Development ethicists assess the ends and means of local, national, regional, and global development. National policymakers, project managers, grassroots communities, and international aid donors involved in development in poor countries often confront moral questions in their work. Development scholars recognize that social‐scientific theories of “development” and “underdevelopment” have ethical as well as empirical and policy components. Development philosophers and other ethicists formulate ethical principles relevant to social change in poor countries, and they analyze and assess the moral dimensions of development theories and seek to resolve the moral quandaries lurking in development policies and practice.1
Several sources exist for the moral assessment of the theory and practice of development. First, activists and social critics, such as Mohandas Gandhi (beginning in the 1890s) in South Africa and India, Raúl Prébisch (beginning in the 1940s) in Latin America, and Frantz Fanon (in the 1960s) in Africa criticized colonialism and orthodox economic development.2 Second, as discussed in Chapter 1, since the early 1960s, American development scholar, critic, and development practitioner Denis Goulet – drawing inspiration from the work of Louis‐Joseph Lebret and Albert Hirschman,3 Benjamin Higgins, and Gunner Myrdal4 and American sociologist Peter Berger – pioneered what we now call “development ethics” by arguing that development theory, policy, and practices should be subjected to ethical assessment. Both Goulet and Berger insisted that what was often called development was bad for human beings and that both ethics and development would benefit from interaction.
In Chapter 1, I identified a third source of development ethics: the effort of primarily Anglo‐American moral philosophers in the late 1970s and the 1980s to deepen and broaden philosophical debate about famine relief and food aid.5 Beginning in the early 1970s, often in response to Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for famine relief (1972) and Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” (1974), many philosophers debated whether affluent nations (or their citizens) have moral obligations to aid starving people in poor countries and, if they do, what are the nature, bases, and extent of those obligations.6 We saw in Chapter 1 how three Colorado State University professors in the late 1970s devised a course on ethics and development that went beyond Singer’s seminal approach and the theoretical debate that it stimulated. By the early 1980s, moral philosophers such as Nigel Dower, Onora O’Neill, and Jerome M. Segal had come to views similar to those of the Colorado State University professors: famine relief and food aid were only one part of the solution to the problems of hunger, poverty, underdevelopment, and international injustice.7 What is needed, argued these philosophers, is not merely an ethics of aid but a more comprehensive, empirically informed, and policy relevant “ethics of Third World development.” The kind of assistance and North/South relations that are called for will depend on how (good) development is understood.
A fourth source of development ethics is the work of Paul Streeten and Amartya Sen. Both economists have addressed the causes of global economic inequality, hunger, and underdevelopment and addressed these problems with, among other things, a conception of development explicitly based on ethical principles. Building on Streeten’s “basic human needs” strategy,8 Sen, as discussed in Chapter 1, argues that development should be understood ultimately not as economic growth, industrialization, or modernization, which are at best means for the expansion of people’s “valuable capabilities and functionings”:
The valued functionings can vary from such elementary ones as avoiding mortality or preventable morbidity, or being sheltered, clothed, and nourished, to such complex achievements as taking part in the life of the community, having a joyful and stimulating life, or attaining self‐respect and the respect of others.9
These four sources have been especially influential in the work of Anglo‐American development ethicists, such as Sabina Alkire, Nigel Dower, Jay Drydyk, Stephen Esquith, Des Gasper, Denis Goulet, Desmond McNeill, Daniel Little, Onora O’Neill, Thomas Pogge, Stephen Schwenke, and the author.10 When practiced by Latin Americans, Asians, Africans and non‐Anglo Europeans, development ethics also draws on philosophical and moral traditions distinctive of their cultural contexts. See, for example, the work of Osvaldo Guariglia and Bernardo Kliksberg (Argentina); Tarso Genro (Brazil); Cristián Parker and Manfred Max‐Neef (Chile); Luis Camacho, Jorge Arturo Chávez, and E. Roy Ramírez (Costa Rica); Kwame Gyekye (Ghana); Ramón Romero (Honduras); Reiko Gotoh (Japan); Asunción St. Clair (Norway); Adela Cortina, Jesús Conill, Emilio Martínez Navarro, and Marta Pedrajas Herrero (Spain); Wilhelm Verwoerd (South Africa); Godfrey Gunatilleke (Sri Lanka); and Peter John Opio, A. Byaruhanga Rukooko, and Joseph Wamala (Uganda).11
Presenting work by these and other thinkers, one anthology and two textbooks in development ethics appeared in the period 2002–4: Bernardo Kliksberg, ed., Ética y desarrollo: La relación marginada (2002);12 Daniel Little, The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development (2003);13 and Des Gasper, The Ethics of Development (2004).14 Three professional organizations have been formed: the International Development Ethics Association (founded 1987); the Human Development and Capability Association (founded 2000); and the Inter‐American Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics, and Development (2000), with its network of more than eighty universities.15 Courses in development ethics have been or are being taught in about twenty universities in at least ten countries.16 Short courses in development ethics are being considered in international financial institutions.
Such publications, groups, and courses indicate that development ethics has become – like environmental ethics or bioethics before it – a recognized field or multidisciplinary “discipline.” I put the last word in inverted commas because development ethics, as I shall argue in this and the next chapter, should not be an exclusively academic inquiry. Rather, it should bridge the gap between theory and practice and does so with interaction in both directions.
Questions
Although they differ on a number of matters, development ethicists exhibit a wide consensus about the commitments that inform their practice, the questions they are posing, and the unreasonableness of certain answers. Development ethicists typically ask the following eleven types of questions:
1. What should count as (good) development or development success? What are clear examples of “good” development and “bad” development? How well are various regions, societies, and locales doing in achieving “development?” Development ethics emerged due to dissatisfaction with conventional wisdom with respect to “development,” and it thrives on questioning how good and better development should be conceived.
2. Should we continue using the concept of development instead of, for example, “progress,” “economic growth,” “transformation,” “liberation,” “sustainable livelihoods,”17 or “post‐development alternatives to development”?18 How, if at all, does (good) development differ from “modernization” or “developmentalism,” “transformational development” (USAID), or the “Washington Consensus”?
3. If by “development” we mean good socioeconomic change, what fundamental economic, political, and cultural goals and strategies should a society or political community pursue, and what commitments or principles should inform their selection?
4. What moral issues emerge in development policymaking and practice and how should they be resolved?19 Should gender equality and women’s empowerment be promoted in cultures with traditions of male dominance? Should anti‐corruption strategies take priority over long‐term efforts at poverty reduction and participatory democracy?20 Should USAID personnel refuse to demote birth control (condoms) to a secondary status compared to policies of abstinence and marital fidelity?21 Should citizen decision‐making in development projects and societal governance be permitted, encouraged, or required?
5. How should the benefits and harms of development be conceived and distributed? Is some composite measure of development success basic, such as economic growth or economic efficiency, or does social justice require equal negative liberty (Nozick), equal political liberty and maximizing the opportunities of the least well off (Rawls), getting all above a minimally adequate threshold (Sen), reducing degrading forms of inequality, or strict economic equality? What category, “currency,” or “metric” is relevant for distributive justice? GDP (income), utility, subjective happiness (Graham and Pettinato), social primary goods (Rawls), access to resources (Roemer), basic human needs (Galtung, Max‐Neef, Streeten), negative liberty (Bauer and Nozick), free agency or autonomy (Sen, Crocker), capabilities and functionings (Sen, Nussbaum, Crocker), or human rights (Pogge, Vizard)?22 If human rights are important, should they include positive socioeconomic rights as well as civil and political rights?
6. Who (or what institutions) bears responsibility for bringing about development? A nation’s government, civil society, private enterprises, or the market? What role – if any – do or should more affluent states, international and global institutions, nongovernmental associations, and poor countries themselves have in development of poor nations? What are the obligations of a rich sovereign state for its own citizens and are these duties more demanding than its duties to all human beings, especially the poor in other countries?23
7. Regardless of the identity of duty‐bearers, how should we understand development responsibilities? Are moral duties based on divine commands, social pacts, general positive duties of charity (which permit donor discretion with respect to specific beneficiaries), specific duties to aid (any needy rights‐bearer), negative duties to dismantle unjust structures or halt injurious action, or duties to make reparation for past wrongs? Is the duty of “Do no harm” enough or should citizens and development agents also consider positive duties to aid? And, if the former, how should the duty not to harm be weighed in relation the duty to do good? Is the duty to aid distant peoples a cosmopolitan duty of justice, which makes no distinction in duties to compatriots and others, or a humanitarian duty to rescue or assist, which is less demanding than a duty to one’s fellow citizens (Nagel)?
8. What should be counted as the virtues and vices of various development agents? How good or obligatory is honesty and how bad or permissible is deception? Should USAID and other donor agencies have a code of ethics or conduct for its personnel? What is the evidence with respect to the role of similar professional codes in improving conduct? Is a code likely to do more harm than good? Would the prohibitions of such a code encourage employees to act in questionable ways just up to the threshold of permissible conduct, thereby encouraging problematic conduct? What would a defensible ethical code look like? Who should decide on such a code and by what process? Should it be imposed from the top or deliberated from the bottom? How should a code be enforced? How does an ethics of professional virtue or conduct relate to an ethics for assessing policy and institutional arrangements?
9. What are the most serious local, national, and international impediments to and opportunities for good development? How should blame for development failures be apportioned among global, national, and local agents? What are the most relevant theories and forms of globalization and how should the promise and risks of globalization be assessed from a moral point of view?
10. To what extent, if any, do psychological egoism, moral skepticism, moral relativism, national sovereignty and political realism, and religious or political fundamentalism pose a challenge to development ethics?
11. Who should decide these questions and by what methods? What are the respective roles of appeal to authority, philosophical reflection, constitutional constraints, public deliberation, donor deliberation, and “learning by doing”? How should development ethicists assess and improve their methods and in relation to what standards?
In addition to accepting the importance of these questions, most development ethicists share at least ten beliefs or commitments about their field and the general parameters for ethically based development. First, development ethicists typically agree that – in spite of global progress with respect to outlawing or reducing slavery and achieving higher living standards – many experience persistent and grave yet avoidable deprivations in contrast to the few who live in elevated affluence. Development ethicists start from judgments about what Dewey would call a “problematic situation”: many people throughout the world undeservedly and needlessly suffer or die. These deaths may be either agonizingly slow, due to poverty of various sorts, or rapid but brutal due to ethnic and military conflict, repressive governments, or fragile states. In our affluent world, these unacceptable sufferings and deprivations need not continue, but should be halted, and people everywhere should have a chance for a good life. Pogge’s cool expression of moral outrage is typical of many who share his sentiments:
How well are the weak and vulnerable faring today? Some 2,800 million or 46 percent of humankind live below the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line – precisely: in households whose income per person per day has less purchasing power than $2.15 had in the US in 1993. On average, the people living below this line fall 44.4 percent below it. Over 1,200 million of them live on less than half, below the World Bank’s better‐known $1/day poverty line. People so incredibly poor are extremely vulnerable to even minor changes in natural and social conditions as well as to many forms of exploitation and abuse. Each year, some 18 million of them die prematurely from poverty‐related causes. This is one‐third of all human deaths – 50,000 every day, including 34,000 children under age five.
Such severe and extensive poverty persists while there is great and rising affluence elsewhere. The average income of the citizens of the affluent countries is about 50 times greater in purchasing power and about 200 times greater in terms of market exchange rates than that of the global poor.24
Moreover, development ethicists contend that development practices and theories have ethical dimensions and can benefit from explicit ethical analysis and appraisal. Although important, trying to ascertain what events and conditions exist as well as their likely causes and effects should not take the place of morally assessing what has been, is, and could be. Ethical commitments are lenses that reveal or highlight the moral dimension of human actions, institutions, and their consequences. It is indispensable to understand the causes and consequences of such things as poverty, corruption, repressive governments, and state fragility. It is another thing to evaluate the morally salient features of those phenomena, decide whether alternatives would be morally better, and ascribe responsibilities to various actors. For example, does the economic growth supposedly generated by a given development strategy get translated to expanding important opportunities for a society’s most vulnerable citizens? Ethical assessment of past policies and present options enables people who are active in development endeavors to keep their eyes on the ball of reducing remediable and undeserved human death and suffering. Many people work in development in order to make the world better, but the conceptual frameworks that guide them are largely concerned with technical means rather than morally urgent ends. Development ethics is a way of thinking that puts moral questions and answers in the center of thought and action.
In addition, development ethicists tend to see development as a multidisciplinary field that has both theoretical and practical components that intertwine in various ways. Hence, development ethicists aim not merely to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of development – conceived generally as desirable social change – but also to argue for and promote specific conceptions of such change. In backing certain changes, development ethicists assume that choice among alternatives is real and that some choices are better than others.25
Furthermore, although they may understand the terms in somewhat different ways, development ethicists are generally committed to understanding and reducing human deprivation and misery in poor countries and regions. Development ethicists persistently remind development agencies that development should be for human beings rather than treating humans merely as tools (or “social capital”) for development. Assessment of development policies and projects should emphasize impacts on preventing death as well as relieving suffering and loss of meaning. A consensus increasingly exists that development policymakers and donors should seek strategies in which both human well‐being and a healthy environment jointly exist and are mutually reinforcing.
Another matter of agreement is that most ethicists are convinced that what is frequently called “development” – for instance, economic growth – has created as many problems as it has solved. “Development” can be used both descriptively and normatively. In the descriptive sense, “development” is usually identified as a high rate of economic growth, where growth is understood in relation to a society’s achievement of high and improving (per capita) gross domestic or national product (GDP, GNP). So conceived, a “developed” society may be either celebrated or criticized. In the normative sense, a developed society – ranging from villages to national and regional communities as well as the global order – is one whose established institutions realize or approximate (what the proponent believes to be) worthwhile goals. These goals include the overcoming of economic and social deprivation. In order to avoid confusion, when a normative sense of “development” is meant, the noun is often preceded by a positive adjective such as “good,” “authentic,” “humane,” “just,” or “ethically justified.”
Development ethicists also agree that development ethics should be conducted at various levels of generality and specificity. Just as development debates occur at various levels of abstraction, so development ethics should assess (1) basic ethical principles, such as justice, liberty, autonomy, solidarity, and democracy; (2) development goals and models, such as “economic growth,” “growth with equity,” “a new international economic order,” “basic needs,” and, most recently, “sustainable development,” “structural adjustment,” “human development” (United Nations Development Programme),26 “transformational development” (USAID), and “development as freedom” (Sen); and (3) specific institutions, projects, and strategies.
Most development ethicists also contend that their enterprise should be international or global in the triple sense that the ethicists engaged in this activity come from many societies, including poor ones; that they are seeking to forge a cross‐cultural consensus; and that this consensus emphasizes a commitment to alleviating worldwide deprivation.
Although many development ethicists argue that at least some development principles or procedures are relevant for any poor community or polity, most agree that development strategies must be contextually sensitive. What constitutes the best means – for instance, donor aid or withdrawal, state provisioning, market mechanisms, civil society, and their hybrids – will tend to vary in relation to a political community’s history and stage of social change as well as to regional and global forces, such as globalization and international institutions.
Finally, this flexibility concerning development models and strategies is compatible with the uniform rejection of certain extremes. Ethically based development is inclusive development: it offers and protects at least a minimally adequate level of development benefits for everyone in a society – regardless of their religion, gender, ethnicity, economic status, sexual preference, or age. Moreover, most development ethicists would repudiate three models: (1) the maximization of economic growth in a society without paying any direct attention to converting greater opulence into better human living conditions for its members, what Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze call “unaimed opulence”;27 (2) a society unconcerned with the (growing) gap between the haves and the have‐nots; and (3) an authoritarian egalitarianism in which physical needs are satisfied at the expense of political liberties. That said, development ethicists do and should enter into dialogue with theorists and practitioners who favor societies and projects that are authoritarian, hierarchical, opposed to governmental redistribution, and subordinate individual rights to community stability.
In addition to these points of agreement among development ethicists, one also finds several divisions and unsettled issues. One unresolved issue concerns the scope of development ethics. Development ethics originated as the “ethics of Third World Development.” There are good reasons to drop – as a Cold War relic – the “First‐Second‐Third World” trichotomy. However, no consensus exists on whether or how development ethics should extend beyond its central concern of assessing the development ends and means of poor, traditional, or nonindustrial societies. Some argue that development ethicists should criticize human deprivation wherever it exists, including in rich countries and regions, since they too have problems of poverty, powerlessness, and alienation and so properly fall within the scope of development ethics. Some argue that the socioeconomic model that the North has been exporting to the South results in the underdevelopment of both. Moreover, just as the (affluent) North exists in the (geographic) South, so the (poor) South exists in the (geographic) North.
Yet others – let us call them “restrictionists” – restrict development ethics to poor countries by arguing that attention to Northern deprivation, on the one hand, or consumerism, on the other, diverts development ethicists and agents from the world’s most serious destitution (in poor countries) and the ways in which rich countries benefit from the current global order.
My own view is that restricting development ethics to “developing” countries is defective in four ways. First, and most obviously, the production processes, consumption, trade, and foreign policy of rich nations often have an enormous impact for good and ill on poor countries and their inhabitants. To be concerned about poor people in poor countries requires both assessment of current policies and practices of rich country inhabitants and governments and ethically based proposals to improve them. Accordingly, in Chapter 7, as part of development ethics, I apply an agency‐focused version of the capability approach to assess and improve Northern consumption with respect to the developing world. Moreover, restrictionism falsely assumes that the most severe deprivation occurs in poor countries when in fact, as Sen points out, “the extent of deprivation for particular groups in very rich countries can be comparable to that in the so‐called third world.”28 Further, Northern and Southern poverty reduction are linked; migrants from the South making money in the North send valuable remittances to their families back home but may also drain the South of able workers and displace workers in the North. Finally, “best practices” learned from development in the South may be applied to destitution in the North (as well as vice versa). For example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – albeit in a poorly funded and now defunct program called “Lessons without Borders” – attempted to apply lessons learned abroad to destitute US cities. Development agents in different societies often face similar problems – such as unemployment, racism, violence, and powerlessness – and benefit from innovative ways of solving them.
A second unsettled question with respect to the scope of development ethics concerns how wide a net development ethics should cast with respect to the topics it addresses. It is controversial whether development ethicists, concerned with rich country responsibility and global distributive justice, should restrict themselves to official development assistance or whether they also should treat such topics as international trade, capital flows, migration, environmental pacts, terrorism, civil conflict, state fragility, military intervention, humanitarian intervention, and responses to human rights violations committed by prior regimes. The chief argument against extending its boundaries in these ways is that development ethics would thereby become too ambitious and diffuse. If development ethics grew to be identical with all international ethics or even all social ethics, the result might be that insufficient attention would be paid to alleviating poverty and powerlessness in various poor communities. Both sides agree that development ethicists should assess various kinds of North–South (and South–South) relations and the numerous global forces, such as globalization, that influence poverty, as well as economic and political inequality in poor countries. What is unresolved, however, is whether development ethics also should address such topics as those listed when – or to the extent that – these topics have no causal relationship to absolute or relative poverty or powerlessness. In any case, these above listed issues are enormously important, and ethicists, whether or not they put “development” before their title, should be among those to confront them.
Development ethicists also are divided on the status of the moral norms that they seek to justify and apply. Three positions have emerged. First, universalists, such as utilitarians and Kantians, argue that development goals and principles are appropriate for all societies. Second, some particularists, especially communitarians and postmodern relativists, reply (sometimes committing a genetic or ad hominem fallacy) that universalism masks ethnocentrism and (Northern or Western) cultural imperialism. Pro‐development particularists either reject the existence of universal principles or affirm only the procedural principle that each nation or society should draw only on its own traditions and decide its own development ethic and path. (Anti‐development particularists, rejecting both change brought from the outside and public reasoning about social change, condemn all development discourse and practice.) A third approach – advanced, for example, by Seyla Benhabib, Jesús Conill, Adela Cortina, Nigel Dower, Jonathan Glover, Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen, as well as the author29 – tries in different ways to avoid the standoff between the first two positions. Proponents of this view insist that development ethics should forge a cross‐cultural consensus on general goals relevant for any society, among which is the principle that a society should be free to make its own development choices among a plurality of fundamental norms. Further, these norms are sufficiently general to require sensitivity to societal differences.
One should also ask a further question related to the universalism/particularism debate: to what extent, if any, should development ethicists propose visions committed to a certain conception of human well‐being or flourishing, and how “thick” or extensive should this vision be? There is a continuum here: at one end of the range, one finds a commitment to individual choice, tolerance of differences, and public deliberation about societal ends and means; at the other end, one finds normative prescriptions and institutional (including constitutional) guarantees with respect to the specifics of a good or flourishing human life but less tolerance for individual and social agency.
As I will argue in later chapters, most plausible is a “threshold” view that identifies an adequate level of agency and well‐being that should be open to everyone, regardless of their citizenship. This threshold functions as a “platform” for individuals and communities freely to decide their own conception of the flourishing human life, its elements, and their weightings. One reason for this approach is that it will be easier to get cross‐cultural consensus for a “moral minimum” than for a more robust conception of the good life. Another reason is that such an approach both respects the rights of individuals and communities to determine (within limits set by their respect for the like agency and well‐being of others) their own conception of the good and enhances the “domain of public reasoning.”30
Even supposing that development principles have some substantive content (beyond the procedural principle of self‐determination that each society or person should decide for itself), there remain disagreements about that content. If one accepts that societal development concerns human development, one still must explore the moral categories crucial to human well‐being and development. Candidates for such fundamental moral notions include, as we have seen, utility (preference satisfaction); subjective happiness; social primary goods, such as political liberty, income, wealth, and self‐respect; negative liberty; basic human needs; autonomy or agency; valuable capabilities and functioning; human rights; and compassion or care.
Although many think that a development ethic ought to include more than one of these moral concepts, development ethicists differ about which among them ought to have priority. The alternative that I favor, as will become clear in Parts II and III, endorses the development of an understanding of a minimally adequate or sufficient level of human agency and well‐being (not flourishing) that combines, on the one hand, a neo‐Kantian commitment to autonomy and human dignity, critical dialogue and public deliberation with, on the other hand, neo‐Aristotelian beliefs in the importance of physical health and social participation. Development duties might then flow from the idea that it is extremely important that all humans have the right to an adequate level of agency and well‐being, and persons and groups have the duty to secure and protect these rights as well as to restore them when lost. Donor agencies, such as the World Bank and USAID, should consider the merits of such a rights‐based and agency‐focused approach to development.
One also finds, as we saw above, an ongoing debate about how development’s benefits, burdens, and responsibilities should be distributed within poor (and rich) countries and between rich and poor countries. Utilitarians prescribe simple aggregation and maximization of individual utilities. Rawlsians advocate income and wealth maximization for the least well‐off (individuals or nations). Libertarians contend that a society should guarantee no form of equality apart from equal freedom from the interference of government and other people. Pogge broadens the libertarian notion of harm (and rights) and argues that rich elites and nations should refrain from harming the vulnerable and compensate those who have been harmed. Singer continues to challenge development ethicists and citizens everywhere with his argument that if affluent nations and individuals can relieve suffering and death without sacrificing anything of comparable moral worth, they are morally obliged to do so. Capability ethicists defend governmental and civil responsibility to enable everyone – even those who are citizens of other countries – to advance to a level of sufficiency (Sen, Crocker) or flourishing (Nussbaum, Little) with respect to either agency or valuable functionings (or both). Nagel distinguishes a stronger duty of justice that governments owe to their own citizens (and that fellow citizens owe to each other) and a less stringent duty of beneficence that such governments and citizens owe to citizens of other countries.
Many development economists and policymakers are personally concerned with distributional and other ethical questions. Such questions, however, are often only implicit in the development economics literature and development policymaking documents. A notable and encouraging exception is the World Bank’s World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development: “equity considerations must be brought squarely into the center of both diagnosis and policy.”31
When silence on distributional issues occurs, development ethics should insist not only that policymakers confront the gains and losses that various policies bring to specific individuals and subgroups but also challenge development professionals and citizens to deliberate explicitly about which distributions of burdens and benefits are most justified morally. When development professionals do take up the question of distribution, development ethicists should applaud the effort but also argue that it is not enough to offer empirical evidence that “equity” – conceived, for example, as individual’s having “equal opportunity to pursue a life of their choosing and be spared from extreme deprivations in outcomes”32 – is efficacious in promoting efficiency or aggregate growth. Development ethicists should also challenge policymakers and citizens to forge, through fair processes, normatively appropriate ideals of economic and political justice. For “equity” is not only instrumentally valuable but is also good or right in itself. Rather than taking refuge in a doctrine of value neutrality or a narrow construal of their institutions’ “mandate” or “comparative advantage,” policy professionals should debate with citizens on the merits of substantive concepts of justice as well as procedures for deciding this question.33
A controversy also exists in development ethics with respect to whether (good) societal development should have – as an ultimate goal – commitments other than to the present and future human good. Communitarian ethicists ascribe intrinsic value – equal or even superior to the good of individual human beings – to such human communities as family, nation, or cultural group.34 Others argue that nonhuman individuals and species, as well as ecological communities, have equal and even superior value to human individuals.35 Those committed to “ecodevelopment” or “sustainable development” often fail to agree on what should be sustained as an end in itself and what should be maintained as an indispensable or merely helpful means. Nor do they agree on how to surmount conflicts among environmental and other competing values. Economist Joseph Stiglitz clearly recognizes that these and other moral disagreements are sometimes implicit in factual or policy disagreements:
There are important disagreements about economic and social policy in our democracies. Some of these disagreements are about values – how concerned should we be about our environment (how much environmental degradation should we tolerate, if it allows us to have a higher GDP); how concerned should we be about the poor (how much sacrifice in our total income should we be willing to make, if it allows some of the poor to move out of poverty, or to be slightly better off); or how concerned should we be about democracy (are we willing to compromise on basic rights, such as the rights to association, if we believe that as a result, the economy will grow faster).36
Each development ethic and theory of justice offers insights at both the broad policy level and at the level of specific interventions. Although these moral frameworks seldom provide definitive or specific answers, they do call attention to candidates for fundamental ends in the light of which many current strategies and tactics might turn out to be morally questionable or even morally reprehensible. The moral theories provide lenses that enable us to see ourselves, our duties, and others in new and compelling ways. They can reinforce moral motivations and thereby shape both citizen and professional conduct.
An increasingly important disagreement concerns not values directly but the roles in resolving moral conflicts of, on the one hand, various experts, such as judges (and the constitutions they interpret), political leaders, donors and their technical experts, philosophers, or development ethicists, and, on the other hand, popular agency of various kinds. On the one hand, popular participation and democracy are suspect insofar as majorities (or minorities) may dominate others and insofar as people’s beliefs and preferences are deformed by tradition, adapted to cope with deprivation, and subject to demagogic manipulation. Moreover, experts often excel at “know how,” if not “know why.” Finally, in addition to facilitating deliberation by others, ethicists can give advice and take stands without falling into self‐righteous moralizing and finger‐wagging. On the other hand, rule by experts or guardians can lead to new tyrannies, and many experts fail to facilitate ways in which “recipients” of development can be in charge of making and implementing their own development goals.
As I argue in detail in later chapters, Sen rightly calls for development institutions to reorient their approach from one of providing goods and services to passive recipients to one of enabling countries and their citizens genuine opportunities to be authors of their own lives and development path:
The ends and means of development call for placing the perspective of freedom at the center of the stage. The people have to be seen, in this perspective, as being actively involved – given the opportunity – in shaping their own destiny, and not just as passive recipients of the fruits of cunning development programs.37
Such an “agency‐centered” development perspective implies, I argue in Part IV, a deepening and broadening of democracy that includes but goes well beyond a universal franchise coupled with free and competitive elections. Crucially important is the engendering of venues – within both government and civil society – in which citizens and their representatives can engage in deliberative give‐and‐take to solve common problems.
I argue in Part IV that the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, grounded in the ideals of agency, dialogue, reason‐giving, and reciprocity, has much to offer development ethics. Rather than focusing exclusively on free and fair elections, as important as they are, the theory and practice of deliberative democracy emphasize social choice through public discussion that aims at solutions – solutions that nearly everyone can accept – to common problems. A political practice as well as a normative theory, deliberative democracy, I argue in Part IV, is informed by and informs promising experiments in democratic governance occurring in Porto Alegre and almost 250 other cities in Brazil, in Kerala (an Indian state of 32 million inhabitants), and in Chicago, Illinois, among other places.
Finally, controversy also exists among development ethicists with respect to which agents and structures are to blame for the present state of global destitution and unequal opportunity and responsible for societal change. Charles Beitz states the empirical aspects of the issue well: “There is a large, complex, and unresolved empirical question about the relative contributions of local and global factors to the wealth and poverty of societies.”38 Some development ethicists, such as Pogge, emphasize that affluent countries dominate if not completely determine the global order, which as a result unjustly tilts against poor countries.39 This global order and the process of globalization amount, claims Pogge, to a “strong headwind” against which any poor community must struggle and which is largely responsible for development failures: “national policies and institutions are indeed often quite bad; but the fact that they are can be traced to global policies and institutions.”40 Other development ethicists and policymakers ascribe development failure much less to global and foreign sources and much more to national and local causes – such as elite capture of power, widespread corruption, and the lack of democratic institutions.
Let us appropriate and develop Pogge’s “headwind” metaphor in a way that captures a view less one‐sided and more pluralistic than the “explanatory nationalism” that Pogge usually expresses about the relative weight of external (global structure, rich country role) and internal (developing country role) factors in causing global poverty. Sailors know that the headwind against which they sail is an important but constantly changing and sometimes ambiguous factor and that getting to their destination requires skill and good judgment as well. The headwind is not always steady. Sometimes it gusts and sometimes it lulls (depending on the wind and whether their boat goes behind an island and is temporarily protected from the wind). Likewise, the impact of the global order and rich countries increases and decreases from time to time and place to place.
Moreover, sometimes there are crosswinds, some of which aid the ship and some of which impede progress, and good sailors must take advantage of the former and adjust to the latter. Likewise, the global order opens up opportunities for poverty reduction and democratization as well as impedes them, and wise leaders and peoples discern the difference. Furthermore, the good sailor tacks back and forth in the face of the wind, taking advantage of it for forward progress and not bucking it directly. Likewise, a developing country can find ways to take advantage of and “manage” normally adverse global factors. For instance, a cutback on US aid in Costa Rica enabled Costa Rica to become less dependent on the USA. Additionally, sometimes a headwind changes and becomes a tailwind. Then the global forces and rich country impacts coincide with and supplement internal development efforts. Finally, just as some boats are better than others with respect to resourcefulness, navigability, and stability, so some countries, owing to such things as natural endowments, governance, and human and social “capital,” develop further and faster than others.
The moral of this nautical story is clear: just as the national development efforts vary from time to time and place to place, so do the impacts of the global order and the rich countries that dominate this order. Although the wind is always a factor in sailing (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes good, sometimes bad, often both), so is the skill of the captain and crew (and their ability to work together). Empirical investigation is important to determine which way and how hard the wind is blowing and how best to use national skills and resources to reach a society’s destination. Pogge recognizes the variability of internal factors; in his less careful formulations, however, he fails to recognize the variability and complexity of external factors, the changing balance between external and internal factors, and the always important and sometimes crucial role of internal factors.41
This debate over the chief causes of development failure is closely linked to sharp disagreements over the moral appraisal of globalization, which I take up in Chapter 11, and the identification of “agents of justice.”42 Does globalization doom or guarantee good national and local development? Does globalization offer blessings and opportunities as well as miseries and risks? Is it up to developing nation‐states and local communities to seize the good and avoid the bad of a globalizing world? Or should the main “agents of justice” be the rich nations, transnational corporations, and global institutions? In Chapter 11, I argue that the challenge is, as economist Joseph Stiglitz says, “to get the balance right . . . between collective action at the local, national, and global levels.”43
The resolution of these controversies within development ethics should be understood in relation to the field’s new challenges (and dangers) and the importance of exploring new terrain. Why are new directions in development ethics important?
First, the world itself changes. The end of World War II; the end of colonialism; the rise and fall of the Cold War and the break‐up of the Soviet Union; disappearing species, global warming, and natural calamities; the advent of and blowback against neo‐liberalism and increased economic integration among states; the end of apartheid; the rapid spread and human toll of HIV‐AIDS; the strengthening of a global human rights regime; the accomplishments of national truth and reconciliation commissions and the initiation of the International Criminal Court; the atrocious terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, and elsewhere; the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the difficulties in promoting and sustaining democracy; the incidence of civil conflict and “failed” states – all these events present new challenges to those who reflect morally on the ends and means of national and global development.
Development ethics, I argue throughout this volume, have been and continue to be centrally concerned with understanding and combating human poverty and promoting human well‐being throughout the world. Cutting‐edge research addresses the issues of ill‐being and well‐being with respect to those systematically excluded and vulnerable, such as women, the disabled, ethnic and religious minorities, displaced persons and immigrants, and the elderly.44 Increasingly, however, development ethicists recognize that they should attend not only to the cures of multidimensional poverty but also to poverty’s deep causes, such as inequality, and its consequences, such as instability and conflict. Moreover, they realize that often poverty alleviation – because it can conflict with other good goals – should be linked in a complementary way with other morally urgent objectives. In so doing, development ethicists are pushing the frontiers of development and development ethics into new areas. It is not that development ethics should tackle every national and global issue. But it should address those problems that either issue in or stem from increased human poverty. Let me mention just three of them.
First, since the mid‐1980s, environmental ethicists and development ethicists, reflecting concerns in the environmental and development communities, have sought ways to balance “conservation” and “development” or, in another formulation, to integrate environmental and development concerns in concepts of “sustainable development,” “ecodevelopment,” or “sustainable livelihoods.”45 How might conflicts between “nature” (including nonhuman animals) and human well‐being be avoided or mitigated? When conflicts cannot be avoided, what should our priorities be, how should they be decided, and who should decide?
A related issue, second, which I address in Chapter 7, is that of consumption and global justice. Peter Singer and Adela Cortina, among others, have insisted on the relationship between environmental damage, mainly due to consumption patterns in affluent societies, and global warming, which then leads to desertification, increased risk of flooding, famines, and destitution in poor countries.46 Although all industrial and post‐industrial societies are guilty of damaging the ecosystem, it is the USA that most consistently refuses to take responsibility for her “collective lifestyle.” Hence the topic of “development” and “conservation” is not just that of promoting development and conserving the environment in the South, but also that of underdevelopment in the South being causally linked – through environmental change – to “overdevelopment” or bad development in the North.
A third new direction for development ethics is that of ethical issues in reckoning with a society’s past wrongs, such as a government’s massively violating human rights and committing genocide against its own citizens or those of other countries. Often a group, nation, or region cannot advance to a better future of genuine development until it reckons ethically and effectively with a terrible past. Failure to hold past rights‐abusers accountable for their crimes contributes to a “culture of impunity” and disregard for the rule of law, both obstacles to good development. Reckoning appropriately with past wrongs, in contrast, may contribute to (as well as benefit from) equitable and democratic development.47
Even before 9/11, but certainly afterwards, many were convinced that close causal links exist between, on the one hand, insecurity and lack of development, and, on the other hand, security and genuine development. The 1994 Human Development Report sought to put security on the development agenda and development on the security agenda.48 A decade later, the Commission on Human Security, which Amartya Sen and Sadako Ogata co‐chaired, proposed that security issues be reframed as less about national security and more about human insecurity in the face of serious and remediable threats.49 The US‐British response to terrorism, however, arguably has continued to emphasize national security in the face of terrorism and has done so at the expense of civil liberties as well as of national security. Just as problematic, the “war on terrorism” is distracting attention from other human ills and hijacking resources from efforts to ameliorate them. Among these are the deprivations that rights‐based development aims to overcome. As Louise Arbour, the Canadian jurist and the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, commented as she departed from Canada’s Supreme Court for her new position in Geneva:
The all‐consuming nature of the US‐led campaign against terrorism is sucking the oxygen out of other initiatives. I think there are other areas of grave concern, one of which I think is the tension between civil and political rights and social, economic and cultural rights, the right to development, which is not recognized by all as being a core human right.50
Yet, as many are coming to realize, poverty‐reducing and humiliation‐reducing development is surely one way of reducing the terrorist threat, for terrorism appeals most to those impoverished and disgraced, and good development decreases deprivations and promotes human dignity.51
These examples, in which development is linked with the environment, reckoning with past wrongs, and security, illustrate three ways of extending development ethics to topics traditionally considered outside development. Other such topics include trade,52 displaced persons, migration,53 bioethics, global financial structures and flows, and war within or between countries.
Beyond the fact of a changing world, new directions in development ethics are important due to three dangers that must be confronted and avoided: dogmatism, cooptation, and a certain modishness of development ethics in general and the capability orientation in particular. Each of these dangers threatens the critical bite and progressive evolution of ethical reflection on development ends and means.
Dogmatism occurs when an intellectual or practical movement insulates itself from a changing world and external critics. All such movements, including development ethics, the capability approach, and (as we shall see) deliberative democracy, are in danger of absolutizing past achievements instead of subjecting favorite ideas and institutions to continual scrutiny and – where called for – revision. As Richard J. Bernstein has argued and illustrated over the course of his long and fruitful career, it is precisely those ideas to which we are most attached that we should probe for ambiguity, incompleteness, one‐sidedness, and downright error.54 There is certainly something to be said for a movement’s seeking unity and coherence so as not to be dissipated and thereby lose its distinctive and critical perspective.55 Yet, the quest for unity – like the quest for certainty that Dewey persistently excoriated – can become a straitjacket that prevents creative change. Why listen to our critics if we know we’ve got it right (and are certain that they are wrong)?
Development ethics, especially with the first appearance of textbooks,56 has become a recognized discipline or field, yet by that very fact may lose its critical soul. One antidote is to build fallibility, revisability, pluralism, and tolerance right into development ethics (and even that is no sure‐fire solution). Another remedy is to confront and sift through the arguments of those who oppose development ethics; for instance, those who continue to espouse supposedly value‐neutral economics, those who object to overly abstract or utopian presentations and insufficient attention to questions of feasibility and implementation, and those who criticize development ethics as a tool of Northern or rich country hegemony.57
The capability orientation, likewise, is in danger of calcification as it seeks to establish itself as a distinctive alternative to mainstream (utilitarian) development economics, Rawlsian perspectives, Kantian development ethics, human‐rights based approaches, libertarianism, and champions of neo‐liberalism. Capability and capabilities ethicists should confront the various critics, whether sympathetic or not, of their perspectives.58 One of the most important of these criticisms is that the capability approach pays insufficient attention to asymmetries in social power. Some argue that Sen fails to emphasize sufficiently local and household power imbalances, including gender inequalities.59 Thomas Pogge argues that Sen consistently ignores global power imbalances, puts excessive explanatory weight on national and local factors of poverty, and pays insufficient attention to global causes.60 Pogge also argues that Sen fails to spell out duties that affluent persons and nations have to change currently unjust global structures and institutions.61 The three chapters in Part IV, “Deliberative Democracy, Participation, and Globalization,” begin to assess these and other criticisms.
One healthy development within the capability orientation is the fact that Sen’s and Nussbaum’s perspectives exhibit increasing differences in style, intended audience, and substance. The annual conferences of the Human Development and Capability Association include many papers that evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the human development and capability approaches to development. Yet a danger exists that the capability orientation will be polarized into two dogmatic factions that unproductively argue about a “list” of universal features of a humanly good life. Fans of Nussbaum may dig in their heals and fight for one universal and prescriptive “list” while followers of Sen may just as tenaciously reject universal lists in favor of culturally specific public discussion. It is important not to get seduced into this “Sen or Nussbaum” dichotomy. One way to avoid doing so is to identify strengths and weaknesses in both approaches. Another way is to find ways to mediate between or creatively advance beyond the two.62 I adopt both strategies throughout the present volume, especially when I argue for (1) a convergence of the capability approach and deliberative democracy (Chapter 9) and (2) the democratic role for lists of valuable capabilities (Chapter 10).63
The capability orientation is best characterized not as “Sen plus Nussbaum” or “Sen versus Nussbaum” but as a capacious family of perspectives. Sen was the founder of the orientation while Nussbaum is currently the most prolific family member. Influenced by both of these thinkers, many (often younger) capability friends and relations are applying, extending, and innovatively developing the capability perspective. To do otherwise would be to create a new dogmatism and weaken the approach’s intellectual and political voice.64
We may also reinforce new directions in development ethics by applauding the way in which development ethics and, in particular, Sen’s perspectives on development have begun to penetrate international institutions and popular discourse. Sen gave lectures at the World Bank that eventuated in Development as Freedom, the volume that would become the most popular and accessible statement of his ideas. With Bank President James Wolfensohn, Sen coauthored an article printed in the International Herald Tribune.65 Beginning in 2000, Sen keynoted five “Ethics and Development” conferences at the Inter‐American Development Bank (IADB). The Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics, and Development of the IADB sponsored these events while the Government of Norway funded them.66 The World Bank devoted its World Development 2006 to the topic of “Equity and Development” and in its Public Sector and Governance unit has begun an initiative, “Ethics and Leadership,” to consider ways in which development ethics might be institutionalized within developing countries and the Bank’s own operations.67
Those of us who have labored in the fields of development ethics are delighted to see such institutions engage in moral (as well as economic) appraisal of development policies. With success in putting ethics on the agenda of these institutions, however, come new dangers. The critical and radical thrust of development ethics and the capability approach may be tamed or sanitized by institutions that talk ethics but keep walking as they did before. To be forewarned is to be forearmed; a great help in this regard are recent studies of the way that international institutions often have taken the sting out of progressive concepts.68 Another way to reduce the danger of cooptation is for both insiders and outsiders – and hybrid insider‐outsiders – in development ethics to apply ethical assessment to the policies and practices as well as to the rhetoric of national development and aid agencies and international financial institutions.69 Or so I argue in the next chapter.
NOTES
This chapter was adapted from the first section of David A. Crocker, “Development Ethics, Democracy, and Globalization,” in Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century, ed. Deen Chatterjee (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Earlier versions appeared as “Development Ethics,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, III, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 39–44; “Development Ethics and Globalization,” Philosophical Topics, 30, 2 (2002): 9–28, and in Ethical Dimensions of Global Development, ed. Verna V. Gehring (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 59–63; “Globalization and Human Development: Ethical Approaches,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, ed. Edmond Malinvaud and Louis Sabourin, the Vatican, April 25–8, 2001 (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, 2001), 45–65; and “Globalización y desarrollo humano: Aproximaciones éticas,” in ¿Republicanismo y educación cívica: Más allá del liberalismo? ed. Jesús Conill and David A. Crocker (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2003), 75–98. For helpful comments, I thank Deen Chatterjee, Roger Crisp, David P. Crocker, Edna D. Crocker, Nigel Dower, Jay Drydyk, Arthur Evenchik, Des Gasper, Verna Gehring, Denis Goulet, Xiaorong Li, Toby Linden, Nasim Moalem, Jerome M. Segal, and Roxanne Walters.
1. For fuller sketches of the history of development ethics, see David A. Crocker, “Toward Development Ethics,” World Development, 19, 5 (May 1991): 457–83; Denis Goulet, Development Ethics: Theory and Practice (London: Zed Books, 1995), Preface, Introduction, and Part I; “Development Ethics,” in The Elgar Companion to Development Studies, ed. David Alexander Clark (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 115–21; Des Gasper, “Development Ethics – an Emergent Field? A Look at Scope and Structure with Special Reference to the Ethics of Aid,” in Ethics and Development: On Making Moral Choices in Development Cooperation, ed. Cees J. Hamelink (Kampen: Kok, 1997), 25–43; and Marta Pedrajas Herrero, “El desarrollo humano en la economía ética de Amartya Sen,” PhD dissertation, University of Valencia, 2005, 29–45.
2. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Navajivan Mudranalaya, Ahmedabad: Jitendra T. Desai, 1927); Raúl Prébisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, E/C.12/R.1, 1950); Edgar J. Dosman, “Raúl Prébisch,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 468–73; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; reprint, Grove Press, 1986). For the emergence of development economics after World War II, see Gerald L. Meier and Dudley Seers, Pioneers in Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
3. See Oswaldo Feinstein, “Hirschman, Albert Otto (b. 1915),” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 226–30.
4. See Paul Streeten, “Myrdal, Gunnar (1898–1987),” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 399–404.
5. Des Gasper suggests another, more practical, 1960s source of development ethics, namely, those practitioners engaged in moral arguments about famine and emergency relief, human rights activists supporting the covenant on social and economic rights (1966), and religious communities influenced by liberation theology.
6. See World Hunger and Morality, 2nd edn., ed. William Aiken and Hugh La Follette (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996). For Singer’s most recent statement of the obligations of rich nations and individuals to poor ones, see Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 5; “Outsiders: Our Obligations to those Beyond our Borders,” in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11–32; and “What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?” New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2006.
7. See, for example, Onora O’Neill, “The Moral Perplexities of Famine Relief,” Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1980); Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); “Ending World Hunger,” Matters of Life and Death, 3rd edn., ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993); Nigel Dower, “What is Development? – A Philosopher’s Answer,” Centre for Development Studies Occasional Paper Series, 3 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1988); Jerome M. Segal, “What Is Development?,” in Philosophical Dimensions in Public Policy, ed. Verna Gehring and William A. Galston (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications, 2002), originally available as a working paper.
8. Paul Streeten, Shaid Javed Burki, Mahbub ul Haq, Norman Hicks, and Frances Stewart, First Things First: Meeting Basic Needs in Developing Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Hugh Stretton, “Streeten, Paul (b. 1917),” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 115–21; Johan Galtung, “The New International Order and the Basic Needs Approach,” Alternatives, 4 (1978/9): 455–76; “The Basic Needs Approach,” in Human Needs, ed. Karin Lederer (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980), 55–125; Francis Stewart, Planning to Meet Basic Needs (London: Macmillan, 1985); “Basic Needs Approach,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 14–18.
9. Amartya Sen, “Development Thinking at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” in Economic and Social Development into the XXI Century, ed. Louis Emmerji (Washington, DC: Inter‐American Development Bank, 1997), 531–51. As noted in Chapter 1, Sen’s most systematic and readable statement of his capability approach and development ethic is Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). See Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), for the most complete bibliography of Sen’s writing on ethics and development through 2001. See also Carl Riskin, “Sen, Amartya Kumar (b. 1933),” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 540–5.
10. The following are major writings of these development ethicists: Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms; Nigel Dower, World Ethics: The New Agenda, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Jay Drydyk, “Globalization and Human Rights,” in Global Justice, Global Democracy, ed. Jay Drydyk and Peter Penz (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 1997), 159–83; “The Development Ethics Framework,” in Peter Penz, Jay Drydyk, and Pablo Bose, Displacement and Development: Ethics and Responsibilities (unpublished manuscript); Jay Drydyk and Atiya Habeeb Kidwai, “Development‐Induced Population Displacement,” in The Economics and Politics of Resettlement in India, ed. Shobhita Jain and Madhu Bala (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2006), 99–114; Stephen L. Esquith, “Complicity in Mass Violence,” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 24, 4 (Fall 2004): 28–35; Des Gasper, The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Denis Goulet, Development Ethics; Development Ethics at Work: Explorations 1960–2002 (London: Routledge, 2006); Daniel Little, The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development (Boulder, Co: Westview, 2003); Desmond McNeill, “Equity, Development and the World Bank: Can Ethics Be Put Into Practice?,” in The World Bank Legal Review, II: Law, Equity and Development (Washington, DC: Martinus Nijhoff and World Bank, 2006), 419–39; Desmond McNeill and Asunción St. Clair, “Development Ethics and Human Rights as the Basis for Poverty Reduction: The Case of the World Bank,” in The World Bank and Governance: A Decade of Reform and Reaction, ed. Diane Stone and Christopher Wright (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 29–47; Desmond McNeill and Asunción Lera St. Clair, eds., Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: The Role of Multilateral Organisations (New York and London: Routledge, 2008); Onora O’Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); David A. Crocker and Stephen Schwenke, “The Relevance of Development Ethics for USAID,” a Desk Study for the United States Agency for International Development (April 2005); and David A. Crocker, “Toward Development Ethics,” World Development, 19, 5 (May 1991): 457–83.
11. Osvaldo Guariglia, Una ética para el siglo, XXI: Ética y derechos humanos en un tiempo posmetafísico (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000); Bernardo Kliksberg, Más ética, más desarrollo (Buenos Aires: Temas, 2004); Manfred Max‐Neef, Human Scale Development: Conception, Application, and Further Reflections (London: Apex Press, 1993); Cristián Parker, “Ética, democracia y desarrollo,” in Ética, democracia y desarrollo humano, ed. Cristián Parker (Santiago: Lom, 1998), 19–39; Luis Camacho, Ciencia y tecnología en el subdesarrollo (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1993); Tecnología para el desarrollo humano (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Tecnológica, 2005); “Development Ethics,” in Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, 4 vols., ed. Carl Mitcham (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2005), I: 513–19; Jorge Arturo Chávez, De la utopía a la política económica: Para una ética de las políticas económicas (Salamanca: San Esteban, 1999); E. Roy Ramírez, La responsibilidad ética en ciencia y tecnología (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1987); Ramón Romero, Identidad nacional en Honduras: Una reflexión filosófica (Tegucigalpa: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, Editorial Universitaria, 1990); Reiko Gotoh, “Understanding Sen’s Idea of a Coherent Goal‐Rights System in the Light of Political Liberalism,” paper given at the 4th Conference on the Capability Approach: “Enhancing Human Security,” University of Pavia, Italy, September 5–7, 2004; Asunción St. Clair, “Development Ethics: Open‐Ended and Inclusive Reflections on Global Development,” in Poverty, Politics and Development: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Dan Banik (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2006), 324–45; “Global Poverty: Development Ethics Meets Global Justice,” Globalizations, 3 (2006), 1–18; “A Methodologically Pragmatist Approach to Development Ethics,” Journal of Global Ethics, 3, 2 (2007): 143–64; Jesús Conill, Horizontes de economía ética: Aristoteles, Adam Smith, Amartya Sen (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 2004); Adela Cortina, Por una ética del consumo: La ciudadanía del consumidor en el mundo global (Madrid: Taurus, 2002); “Ética del desarrollo: Un camino hacia la paz,” Sistema, 192 (May 2006): 3–17; Emilio Martínez Navarro, Ética para el desarrollo de los pueblos (Madrid: Editorial Trotla, 2000); Marta Pedrajas Herrero, “El desarrollo humano en la economía ética de Amartya Sen”; Ethical Dilemmas of Development in Asia, ed. Godfrey Gunatilleke, Neelan Tiruchelvam, and Radhika Coomaraswamy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988); Peter John Opio, “Towards a New Economic Order: Needs, Functioning and Capabilities in Amartya Sen’s Theory,” MA thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1993. The “Digital Library” on the web page of the “Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics, and Development” of the Inter‐American Development Bank is a valuable resource of recent work, especially by Latin Americans, in development ethics: <etica@iadb.org>.
12. Bernardo Kliksberg, Ética y desarrollo: La relación marginada (Buenos Aires: Editorial El Ateneo, 2002). Earlier anthologies on ethics and development include Ethics and Development: On Making Moral Choices in Development Cooperation, ed. Cees J. Hamelink (Kampen: Kok, 1997); El desarrollo humano: Perspectivas y desafíos, ed. Aldo Ameigeiras (San Miquel, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 1998); and Ética, democracia y desarrollo humano, ed. Parker. An urgent need exists for English‐language collections of historically important and recent articles in development ethics.
13. Daniel Little, The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty.
14. Des Gaspar, The Ethics of Development. See also David Clark, Visions of Development: A Study of Human Values (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002). The Clark volume is a revised PhD thesis and case study rather than a textbook.
15. The groups’ respective websites are the International Development Ethics Association, <www.development-ethics.org>; the Inter‐American Initiative on Social Capital, Ethics and Development, <www.iadb.org/etica/ingles>; and the Human Development and Capability Association, <www.fas.harvard.edu/~freedoms>. Although not explicitly dedicated to development ethics, other associations – such as the Society for International Development, the United Nations Association, and the World Development Movement – have had serious ethical interests related to development and foreign aid.
16. University of Aberdeen (Scotland), Carleton University (Canada), Colorado State University (USA), Institute of Social Studies (the Netherlands), Michigan State University (USA), Makerere University (Uganda), New School University (USA), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Uganda Martyrs University (Uganda), University of Bergen (Norway), Universidad de Costa Rica, University of Maryland (USA), Universidad de Múrcia (Spain), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, Universidad Nacional Heredia (Costa Rica), University of Notre Dame (USA), University of Oslo (Norway), Universidad de Santiago (Chile), Universidad de of Valencia (Spain).
17. Richard M. Clugston and John A. Hoyt, “Environment, Development and Moral Values,” in Ethics and Development, ed. Hamelink, 82–103.
18. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
19. For a sample of such moral dilemmas in development practice and cooperation, see Crocker, “Toward Development Ethics,” 461–4; Ethics and Development, ed. Hamelink; and Gasper, The Ethics of Development.
20. Although anti‐corruption strategies sometimes encompass the objectives of poverty reduction and participatory democracy, a focus on controlling corruption often eclipses these larger development goals and becomes the only end considered. See, for example, Moisés Naím, “Bad Medicine,” Foreign Policy (March–April 2005): 95–6.
21. See Nicholas D. Kristof, “When Marriage Kills,” New York Times (March 30, 2005), A 27.
22. Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato, Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971; rev. edn., 1997); John Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Johann Galtung, “The New International Order and the Basic Needs Approach”; Manfred Max‐Neef, Human Scale Development: Conception, Application, and Further Reflections (London: Apex Press, 1993); Streeten et al., First Things First; Len Doyal and Ian Gough, A Theory of Need (London: Macmillan, 1991); Des Gasper, The Ethics of Development, ch. 6; Peter T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom; Onora O’Neill, Bounds of Justice; David Ellerman, Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty; “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?,” Philosophical Topics, 30, 2 (fall 2002): 167–228; Amartya Sen, “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32, 4 (2004): 315–56; Polly Vizard, Poverty and Human Rights: Sen’s “Capability Perspective” Explored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Bas de Gaay Fortman, “Human Rights,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 260–6.
23. Thomas Nagel argues that duties of socioeconomic justice are the exclusive concern of sovereign states (and their citizens) in relation to their own (fellow) citizens. In relation to citizens of other countries, a sovereign state only has negative duties not to enslave, coerce, or violate civil liberties, as well as the positive duties of humanitarian assistance and rescue. See Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33, 2 (2005): 113–47.
24. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2. Cf. Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” 118. The first paragraph of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2005 drives home a similar point but without Pogge’s important reminder of global disparities: “The tsunami was a highly visible, unpredictable and largely unpreventable tragedy. Other tragedies are less visible, monotonously predictable and readily preventable. Every hour more than 1,200 die away from the glare of media attention. This is equivalent to three tsunamis a month, every month, hitting the world’s most vulnerable citizens – its children. The causes of death vary, but the overwhelming majority can be traced to a single pathology: poverty. Unlike the tsunami, that pathology is preventable. With today’s technology, financial resources and accumulated knowledge, the world has the capacity to overcome extreme deprivation. Yet as an international community we allow poverty to destroy lives on a scale that dwarfs the impact of the tsunami” (United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2005 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005]), 1.
25. Des Gasper is particularly eloquent in articulating the widely shared assumption that development agents face alternative paths and that development ethics emphasizes “value‐conscious ways of thinking about and choosing between alternative paths and destinations” (Gasper, The Ethics of Development, xi).
26. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990–2008). These Human Development Reports operationalize the capability approach and address such themes as consumption, globalization, human rights, technology, democracy, the Millennium Development Goals, cultural identity, international cooperation, water, and climate change. See Readings in Human Development: Concepts, Measures and Policies for a Development Paradigm, ed. Sakiko Fukuda‐Parr and A.K. Shiva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Asunción St. Clair, “The Role of Ideas in the United Nations Development Programme,” in Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World?, ed. Morten Bøås and Desmond McNeill (London: Routledge, 2004), 178–92; Mozaffar Qizilbash, “Human Development,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 245–50; Amartya K. Sen, “Human Development Index,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 256–60.
27. Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
28. Sen, Development as Freedom, 21.
29. See Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
30. Amartya Sen, “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32, 4 (2004): 333, n. 31.
31. World Bank, World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development (New York: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
33. The authors of World Development Report 2006, appealing to a narrow construal of the World Bank’s mandate and comparative advantage, shy away from arguing for (any concept of) equity as intrinsically good or for any political design as normatively required. See, for example, ibid., 10, 20, and 206.
34. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
35. Holmes Rolston III, “Feeding People Versus Saving Nature?,” in World Hunger and Morality, ed. Aiken and La Follette, 248–66.
36. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 218–19.
37. Sen, Development as Freedom, 53.
38. Charles R. Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?,” in Global Justice, ed. Thomas W. Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 113. See World Bank, World Development Report 2006, 206–7.
39. Pogge, World Poverty, 15, 21, 112–6, 141–5.
41. In 2006 Pogge formulated a more balanced view of both global and national factors in causing and remedying human rights deprivations (“Severe Poverty: Harm Done Through Social Institutions,” keynote address, 7th International Conference on Ethics and Development, International Development Ethics Association, Kampala, Uganda, July 19–22, 2006). He anticipated this more complex view in World Poverty, 50.
42. Onora O’Neill, “Agents of Justice,” in Global Justice, ed. Thomas W. Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 188–203.
43. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), xii.
44. See, for example, Nussbaum, Women and Human Development; “Capabilities and Disabilities: Justice for Mentally Disabled Citizens,” Philosophical Topics, 30, 2 (2002): 133–65; Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); David A. Crocker, “Ética del desarrollo y grupos vulnerables,” keynote address, Congreso Internacional Sobre Cooperación al Desarrollo, “Cooperacion y Grupos Vulnerables,” November 17–19, 2005.
45. In addition to the articles by Rolston and by Clugston and Hoyt cited above, see Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge and International Response, ed. J. Ron Engel and Joan Hoff Engel (London: Belhaven Press; Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Robin Attfield, The Ethics of the Global Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Global Sustainable Development in the 21st Century, ed. Keekok Lee, A. Holland, and Desmond McNeill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Peter J. Balint, “Balancing Conservation and Development: Two Cases Studies from El Salvador,” PhD dissertation, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland (December 2000); Partha Dasgupta, Human Well‐being and the Natural Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 18; Nigel Dower, “The Nature and Scope of Global Ethics and the Relevance of the Earth Charter,” Journal of Global Ethics, 1, 1 (June 2005): 25–43.
46. Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, esp. chs. 2 and 3; Cortina, Por una ética del consumo.
47. For my writings and those of other scholars on reckoning with past wrongs, see my “Punishment, Reconciliation, and Democratic Deliberation,” Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 5, 2 (2002): 509–49, esp. nn. 9 and 87; “Interpretative Ideals and Truth Commissions: Comments on Krausz’s ‘The Limits of Rightness,’” in Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz, ed. Andreea D. Ritivoi and Giridhari L. Pandit (Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishers, 2003), 55–68; “Reckoning with Past Wrongs in East Asia,” a paper presented to the workshop “Memory, Reconciliation and Security in the Asia‐Pacific Region: Implications for Japan–US Relations,” Hyogo, Japan, December 15–17, 2006.
48. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
49. Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now: Protecting and Empowering People (New York: Communications Development, 2003). See also Nigel Dower, “Development, Violence, and Peace: A Conceptual Exploration,” European Journal of Development Research, 11, 2 (1999): 44–64; Des Gasper, “Violence and Human Security,” in The Ethics of Development, ch. 5; “Securing Humanity: Situating ‘Human Security’ as Concept and Discourse,” Journal of Human Development: Alternative Economics in Action, 6, 2 ( July 2005): 221–45; United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2005, ch. 5; Selim Jahan, “Human Security,” in Elgar Companion, ed. Clark, 266–71.
50. Allan Thompson, “Arbour Ready for UN Role,” Toronto Star ( June 7, 2004), A 20.
51. See Lloyd Dumas, “Is Development an Effective Way to Fight Terrorism?,” Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, 22, 4 (2002): 7–12. Whether development that reduces poverty also reduces humiliation depends on whether poverty is more than lack of income and whether a distinction is made between well‐being (ill‐being) and agency or empowerment (lack of agency). I owe this point to Des Gasper.
52. See, for example, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, Free Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2005, ch. 4.
53. See Celia W. Dugger, “An Exodus of African Nurses Puts Infants and the Ill in Peril,” New York Times ( July 12, 2004), A1, A8, for a shocking account of hospital conditions in Malawi and the fact that wretchedly poor pay is causing many nurses – seeking a better life for themselves and their families – to emigrate to Great Britain and elsewhere.
54. For Bernstein’s writings on Dewey, ethics, and social‐political philosophy, see above, ch. 1, n. 64.
55. Sabina Alkire made this point in the training session “The Capability Approach as a Development Paradigm,” 3rd Conference on the Capability Approach, Pavia, Italy, September 7–9, 2003.
56. See above, p. 37.
57. For a response to what he calls “economism,” see Gasper, Ethics of Development, esp. ch. 3. Stephen Schwenke and Ada Pizze of the Inter‐American Development Bank’s “Initiative for Social Capital, Ethics, and Development” persistently criticize development ethics for failing to deal with the moral issues of practitioners in the development trenches. For arguments that the concept of poverty, the ideal of participation, and the practice of development and development ethics are tools of Western imperialism, see The Development Dictionary, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1992).
58. Sympathetic and largely constructive critics include Jesús Conill, “Capacidades humanas,” Glosario para una sociedad intercultural, ed. Jesús Conill (Valencia: Bancaja, 2002), 29–34; Horizontes de economía ética; Cortina, Por una ética del consumo; and Philip Pettit, “Capability: A Defence of Sen,” Economics and Philosophy, 17 (2001): 1–20. In Chapter 7 below, not only do I accept much of Cortina’s criticisms of my earlier prudential version of the capability orientation, but I improve my earlier view by modifying it in the light of her Kantian consumption ethic. Sen accepts the thrust of some (but only some) of Pettit’s alternatives in “Reply,” Economics and Philosophy, 17 (2001): 51–6. Other recent critics are less supportive. They include Robert Sugden, “Welfare, Resources and Capabilities: A Review of Inequality Reexamined by Amartya Sen,” Journal of Economic Literature, 31 (1993): 947–62; Richard J. Arneson, “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophical Studies, 56 (1989): 77–93; “Perfectionism and Politics,” Ethics, 111, 1 (2000): 37–63; John Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). For assessments of Nussbaum, see essays by Louise M. Antony, Arneson (referred to above), Hilary Charlesworth, and Richard Mulgan in “Symposium on Martha Nussbaum’s Political Philosophy,” Ethics, 111, 1 (2000). Nussbaum responds to these four assessments in “Aristotle, Politics, and Human Capabilities: A Response to Antony, Arneson, Charelsworth, and Mulgan,” Ethics, 111, 1 (2000): 102–40. Three collections include important evaluations of both Sen’s and Nussbaum’s work on the capability orientation: Women, Culture and Development, ed. Nussbaum and Glover; Feminist Economics, 9, 2–3 (2003); and Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems, ed. Alexander Kaufman (New York: Routledge, 2006).
59. See Feminist Economics, 9, 2–3 (2003).
60. See Pogge, “Can the Capability Approach Be Justified?”
61. I thank Ingrid Robeyns for discussions bearing on this paragraph.
62. Several authors utilize one or the other and often both of these strategies. See Séverine Deneulin, “Perfectionism, Paternalism and Liberalism in Sen and Nussbaum’s Capability Approach,” Review of Political Economy, 14, 4 (2002): 497–518; Des Gasper, “Development as Freedom: Moving Economics beyond Commodities: the Cautious Boldness of Amartya Sen,” Journal of International Development, 12, 7 (2000): 989–1001; “Is Sen’s Capability Approach an Adequate Basis for Considering Human Development?,” Review of Political Economy, 14, 4 (2002): 435–61; “Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach in Perspective – Purposes, Methods and Sources for an Ethics of Human Development,” Working Paper (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 2003); Mozaffar Quizilbash, “Development, Common Foes, and Shared Values,” Review of Political Economy, 14, 4 (2002): 463–80. Most of the articles in Feminist Economics, 9, 2–3 (2003) freshly assess Sen’s work “through the lens of gender” and seek to mediate differences between Sen and Nussbaum. Especially important is Ingrid Robeyns, “Sen’s Capability Approach and Gender Inequality: Selecting Relevant Capabilities,” Feminist Economics, 9, 2–3 (2003): 61–92, in which Robeyns argues against one and only one list and for specific lists for particular purposes and contexts. See also Alkire, Valuing Freedoms; and “Public Debate and Value Construction in Sen’s Approach,” in Capabilities Equality, ed. Kaufman. Although closer to Sen than to Nussbaum, Alkire argues for some uses of lists. She also draws creatively on some ideas of John Finnis, a theorist outside the capability orientation.
63. The variety of democratic theory known as “deliberative democracy” also is in danger of becoming a new scholasticism. One way to guard against this threat (a way I will refer to and employ in Chapters 9 and 10) is to bring the theory of deliberative democracy into critical dialogue with other democratic theories and with institutional experiments in deliberative democracy.
64. My views in this paragraph owe much to discussions with Ingrid Robeyns. See Ingrid Robeyns, “The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey,” Journal of Human Development: Alternative Economics in Action, 6, 1 (2005): 93–114. See also Sabina Alkire, “Why the Capability Approach?,” Journal of Human Development: Alternative Economics in Action, 6, 1 (2005): 115–33.
65. James D. Wolfensohn and Amartya Sen, “Development: A Coin with Two Sides,” International Herald Tribune (5 May 1999).
66. <www.iadb.org/etica/ingles>.
67. <www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/LeadershipEthics/bbags.cfm?offset=5>.
68. See, for example, Global Institutions and Development, ed. Bøås and McNeill.
69. See Stephen Gould Schwenke, “Morality and Motivation: A Role for a Human Rights Approach in the World Bank’s Urban Strategy?” PhD dissertation, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, 2002; and Crocker and Schwenke, “The Relevance of Development Ethics for USAID.”