering the Famine Relief Argument,” in Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, ed. Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977), 36.

    18. The New York Times Magazine (July 7, 1974): 17–20.

    19. “The Need for Recovery of Philosophy,” John Dewey: On Experience, Nature and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 67.

    20. World Hunger and Moral Obligation, ed. William Aiken and Hugh La Follette (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1977), 1.

    21. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 231.

    22. Hardin’s most important early essays were “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today, 8 (1974): 38–43, and “Living on a Lifeboat,” Bioscience, 25 (1974): 561–8.

    23. Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics,” as well as the first wave of philosophical responses, appeared in World Hunger and Moral Obligation, ed. Aiken and La Follette. Two other anthologies of the period, both of which include philosophical essays on ethics and world hunger, are Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger, ed. George R. Lucas, Jr., and Thomas W. Ogletree (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) and Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices, ed. Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (New York: Free Press, 1977). For the most important of the early essays as well as more recent work, see World Hunger and Morality, 2nd edn., ed. William Aiken and Hugh La Follette (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1996).

    24. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” 242.

    25. Singer, “Postscript,” in World Hunger and Moral Obligation, ed. Aiken and La Follette, 35.

    26. David A. Crocker, “Hunger, Capability, and Development,” in World Hunger and Morality, ed. William Aiken and Hugh La Follette, 2nd edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1996), 211–30.

    27. Peter Singer, “Achieving the Best Outcome: Final Rejoinder,” Ethics and International Affairs, 16, 2 (2002): 127.

    28. Ibid., 128.

    29. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

    30. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

    31. Andrew Kuper, “More than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the ‘Singer Solution,’ ” Ethics and International Affairs, 16, 2 (2002): 116.

    32. In “World Hunger: Putting Development Ethics to the Test” (Christianity and Crisis [May 26, 1975]: 125–32), an article that I did not read until thirty years later, Denis Goulet (with no indication that he had read Singer’s 1972 article on famine relief) argued that world hunger was a symptom of systemic problems of asymmetrical power within and between nations. The “test” for development ethics should be not just to advocate the alleviation of hunger but also to criticize and seek alternatives to its causes. In Chapter 8, I return to Goulet and his contribution to the transition from an ethics of food aid to an ethics of development.

    33. In “More than Charity,” and in “Facts, Theories, and Hard Choices,” Ethics and International Affairs, 16, 2 (2002): 125–6, Kuper vitiates his similar criticism of Singer by failing to recognize that Singer explicitly rejects exclusive disjunction between famine relief and systemic change.

    34. My evolving conception of development ethics in the 1970s and 1980s owed much to discussions with, and to the work of, two colleagues in CSU’s Department of Philosophy: Bernard Rollin and Holmes Rolston. In their respective fields of veterinary ethics and environmental ethics, Rollin and Rolston were pioneers in philosophically rigorous and practically relevant applied ethics. See, for example, Bernard E. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1981); and Holmes Rolston, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

    35. In Chapters 2 and 3, I explain farther and defend this model of applied ethics or practical philosophy.

    36. “Hacia una ética del desarrollo,” Revista de la Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 25, 62 (1987): 20–31; “Toward Development Ethics,” World Development, 19, 5 (May 1991): 457–83. See also, “La naturaleza y la práctica de una ética del desarrollo,” Revista de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 26, 62 (1988): 49–56.

    37. “Toward Development Ethics,” 463.

    38. Roberto Murillo, “Noción desarrollada del desarrollo,” Revista de la Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 12, 35 (1974): 165–9.

    39. Claudio Gutiérrez, “Papel del filósofo en una nación en desarrollo,” Revista de la Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 12, 35 (1974): 171.

    40. Mario Bunge, Ciencia y desarrollo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo Veinte, 1980).

    41. Ibid., 23.

    42. E. Roy Ramírez, “Desarrollo y ética,” Revista Comunicación, 2, 2 (1986): 23. At about the same time, Howard Wiarda made the more general point about “Third World” criticisms of “Western” development models: “Western modernization and development theory is . . . seen as still another imperialist Cold War strategy aimed at tying Third World nations into a Western and liberal (that is, United States) development pattern, of keeping them within our sphere of influence, of denying them the possibilities of alternative development patterns . . . Since that time [the early 1970s] . . . development has been increasingly tarred with the imperialist brush and discredited throughout the Third World, and hence a whole new generation of young Third World leaders and intellectuals no longer accepts Western developmentalist concepts and perspectives and is searching for possible alternatives” (Howard Wiarda, “Toward a Non‐ethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative Conceptions from the Third World,” Journal of Developing Areas, 17 (1983): 439).

    43. Ibid., 25.

    44. E. Roy Ramírez, “El ‘argumento’ tecnológico, la tecnología perniciosa, y la ética,” in Dédalo y su estirpe: La revolución industrial, ed. Mario Alfaro, Guillermo Coronado, E. Roy Ramírez, and Alvaro Zamora (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1988), 48.

    45. Luis Camacho, “Ciencia, tecnología, y desarrollo desde el punto de vista de los derechos humanos,” in Ciencia, responsibilidad y valores, ed. E. Roy Ramírez (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1985), 26. See also Luis Camacho, Ciencia y tecnología en el subdesarrollo (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológia de Costa Rica, 1993); “Consumption as a Topic for the North–South Dialogue,” in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, ed. David A. Crocker and Toby Linden (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Tecnología para el desarrollo humano (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 2005). Ramírez and Camacho both contribute to Edgar Roy Ramírez and Fernando Araya, Cultura y desarrollo desde América Latina: Tres enfoques (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1993).

    46. Especially helpful were my discussions with sociologist Jorge Rovira Mas, Estado y política económica en Costa Rica 1948–1970, 2nd edn. (San José, Costa Rica: 1982); Costa Rica en los años 80 (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Porvenir, 1987).

    47. See David A. Crocker, “Un intercambio de fútbol: LDA y el Ft. Collins (Colorado) Arsenal,” La Voz de La Liga 3 (January–February 1987): 21, 28; and “Dos torneos en Colorado,” La Voz de La Liga 4 (March–April 1987): 28–9.

    48. “Cuatro modelos del desarrollo costarricense: Análisis y evaluación ética,” Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 27, 66 (1989): 317–32. Updated versions in English appeared as “The Hope for Just, Participatory Ecodevelopment in Costa Rica,” in Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge, International Response, ed. J. Ronald Engel and Joan Gibb Engel (London: Belhaven Press; Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1990), 130–43; and “Just, Participatory Ecodevelopment in Costa Rica,” in Soziale Arbeit und Internationale Entwicklung, ed. Gregor Sauerwald, Wigbert Flock, and Reinhold Hemker (Münster: Lit, 1992), 121–34.

    49. “Insiders and Outsiders in International Development Ethics,” Ethics and International Affairs, 5 (1991): 149–73; and “Cross‐Cultural Criticism and Development Ethics,” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 24, 3 (2004): 2–8.

    50. Gasper, The Ethics of Development, xii.

    51. Ibid.

    52. See “Cuatro modelos,” 330.

    53. For Sen’s and Nussbaum’s extensive writings on development and development ethics, see the bibliographies in Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

    54. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999).

    55. For a careful consideration of the relative weight of Smith, Marx, and Aristotle on Sen’s thinking and the somewhat different roots of Nussbaum’s thought, see Jesús Conill, Horizontes de economía ética: Aristoteles, Adam Smith, y Amartya Sen (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 2004).

    56. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, “Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions,” in Relativism, Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 219–35.

    57. The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Much of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, whether separate or in collaboration, was affiliated with the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), Helsinki, a branch of the United Nations University.

    58. “Toward Development Ethics,” 457–83.

    59. Ibid., 466.

    60. Ibid., 465. In his Presidential Address to the Development Studies Association in 1982, Sen said that although “development economics had not been particularly unsuccessful in identifying the factors that lead to economic growth in developing countries,” it “has been less successful in characterizing economic development, which involves expansion of people’s capabilities.” Sen immediately added: “For this [expansion], economic growth is only a means and often not a very efficient means either”: “Development: Which Way Now?” in Resources, Values, and Development (Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 504.

    61. Ibid.

    62. Ibid.

    63. “Toward Development Ethics,” 466.

    64. “Functioning and Capability: The Foundation of Sen’s Development Ethic,” in Ethical Principles for Development: Needs, Capacities or Rights? Proceedings of the IDEA/Montclair Conference, ed. Kenneth Aman (Upper Montclair, NJ: Institute for Critical Thinking, 1991), 104–72.

    65. Part 1 appeared as “Functioning and Capability: The Foundation of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic,” Political Theory, 20, 4 (1992): 584–612. Part 2 was published as “Functioning and Capability: The Foundation of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic, Part 2,” in Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 153–98.

    66. Florecimiento humano y desarrollo internacional: La nueva ética de capacidades humanas (San José: Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998).

    67. The Washington DC area has offered many venues for applying development ethics in dialogue with development practitioners. Particularly important to me has been my participation in the World Bank’s Friday morning “Values for Development Group” and in the reorientation in 2007 of the Inter‐American Development Bank’s “Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics, and Development.” Their respective websites are <www.worldbank.org/fmg> and <www.iadb.org/etica>.

    68. See Adela Cortina, Por una ética del consumo: La ciudanía del consumidor en un mundo global (Madrid: Taurus, 2002).

    69. “Consumption, Well‐being, and Capability,” in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life: Justice, the Good Life, and Global Stewardship, ed. Crocker and Linden, 366–90.

    70. Gasper, The Ethics of Development, 180–1; Cortina, Por una ética del consumo, 178–9.

    71. Crocker, “Hunger, Capability, and Development,” in World Hunger and Morality, ed. Aiken and La Follette, 211–30.

    72. See, for example, Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action; and The Political Economy of Hunger, 3 vols., I: Entitlement and Well‐being; II: Famine and Prevention; III: Endemic Hunger, ed. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

    73. In a keynote address in an Inter‐American Development Bank Conference on “Ethics and Development,” Sen challenged development ethicists to take up new issues such as disaster prevention and mitigation, AIDS, and the use of DDT: “Ethics and Development Day at the IDB,” Inter‐American Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics, and Development, Inter‐American Development Bank, January 11, 2005.

    74. See Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, ed. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (London and New York: Verso, 2003); Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

    75. See Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (New York: Washington Square, 1966, reprinted Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1981); Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); “John Dewey on Democracy: The Task before US,” Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 260–72; Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); The New Constellation: The Ethical‐Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002); “Can We Justify Universal Moral Norms?,” in Universalism vs. Relativism: Making Moral Judgments in a Changing, Pluralistic, and Threatening World, ed. Don Browning (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 3–17; “The Romance of Philosophy,” Dewey Lecture, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 81, 2 (2007), 107–19. See also Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy” and “Afterward,” The Southern California Law Review, 63 (1990): 1671–97; and “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in Women, Culture, and Development, ed. Nussbaum and Glover, 199–224. For Dewey’s evolving theory of democracy in the context of his philosophical and professional career, see Robert B. Westbrook’s excellent book, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).