Ethics of Global Development

Figure 3.1’s components, then, are distinguishable aspects of a more fundamental reality: the theory‐practice of development. When we engage in this activity or field, we do different but related things. When we analyze and assess our own or another development theory‐practice, we should expect to find the following components – although some may be implicit, implied, or incomplete and all will be interconnected in a complex but not seamless web. In this chapter, although I sometimes exemplify the general analysis with reference to my own work, I take no stand on which is the best development theory‐practice. But neither is my analysis of the generic structure of such complexes ethically neutral. My general model will imply that some specific development theory‐practices are better than others insofar as they explicitly include and successfully integrate the various components.¹⁴ Let us now consider the nature and relations of each element.

Scientific understanding

Development researchers and investigative reporters seek to understand (in box D) development and underdevelopment as both processes and outcomes. They describe happenings and structures, interpret what these phenomena mean, and try to explain them. Investigators want to understand why nations are “developed,” “undeveloped,” or “developing.” For example, which of the following are (always, sometimes) preconditions for or obstacles to (good) development: capital savings and investment; capitalist (or socialist) ownership of the means of production; class struggle; unions; cooperatives; the (democratic) state; transnational corporations; international lending agencies; and the global economic order?

Scientific understanding is pursued on various levels of generality. There are development studies of economic development as such as well as of developing countries, Latin America, Central America, Costa Rica, and the Talamanca region of Costa Rica. Some investigate the causal mechanisms that led to the failure to realize models popular in the past: for example, the eighteenth‐century political model of constitutional democracy or the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century economic model of export‐led growth and comparative advantage.¹⁵ Some try to explain why the import substitution model of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a “new dependency.”¹⁶ Others identify obstacles that block the realization of new, alternative visions of development. The conservative columnist and Cuban exile Carlos Montaner, repeating what W.W. Rostow had argued twenty‐six years earlier, provides a good example of the latter:

The poorest countries of the world are those that trade least and have fewest ties to the economic and financial network of the planet’s leading nations. In Haiti, in Bolivia, in Bangladesh or in Ethiopia there is hardly any foreign capital that exploits the citizens of these countries. In the developed world, in contrast, every nation energetically fights to be exploited by foreign investors. We in Latin America cannot give ourselves the luxury of continuing to insist on the intimidating revolutionary language that blames entrepreneurs, industrialists, or financiers for the poverty of a country. It is just the opposite: if our countries are not richer, it is because there are not enough entrepreneurs, industrialists, agriculturists or financiers. What we ought to promote is not reproach but applause for those capable of accumulating wealth; for development is impossible without savings that can be converted into investments.¹⁷

To decide whether Montaner is right about his claims that savings are a necessary condition for development, one has to understand not only events in the world but also how Montaner is using the term “development.” Hence, investigations of the causes of and obstacles to development are conceptual as well as empirical. It is often important to define and justify – or at least indicate how one is using – the concepts of development and underdevelopment as well as to gather and interpret phenomena and find their causes.

What we find in development research is not just differences in data sets but also a profusion of perspectives with “development” defined in purely economic terms, such as the rate of economic growth – per capita gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), or gross national income (GNI) – or in terms that include a variety of political and social factors, such as “redistribution with growth,”¹⁸ “material well‐being with cultural autonomy,”¹⁹ or “the removal of substantive unfreedoms.”²⁰

To describe (in box D) a region as developed, undeveloped, or underdeveloped often implies an evaluation (in box F) that development is good and underdevelopment bad. The choice of the concepts for understanding development in D (or B) can be linked to normative commitments in C (and A). Hence, the broken lines connecting the empirical (right) and valuational (left) side of Figure 3.1. For example, the use of the concept of class struggle, social conflict, or “ancient tribal animosities” can be informed by a commitment to a society with more social harmony or a more egalitarian distribution of power. The concept of gender is usually used by those who believe that unfortunately it is men who have benefited from development, while women – in spite of or because of their relative “invisibility” in “development theory‐practice” – have borne its burdens.²¹ Of course, someone who wanted to accentuate conflict could use the concepts of class conflict, and gender distinction could be employed by someone neutral or conservative on gender matters. The point is that often ethical or other normative commitments influence one’s choice of descriptive, interpretative, and explanatory categories.²² Such a “practical intention” is not, as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues, part of the a priori structure of certain social sciences; for, contrary to Habermas, one can pursue scientific knowledge exclusively for its own sake.²³ But such a practical intention is part of one’s moral responsibility in the “theory‐practice” of social change in general and development in particular.

Ethical as well as scientific values can also motivate inquirers to understand development as objectively and correctly as possible. Development and underdevelopment are phenomena that we should understand, especially if we want to achieve the first and avoid or overcome the second. It is hard to overcome underdevelopment if – as Peter Berger observed in 1974 – we let our hopes or fears distort our understanding of it.²⁴ And many investigators want to understand the world precisely in order to change it. It is important, and itself a moral obligation, to grasp the facts and their probable causes. Investigators then have the responsibility to use their knowledge to help change for the better the world that they now (more or less) understand.

Scientific and philosophical assumptions

The choices of descriptive and explanatory concepts in D often reflect and presuppose not only normative commitments (in C and A) but also philosophical or meta‐scientific assumptions (in B) about reality, nature, human nature, society, social change, and the nature and methods of knowledge and a (good) science of development. For example, various development perspectives can be differentiated on the basis of at least eight sorts of assumptions.

The basic unit of analysis

One finds a number of fundamental units of analysis in theories of development and underdevelopment: utility‐maximizing individuals; great personalities; economic classes in conflict (or consensus); the “block in power”; modes of production; ethnic or religious groups; nations; supranational regions; genders; and either an international order (divided into nation‐states) or a global order (divided into center and periphery). For example, the dispute that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s between Marxism and dependency theory or world systems, within what Wilber and Jameson call “the political economy development paradigm,” was a debate over which category should be more fundamental: national class struggle or the world economic system.²⁵

Process or outcomes?

An even more fundamental presuppositional difference is exhibited between conceptions of development that emphasize development as a process of beneficial change and those that focus largely or exclusively on development as an achievement or desired outcome. Of course, some approaches seek to do empirical (and normative) justice to both aspects.

Methodological individualism or atomism versus holism?

As is the case throughout the social sciences, empirical studies of development and underdevelopment differ with respect to the way in which the fundamental units of analysis are combined or divided. Methodological individualists start from externally related atomic units and try to explain larger totalities as the sum or aggregate of such units. For example, neo‐classical and neo‐Keynesian economics explains economic growth and its absence in relation to individual human beings conceived as utility‐maximizing and cost‐minimizing agents. Development economics then goes on to explain the unity and diversity of the international economic system in terms of the relative success by which the units – in this case, externally related nation‐states – pursue their national interest in development. And development is defined, returning to the microeconomic individual, as per capita GNP. As Geoffrey Hunt explains, methodological atomists view development and underdevelopment as “endogenous,” that is, as an achievement or failure due primarily to the nation‐state in question: “From the perspective of TDT [traditional development theory] propounded in the West, poverty is ‘their problem’ and wealth is ‘our achievement.’ ”²⁶

In contrast, holists see parts (entities, events, processes, and actions) as internally related to one another and structured by their role in a totality. For instance, Marxists analyze both individual behavior and capitalist underdevelopment as a function of a social formation structured by a “mode of production” that involves both “productive forces” and “productive relations” of unequal power. Uneven development is a function of class exploitation. Dependency and world system theorists, taking their unit of analysis to be the global economic system rather than a particular social formation, conceive underdevelopment to be the product of unequal international power and economic exchange. Underdevelopment of some nations is the structural result either of the development of other nations or of the international order dominated by the developed nations.²⁷

The dimensions of analysis

Development can be understood in exclusively economic categories, as is often the case in mainstream development economics, or in social and political categories – for example, modernization theory. Development economics can become the “political economy of development and underdevelopment” when one or more of the following are added to economic concepts: political categories, such as power, the state, property relations, or, most generally, the “rules of the game”;²⁸ social categories, such as caste, class, or stratum; and cultural categories such as ideology, values, religion, or cultural identity. And if an integral or comprehensive concept of development is sought (or presupposed), the various elements can be combined in a variety of ways – for example, as successive stages, reducible variables, or interacting factors.²⁹

Synchronic versus diachronic

Some development approaches stress geography and spatial structure. For example, J.P. Dickenson and his colleagues preface their A Geography of the Third World by saying: “We feel that there is a need to present a contemporary geography of the Third World, exploring systematic themes in the development process and examining spatial patterns of development and underdevelopment at various scales within the Third World.”³⁰

Other development theorists give decisive weight to historical, evolutionary, or sequential factors. Keith Griffin exemplifies this “diachronic” perspective:

It was the social and political systems imposed by the colonists, in combination with the demographic changes which followed the Conquest, which were responsible for creating underdevelopment in Spanish America. One cannot explain the poverty of the region today without referring to the region’s history.³¹

Inevitability or openness? Structure or agency?

Development perspectives also differ with respect to whether individuals, societies, or other units have freedom of action and, if they do, the nature and extent of that freedom. Is there only one road, predetermined and inevitable, toward development (as outcome)? Or is the future completely open, such that the failure to achieve development is simply a failure of will or the right goals? Do structures determine human action or does individual and collective agency determine structures? Alternatively, consider Jorge Graciarena’s attempt to avoid these extreme answers:

The future, far from being prefixed, is open and takes directions that are difficult to predict but are within certain historical limits that frame what is contextually possible . . . A real, concrete [development] style is always an alternative among various historically possible and potentially viable alternatives. The selection and application of one of these possible alternatives is a political act: the decision of political will formed by a hegemonic coalition of groups that represent social forces with sufficient resources of power to be able to impose the decision in place of other options . . . In a historically concrete and conditioned national situation there is always more than one option possible.³²

Fundamental suppositions about the nature and reach of freedom are especially prominent when one offers a general theory of development. Notice the variety of assumptions involved in Graciarena’s definition of “development style”:

From a dynamic and integrated perspective, a development style is . . . a dialectical process between relations of power and conflicts, between groups and social classes that derive from dominant forms of capital accumulation, the structure and tendencies of income distribution, and the historical conjuncture and external dependency as well as from values and ideologies. All this occurs in the midst of other structural conditions (technology, natural resources, population) that are present in the analysis as an integrated totality that frames a style’s historical possibilities.³³

Fatalism and extreme determinism are clearly unreasonable and incompatible with efforts to bring about (improved) development. Development agents always confront some choices or alternatives, however constrained. Development “oughts” presuppose genuine development options or alternatives. Development goals presuppose purposive and (more or less) free agents. Economist Branko Milanovic puts the “conditioned freedom” view exactly right:

We can indeed explain past trends, because the history that underlies them (e.g., the Chinese Civil War, the Bolshevik revolution, colonialism, or the industrial revolution) is known to us, and the link between them and the observed outcomes can reasonably be made. But we cannot make sensible projections because we do not know the future political and social, and hence economic, history of the world. It is not because history is random, but because it is created through the interaction between an “objective” reality (institutions, preferences, the past) and actions of people endowed with free will. History is, as Vico wrote, what people make of it. Deterministic theories are incomplete because they cannot take into account that second element, human freedom of action (le libre arbitre). Moreover, under the false air of inevitability, they sap all effort to effect social change.³⁴

As Milanovic suggests, this view of free will or freedom of choice has relevance for whether the investigator is justified in making (hard and fast) predictions. The anti‐determinist assumption also coheres with the view that humans are or should be agents rather than patients and that development is best understood as the removal or reducing of serious unfreedoms. In Part II, I take up the explicitly normative issues when I analyze and strengthen Sen’s agency‐oriented view of development as freedom.

One road versus many? One science versus many?

For the neoclassical [theory of development], capitalism was the end of development, while for the Marxist, it was a necessary, if regrettable, stage to be transcended by socialism. But both agreed that any (nonsocialist) country that needed to develop had to do so within the framework of capitalism, and moreover, that the operations of the capitalist system (of course, conceived differently by the two positions) would lead to higher levels of development in the normal course of things.³⁵

Furthermore, a unilinear approach assumes that all countries can be arranged on the same (quantitative) scale from least to most developed and that differences merely reflect different starting points and different rates of change.³⁶ In contrast, a multilineal approach assumes that different countries must, can, or should follow a more or less distinctive development path. For example, in Andre Gunder Frank’s development theory, contemporary “Third World” countries, of necessity, develop differently than did those now developed countries precisely because the latter have produced adverse conditions for the former. There has been a “development,” caused by colonialism and dependency, of “underdevelopment.”³⁷ Hunt puts the point well in his analysis of “radical” development theories:

For RDT [radical development theory] it is this expansion [“imperialist expansion of capitalism”] that results in, and feeds on, underdevelopment. Underdevelopment is not, then, a universal original condition but an intrinsic dimension of the specifically capitalist mode of production in a late historical phase.³⁸

Moreover, many theorists from the South assume that ends and means of their countries can and should be significantly different from Northern precedents. This view is often linked to a methodological historicism or particularism that assumes that general theorizing is either impossible or undesirable because of the important historical and cultural differences among countries (and investigators). Hence, the multilinearists typically differ from the unilinearists on what counts as good (development) science. Unilinearists stress the general and universal and presuppose that science is, in some sense, transhistorical. Multilinearists focus on the local, particular, and indigenous; they charge unilinearists and generalists with (an often unconscious) Western or Northern ethnocentrism, and they advocate such things as a Latin American or African social sciences of development.³⁹

Essential versus historical human nature

Development theorists who posit one (deterministic) development path and one transcultural development science typically “ground” their development descriptions, explanations, predictions, and prescriptions on a view that their one principle of change is based on an unchanging human essence. As Hunt says, “neo‐Keynesians still appeal to supposed features of human nature (diminishing marginal propensity to consume, preference for liquidity, love of prestige) as transhistorical determinants of economic change.”⁴⁰ In contrast, other development theorists deny that there is a permanent human nature.⁴¹ Humans can be said to have the “nature” of not having an essential nature or of having the freedom to determine their own nature. What people are is a function of changing relations of specific historical traditions, social production, nature, and – on voluntarist versions – their own choice.

The strategy of the historicist or particularist thinker, says US philosopher Richard Rorty, “has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down – that there is nothing ‘beneath’ socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human.”⁴² Historicist development theorists doing development theory in and for their own “social formation” argue that the question “What is it to be a developed human being and society?” should be replaced by questions such as “What is it to be authentic Costa Ricans and have genuine Costa Rican development?” and “How can an inhabitant of our poor ‘underdeveloped’ society be more than the enactor of a role in a development script written for another place and time?”⁴³

Increasingly, economists such as Sen and social scientists such as Jane I. Mansbridge argue that economics has been straitjacketed by egoistic assumption about human motivation.⁴⁴ However self‐interest is defined – as individual welfare, individual goals, or individual choices – Sen argues that (1) people can have good reasons for acting against their self‐interest and that (2) self‐interested motivation fails to explain differences in economic productivity among countries.⁴⁵

As I discussed briefly in Chapter 2 and will explain more fully in later chapters, Sen’s capability approach, and the use to which I put it in defending deliberative democracy, assume that human beings both are shaped by their group affiliations and have some freedom to shape and transcend their (multiple) identities. Such a view seeks to finesse the essentialist/historicist dichotomy with respect to human “nature.”⁴⁶

The above illustrates the way in which development science or development theory in box D can have philosophical or meta‐scientific assumptions in box B. The assumptions are not directly part of the scientific investigation of facts, causes, and patterns; rather, they make possible that investigation by supplying its categories. This relationship between B and D is usually non‐deductive. B suggests or permits rather than deductively entails D. It is possible that two theory‐practices could have the same assumptions in B and yet differ in D (or offer similar descriptions and explanations in D even though their assumptions vary). Moreover, as mentioned earlier, assumptions in B may be modified by anomalies discovered by empirical work in D. Finally, just as the choice of a descriptive vocabulary in D is linked to one’s normative commitments in C or A, so scientific and philosophical assumptions include or are related to normative assumptions in A. In both the unilinear and multilinear assumptions discussed above, as well as in essentialist and historicist assumptions about human nature, the line is blurred between what is and what ought – or ought not – to happen in development. The components of a development theory‐practice interact within the larger totality.⁴⁷

Critique

We not only want to understand “developed” and “developing” countries, but we also want to determine what is good and bad about a country’s being developed or remaining underdeveloped. We want to praise, criticize, and sometimes lay blame; for example, in relation to India’s Bhopal disaster in 1983 or Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001–2. Hence, (in box F) we make moral judgments the way a clinician would make judgments about her patient’s health or illness, improvement or decline. We make these assessments either by reference to (a group’s) development goals (in C) or to (its or the evalutor’s) more abstract ethical principles (in A). It is also important to evaluate past and present development policies or plans (in E) and actual projects or practices (in G). All these assessments take place in box F.

Sometimes, of course, our evaluations are nonmoral; we judge how efficient or effective the strategies (in E) have been in realizing the goals (in C).⁴⁸ In terms of scientific values, such as simplicity and attention to counter‐evidence, we evaluate causal explanations. But it is also important explicitly to raise ethical questions about developing societies and other groups and their goals. How important, ethically speaking, is the value of efficiency in relation to other goals? We have achieved our development goals, but are they right, just, or best? Moreover, it is not uncommon to find out in practice that we cannot live with our habitual goals or that we need to revise or improve upon them. Good development ethics does not just apply a preformed, a priori ethics to practice; through critique linked to practice we can improve our development goals and ethical principles. Consequently, I have placed box F (critique) on the line that divides theory and practice, for critique looks in both directions. Moreover, in the light of other aspects of development theory‐practice, development ethicists engage in a critique of critiques: they assess the strengths and weaknesses of their and others’ earlier assessments.

It should be underscored that critique is not always negative. It identifies the good as well as the bad. It finds institutional limitations on the good that make it, on balance, bad; but these constraints might be removed so that the good comes to fuller and less compromised realization. The new and better can be conceived and nurtured in the womb of the old and limited.

This conception of “dialectical critique” is meant to include a spectrum of diagnoses and prescriptions – from minor ills to be solved by piecemeal remedies to mortal diseases, such as (bad) development, the latter to be overcome by incremental structural transformation or by revolution. Our speaking of critique, then, leads us to other moments of development theory‐practice, namely, conceptions of possible and better futures.

Delineation of options

It is important to understand and evaluate not merely the past and the present. Development scholars and practitioners are also interested in the future. Unless a theory is fatalistic or deterministic, it identifies a developing society’s options for action, its possibilities for change. I have put such delineation of options in box E because they are policy options, possible courses of action. These options, however, are also related to box D and the scientific understanding of causal mechanisms. More determinist approaches will offer forecasts, projections based on current trends, and even detailed predictions, the latter employed to support or disconfirm causal explanations. Such forecasts of the future are more or less probabilistic, and normally, the longer the range, the less reliable the forecast. Those who call themselves “futurists” explicitly argue that what they offer is more an art of exploring future possibilities than a predictive or even probabilistic science.⁴⁹ In any case, development delineation of options vary with respect to whether they are based on present trends or on changes in prevalent human action patterns. British philosopher Onora O’Neill puts the point well in relation to predictions of famine:

These predictions are contingent upon certain assumptions about what people will do in the pre‐famine period. Famine is said to be inevitable if people do not curb their fertility, alter their consumption patterns, and avoid pollution and consequent ecological catastrophes. It is the policies of the present that will produce, defer, or avoid famine.⁵⁰

Another way to put the point is to say that the term “future possibility” is ambiguous. On the one hand, what is possible for a society are those options open to it, given its present structures and patterns of human conduct. On the other hand, what is possible for a society includes, in addition, those options that emerge if and when structures are changed and people act in new ways. A development option that is impossible now may become “feasible” in the future when people act to remove present impediments or establish requisite preconditions. Innovative social theorists can eliminate intellectual obstacles, and creative social agents can “tear up” calcified meanings and surpass what had seemed to be institutional limits.⁵¹ We ought not restrict our analysis of options to what is feasible now or in the short run. In the depths of World War II, the idea of a United Nations or Marshall Plan seemed preposterous to many. It is important to have medium‐ and long‐run perspectives that take into account the results of obstacle‐removing human action. As US political theorist Charles Beitz says: “One needs to distinguish two classes of reasons for which it may be impossible to implement an ideal. One class includes impediments to change that are themselves capable of modification over time; the other includes impediments that are unalterable and unavoidable.”⁵²

Many moral disagreements hinge on conflicting empirical estimates about the possible or probable consequences of various courses of action. For example, the controversy I briefly discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 (and a topic to which I return in Chapter 8), between two utilitarian ethicists, Peter Singer and Garrett Hardin, over the “ethics of famine relief,” largely if not entirely reduces to different forecasts over the impact of aid on famine victims and on the larger societal structures.⁵³ Singer argues that affluent people are morally obligated to send food aid because – or, better, if and when – it prevents, better than available alternative actions, the bad consequences of death and suffering. In contrast, Hardin argues not just that we have no such moral duty, but that we have the duty not to send famine relief. His argument is based on the forecast that such aid causes worse long‐term consequences than sending no aid at all. Aid recipients, he predicts, will use their added longevity to produce more mouths to feed and, thereby, further transcend the limits of the environment’s “carrying capacity.” Moreover, for Hardin, a pernicious consequence of aid is that the beneficiary learns to be a passive, dependent recipient of another’s charity, rather than an active producer for or prudent investor in the future.

It might seem that this debate between Singer and Hardin could easily be resolved by empirical investigations about the actual short‐ and long‐term consequences of aid. It should be noted, however, that this is not always so simple. For one thing, the data are complex and resist facile generalizations that aid is always or never beneficial.⁵⁴ For another, forecasts sometimes express (and conceal) what prognosticators hope to see rather than what they expect to see (the same thing frequently occurs when someone “predicts” that his or her favorite team will win the World Cup). Sometimes the real difference between two forecasts is due to different moral evaluations of the same phenomena, such as the moral weight given to undoubted present suffering compared to probable future misery. However, since many investigators cling to value or moral neutrality, they bury their moral judgments in what should be a (relatively) value‐free part of their inquiry. They let their hopes or fears distort their estimate as to what is possible and likely. Although development theory‐practice should make an important place for moral judgment and ethical reflection, it should not confuse judgments about what is possible or likely with judgments about what is good or obligatory. The rejection of the dogma of value neutrality would encourage analysts to make their moral commitments explicit and open to rational scrutiny rather than permit these assumptions to function in a subterranean manner.⁵⁵

Identification of options and likelihoods should avoid both utopian dreaming and “crack‐pot” realism. Objective forecasts of feasible options for social change are important for development theory‐practice, for they enable us to avoid quixotic goals. The feasible or practically possible is not the same as what is only logically or remotely possible. It is also true, however, that the probable is not the inevitable. We should reject a “hard‐headed” realism that baptizes an often unjust status quo when better possibilities are in fact available.

Unfortunately, the future is often hazy, and social projections can be as unreliable as weather forecasting. Moral reflection includes consideration of our moral obligations and ethical principles in situations where we often have only imprecise estimates of probabilities.⁵⁶

Moreover, that I treated forecast before I considered ethical norms should not be taken to imply an invariable sequence. Sometimes what is possible and feasible only becomes apparent from the perspective of a transformative ideal. After committing ourselves to a new and ethically inspiring goal, what had been neutral or even an obstacle with respect to other aims now becomes an opportunity. Furthermore, it is not the case that we always first discover what is possible and then select what is desirable. Sometimes we start with our ends, and then cast about for means. It is to a consideration of the explicitly normative or ethical dimensions of development theory‐practice that we now turn.

Development goals and ethical principles

Frequently, moral principles and judgments come into play directly and explicitly when, after analyzing the feasible futures, people choose (in box C) the best of these futures, the basic development goals they intend to pursue. One engages in relevant or realistic utopianism by selecting a future – from among the available options – that is on balance morally best as well as realizable. One method of doing so is (1) to identify the fragmentary and embryonic advances made in present thought and action, and (2) to affirm the progressive elements while criticizing the aspects that block further flourishing of what is promising. We can improve the good by (partially) liberating it – both theoretically and practically – from its historical limitations.⁵⁷

Sometimes the appropriate critique (in F) of the present and the identification (in C) of the best feasible option for the future are obvious, and immediately we go on to decide (in E) what strategy would be most efficient to reach the desired goal. Sometimes it is not important to appeal to goals or principles. Sometimes we are surer of our concrete judgments than we are of any abstract norms. Sometimes, however, we are justifiably hesitant about our concrete judgments. We worry about biases in our commitments and our past policies or principles, especially when carrying them out has had unintended but negative consequences. We sense an inconsistency among our concrete moral judgments, between them and our development goals, or among our development goals. In these cases, it is appropriate to engage in ethical reflection and dialogue with others. And this reflection includes a consideration of general norms. These norms can be either basic conceptions of (good) development (in C) or, on a more abstract level, ethical principles (in A).⁵⁸

Development ethics consists, then, not only of concrete critique and judgments of moral responsibility, but also reflection on both the general direction in which a society should develop and the abstract ethical principles that can guide the choice of these goals. A reasonable development ethic, in the context of development theory‐practice, explicitly clarifies, defends, applies, and revises development goals and ethical norms that are realizable locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

Before looking at some examples of such substantive ethical proposals, let us pause to consider some “metaethical” issues concerning the nature of development ethics. The first is the question of whether development ethics should engage in reflection on general abstract ethical principles (in A) or rather should restrict itself to critical reflection on development goals (in C) and critique (in F). In “Tasks and Methods in Development Ethics,” Denis Goulet distinguishes four levels of ethical discourse:

Ethical discourse is conducted at four distinct levels: general ends, specific criteria which determine when these ends exist in concrete situations, clusters of interrelated means or systems which constitute strategies congenial or uncongenial to the ends sought, and individual means taken separately.⁵⁹

After discriminating these levels, Goulet argues as follows:

In questions of social change the sharpest ethical disagreements arise in the two middle realms . . . Discussion over general ends rarely engenders debate because such ends are deemed to be universal and are easily disguised behind verbal smokescreens. Even tyrants profess to cherish freedom and warmongers to seek peace. Hence many apparent debates over general ends – ideal conceptions of justice, freedom, reciprocity, equity – are, in truth, controversies over the concrete marks or institutions by which the presence of these ideals can be detected . . . One’s ethical stance on ends is dramatically revealed in the means one adopts to pursue them. Consequently, development ethics as “means of the means” requires not that moralists pose ideal goals and pass judgment on the means used by others to pursue these or other goals, but rather that decision‐makers, versed in the constraints surrounding vital choices, promote the values for which oppressed and underdeveloped groups struggle: greater justice, a decent sufficiency of goods for all, and equitable access to collective human gains realized in technology, organizations, and research.⁶⁰

Although I agree with much of Goulet’s approach, I think this argument is problematic at several points. First, as a matter of fact, there is much evidence to challenge his contention that debate over general ends is rare. It is true that ideals such as liberty, equality, and justice have been and continue to be widely affirmed and that tyrants and many others use noble ideals as camouflage or rationalizations for ignoble acts. But we also find widespread and intense debate about what we should mean or how we should understand these principles. Not just philosophers but also politicians, policymakers, columnists, citizens, and “oppressed and underdeveloped groups” argue about how ideals should be understood and prioritized if we are to think clearly, live with ethical sensitivity, be true to our communities’ traditions and hopes, and promote a better world.⁶¹

Second, not only do people deliberate about these norms, they should do so both individually and collectively. Such deliberations are often worthwhile for several reasons. They enable critics to unmask the very perversion of moral ideals that Goulet correctly worries about. Debates about fundamental norms are one way of getting clear about alternative social projects and superior social possibilities. Dialogue on abstract themes is one way of “hammering out” new and better conceptions of who a people should be and what they should be committed to. Democratic deliberation about ends as well as means, I shall argue in Chapters 9 and 10, both is a fair way for a group to make collective choices and contributes to individual agency and group empowerment.

Such abstract norms certainly need not and, arguably, should not be viewed as philosophical “foundations” that have to be settled first and from which we deductively derive specific moral judgments and courses of action. For, as I argued earlier, we often do and should revise our more abstract ethical norms on the basis of our concrete experience and judgments about existing practices. Goulet is correct in affirming that one’s abstract ethical principles are often revealed through the means one adopts to realize them. But from that point it does not follow that there is no independent role for such principles. Sometimes we are clearer about more abstract principles than we are about more concrete norms or practical judgments; consequently the former sometimes guide us when we decide on the latter. Abstract principles can enable us to perceive in a new way and direct us to challenge accepted practices, especially those constraints that policymakers dogmatically view as given.

This is not to say that development ethics should be done only by “outsiders,” let alone by those philosophers who adopt a “God’s‐eye view.” One must concede to Goulet that much social‐political philosophy – and not just the Anglo‐American varieties – is little more than academic dreaming or intellectual gymnastics with little connection to economic, social, and political realities and even less relevance for public policy dialogue and formation. And certainly I do not advocate moralistic finger‐wagging. However, if development ethics uncritically accepts what policymakers and citizens perceive as fixed norms and constraints, it most definitely will lose the very opportunity for “creating new possibilities” that Goulet stresses so well. Just as the development ethicists engaged in critique (Figure 3.1’s box F) may assess development goals “from below” in the light of concrete experiences and judgments, so they may assess development practices “from above” in the light of innovative but still general versions of abstract ideals.⁶²

It is interesting that Rorty, like Goulet, also questions the relevance to actual policy and political debates of “analytic philosophers who specialize in applied ethics.”⁶³ For Rorty, these philosophers err because they claim “that there are special skills associated with analytic philosophy which are useful in resolving policy dilemmas.” Similarly, Rorty criticizes “non‐analytic” leftist philosophers who try to “relate philosophical doctrines and vocabularies . . . to politics.”⁶⁴ They fail, says Rorty, because they have “gotten over‐theoretical, over‐philosophical” and, especially since the late 1960s in the US, have “taken less and less interest in what the rest of the country is worrying about.”⁶⁵ Rorty does mention one exception to this general indictment:

Habermas, almost alone among the eminent philosophers of the present day, manages to work as Dewey did, on two tracks. He produces both a stream of philosophical treatises and a stream of comment on current events. I doubt that any philosophy professor since Dewey has done more concrete day‐to‐day work in the political arena, or done more for the goals of US social democrats. Habermas’s connection with the German SPD is exactly the sort of eminently useful connection that leftist academics influenced by Dewey used to have with the Democratic Party in the United States.⁶⁶

Unfortunately, Rorty’s own highly abstract and meta‐theoretical reflections largely fail to put into practice what I would argue is entailed by his own approach – not two separate “tracks” but engaged, revisable, critical assessments of live policy options and of proposals for promising alternatives. Regrettably, Rorty ignores non‐analytic thinkers, such as Adela Cortina and Denis Goulet, and “post‐analytic” philosophers, such as Robert K. Fullinwider, William A. Galston, Judith Lichtenberg, Jonathan Moreno, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, Mark Sagoff, Peter Singer, and David Wasserman, who do ethically oriented public policy but do not believe they have unsharable “analytic skills.” Although Rorty might not consider these thinkers to be “eminent philosophers of the present day,” they are making contributions to a variety of “theory‐practices.” And one way they are making this contribution is in arguing for and promoting – in their teaching, writing, lecturing, and consulting – the shareable skills of ethical critique and reflection.⁶⁷ Ethical reflection will come to grips with “the day‐to‐day” debates about international development only if applied philosophers as well as other ethicists do development ethics – however abstractly or concretely – in the context of the scientific and practical components of development theory‐practice.

Development plans and strategies

Much philosophical ethics hitherto has failed to attend to questions of achieving or institutionalizing moral norms – as if correct moral thinking were all that was needed and then the world would automatically “right itself.” Once again I reject both sharp fact/value as well as conceptual/empirical distinctions. Challenging the notion of philosophy and ethics as exclusively expert knowledge, I advocate a culture in which conceptual, ethical, and political questions are debated by many citizens, whether or not they are professional philosophers or ethicists. Indeed, just as it is important for those who call themselves philosophers to be more knowledgable about empirical and political matters, so social scientists, politicians, development practitioners, and citizens should be more capable of applying moral intelligence to development matters. In my experience it is interdisciplinary people who can be expected to do the best interdisciplinary work.

Taking into consideration – but also contributing to – science, ethics, and evaluation of past practice, development planners formulate policies, design projects, and recommend actions. The questions now are: What ought to be done? Who ought to do it? When and how ought they to do it? Who should make these social decisions and how? What are the social mechanisms or institutional designs and devices available to realize and maintain the chosen model of authentic development?

Practical, nontheoretical questions now dominate attention because development agents plan and recommend in order to transform the world and achieve (their concept of) development as beneficial change. Ethics is not forgotten, for we must still consider various strategies from an ethical as well as an economic or political point of view. We want an ethics of means as well as an ethics of principle and vision. We want an ethics of social change in an unjust world, where we want to avoid being either moral fools or amoral operators.⁶⁸ We want good outcomes but we want to achieve them by just and fair means. We need to ask not only which means efficiently and effectively will obtain our ends, but also which means are ethically intolerable, acceptable, or obligatory. Moreover, we should question the relative importance of standard notions of economic efficiency when they collide with other goals or constraints such as cultural identity or human rights. We should clarify and evaluate the implicit ethical assumptions, content, and consequences of various development strategies and tactics.

Collective agency, an important theme throughout this book, means that citizens acting in concert with and through their elected representatives are responsible for the development of their own community, region, and country. If countries are to progress towards the goal of authentic development, it will be largely because of critical discussion among and collective participation by citizens themselves, especially those worst off. More generally, in ethically justified development, a people – sometimes with assistance from outsiders – defines and develops itself and is not coerced or developed by someone else. The implication for national or international development professionals is clear. The help they give to others should enhance autonomy rather than produce dependency.

More than ninety years before Sen’s concern to rehabilitate the notion of agency and its implications for outside assistance and democracy promotion, John Dewey and James H. Tufts criticized what Robert B. Westbrook calls the “paternalistic benevolence” of social leaders or reformers:

The vice of the social leader, of the reformer, of the philanthropist and the specialist in every worthy cause of science, or art, or politics, is to seek ends which promote the social welfare in ways which fail to engage the active interest and cooperation of others. The conception of conferring the good upon others, or a least attaining it for them, which is our inheritance from the aristocratic civilization of the past, is so deeply embodied in religious, political, and charitable institutions and in moral teachings, that it dies hard. Many a man, feeling himself justified by the social character of his ultimate aim (it may be economic, or educational, or political), is genuinely confused or exasperated by the increasing antagonism and resentment which he evokes, because he has not enlisted in his pursuit of the “common” end the freely cooperative activities of others. This cooperation must be the root principle of the morals of democracy.⁶⁹

Concrete and detailed recommendations, of course, are appropriate in development planning. These practical proposals may range from large‐scale, regional, or national hydroelectric projects, to small, neighborhood credit unions for single mothers. Like the clinician, the development planner is intent on improving these particular people or, better, enabling them to improve themselves. It is important that general theories be supplemented and corrected by the idiosyncrasies of a unique country or supranational or subnational region in a particular phase of its history.

A further – sometimes neglected – point is that moral principles and goals can enter into development policymaking in two different ways. As norms (in either boxes A and C of Figure 3.1) for what is good or right, development planners themselves make planning decisions inspired, guided, or constrained by ethical principles and development goals. However, the planner may also recommend that certain values be promoted, scrutinized, or weakened in a population as a means to achieve some other development goal such as economic growth or democratic decision‐making. The presence (or absence) of certain operative values explains the presence (or absence) of development success or failure (variously conceived). Then, on the basis of this alleged causal link, the development theorist recommends, on the basis of what she considers to be the most reasonable principles, the promotion, strengthening, or weakening of certain (perhaps different) values that function in the society being investigated. For example, some mainstream economists assume and/or recommend “rationality,” conceived as self‐interested behavior, as the explanatory and causal key to development. Mitchell A. Seligson describes a version of this approach to explaining and removing the widening international and domestic gaps between rich and poor:

The widening gap between rich and poor nations is viewed as being principally a cultural problem. Specifically, the cultural values associated with industrialization are seen as foreign to many developing nations, which are deeply attached to more traditional values. Yet the values of punctuality, hard work, achievement, and other “industrial” values are keys to unlocking the economic potential of poor countries, according to these scholars. Most adherents of this perspective believe that such values can be “inculcated” in a population through deliberate effort. Others argue that the values will emerge naturally as the result of a worldwide process of diffusion of values functional for development. This perspective has been incorporated into a more general school of thought focusing on the process called “modernization.” Development occurs and the international gap is narrowed when a broad set of modern values and institutions are present.⁷⁰

On this first account, development scholars treat values scientifically and instrumentally rather than normatively or critically. Development social scientists, such as anthropologists, describe values or moral norms operative in the lives of people and ask whether these moral commitments help explain and forecast development and underdevelopment. Policymakers often want to know what moral commitments, if any, are aids or obstacles for bringing about development.

Critical or reflective ethics, on the other hand, does not only value moral commitments instrumentally, it also asks what principles (ends and constraints) would be intrinsically good or reasonable to have, and how they should be promoted (consistent with human agency and other values). Development ethics asks what should be the ends and morally acceptable means of development rather than merely how societies mobilize values to reach some given conception of development. Planners and other development agents do ethics when they reflect ethically on development ends and means. They use moral values instrumentally when trying to instill them as factors to bring about some model of development. Even if it is scientifically correct that “industrial” values explain and are causal factors in (some view of) development, it follows neither that these values are justified, nor that it is ethically permissible to “inculcate” them, nor that the development model in question is ethically justified.

These remarks can be summarized in relation to Figure 3.1. What one development theory‐practice proposes (in A) as an ethical principle, or (in C) as a development goal, a contending theory‐practice may advocate (in E) as a means, based on scientific understanding (in D) of the value or moral belief as a causal factor. Moreover, it is also possible that the same value can be viewed as both a reasonable end and an efficient (and morally acceptable) means. Basic need satisfaction or capacity‐building, for instance, can be viewed as ends of development, the means to economic growth, or both ends and a means. Economic growth can be viewed as the goal of development or as the means to basic need satisfaction or capability expansion, or both. In Sen’s capability approach, “expansion of freedom is viewed as both (1) the primary end and (2) the principal means of development.”⁷¹

This view that the same variable can be both an end and a means provides a basis for a criticism of some positions taken on so‐called “social capital” or “human capital.” These approaches are flawed when they view human beings, their education, skills, and trusting relationships, as only “means of production” and not also as “the end of the exercise”:⁷²

While economic prosperity helps people to have wider options and to lead more fulfilling lives, so do more education, better health care, finer medical attention, and other factors that causally influence the effective freedoms that people actually enjoy. These “social developments” must directly count as “developmental,” since they help us to lead longer, freer and more fruitful lives; in addition to the role they have in promoting productivity or economic growth or individual incomes.⁷³

Three additional points are relevant to the relations of different levels of Figure 3.1. First, boxes C and D together rarely deductively entail E. Practical reasoning is an art, which the Greeks termed phronēsis, wherein more abstract beliefs can help one arrive at practical diagnoses, prognoses, or recommendations but do not logically entail them.⁷⁴ One implication, which I spell out in my analysis of deliberative democracy, is that two individuals (or subgroups of a group) may reach the same policy from different normative and empirical starting points. Even people at odds over ultimate goals and basic beliefs may agree on courses of action. Second, two individuals (or subgroups) can have the same development commitments and beliefs and derive (without inferential error) diverse proposals for practice. Third, although the idea of a development‐theory practice implies that the integration (without fusing) of a theory‐practice’s components is a good thing, a certain looseness among the components is also desirable. If a development theory‐practice were a seamless web or a prison, deliberation among proponents of different theory‐practices would be extremely difficult. When theory‐practices share some components and when a theory‐practice’s components do not all stand or fall together, deliberation among persons representing rival perspectives may yield innovative agreements and solve practical problems.

Practice

Norms and policies are more or less realized in many sorts of development actions and practices. Practice, both good and bad kinds, occasions theorizing. Theory generally guides agents who act to bring about (their conception of) development. People theorize, normally, with the intention of changing as well as understanding the world. As Aristotle realized, people engage in reflective ethics not just better to understand the good, but ultimately to do good, “to act on our knowledge.”⁷⁵ Likewise, theorists and practitioners engage in development theory‐practice not just to understand good and better development, but to bring it about.

The practice and the theory of development are, ideally, dialectically related within a development theory‐practice. Neither has permanent priority. It is important to revise our policy and institutions on the basis of theoretical successes and failures. Likewise, we should revise our normative and non‐normative theories on the basis of our practical achievements and failures. An unsettling gap frequently exists between the ideal and the real, between Figure 3.1’s boxes A, C, and E, on the one hand, and box G, on the other. Critique in box F can be unflinchingly honest about this gap between theory and practice. Critique helps us tailor ethical principles and development goals to real world challenges. Critique also enables us to learn the lessons of cases of failure as well as success. As Sen remarks in words with Deweyan echoes: “While . . . success stories have to be supplemented by accounts of failures and deflections, lessons can be learned from what went wrong, in order to do things better next time. Learning by doing is a great ally of the rationalist reformer.”⁷⁶

The closing of the gap between theory and practice, however, is more than a discursive cliché or a theory. It also depends on individual and collective development agents putting their ethical commitments into practice to improve basic institutions – be they local, national, or global. Australian Anna Malavisi, the former Field Director in Bolivia for International Service, puts it exactly right:

There is a risk that ethics becomes just another “buzzword” in the development debate, being understood in a superficial way, diluting its true significance. Including an ethical dimension in development should allow for a more profound analysis and reflection on the failings of development and guide policymakers, practitioners, activists and other members of the civil society in ways to tackle the moral questions faced in development and provide effective solutions to decrease human suffering, inequalities and enhance freedom.⁷⁷

Elaborating Sen’s point about the role of successful (and unsuccessful) cases, I add one final ingredient to a development theory‐practice. Each development theory‐practice partially defines itself by taking actual projects, societies, or regions as “exemplars”⁷⁸ of good and bad development. People often judge Norway or Costa Rica, for instance, as concrete examples of a social democratic model of good development. Others offer Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (“The Gang of Four”) as paradigm cases – now somewhat tarnished – of the so‐called “East Asian development model.” Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Kerala, India, have become iconic of deliberative and democratic development. South Africa exemplifies a transition from racist and conflictual authoritarianism to a rights‐respecting and pacific democracy. Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela exemplifies what one analyst calls “competitive autocracy.”⁷⁹

If we tried to add a “theory‐practice’s” exemplar to our Figure 3.1, it would be most accurate to depict it within box G but with waves radiating out to all other boxes. For a concrete development exemplar tends to function as a dominant image that informs and integrates all aspects of the “theory‐practice.” Yet, exemplars are not bedrock; they can be changed or, more likely, redescribed on the basis of other elements of the theory‐practice. When theory and practice fail to fit together, there is no algorithm to tell us which element or elements should be altered. Our final appeal is to ongoing, critical dialogue about the ends and means of development.

Concluding remarks

The present chapter draws on but enlarges and updates “La naturaleza y la práctica de una ética del desarrollo,” La Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 26 (1988): 49–56; and “Development Ethics and Development Theory‐Practice,” Discussion Paper CBPE 93–2, Center for Biotechnology Policy and Ethics, Texas A&M University, 1993. Both papers benefited greatly from suggestions made by Alison Bailey, Cynthia Botteron, Rafael Angel Herra, Christopher Johnson, Jorge Rovira Mas, Bernard Rollin, and Holmes Rolston. I am grateful to my Costa Rican colleagues for their friendship and insightful criticism of my work during my 1986–7 and 1992 Fulbright Visiting Professorships at the School of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica.

1. I first employed the concept of a “development theory‐practice” in “Toward Development Ethics,” World Development, 19, 5 (1991): 457–83. Sources for this idea were William Frankena, Three Historical Philosophies of Education (Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1965) and Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); Orlando Fals‐Borda, “The Challenge of Action Research,” in The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 3rd edn., ed. Charles K. Wilber (New York: Random House, 1983), 65–73; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); and Catherine Z. Elgin (see below, n. 14). MacIntyre defines a practice as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of ends and good involved, are systematically extended” (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 18). My view of a development theory‐practice enlarges MacIntyre’s definition to include both theory and conduct as elements. Moreover, each development theory‐practice has its own conception of the “human powers to achieve excellence” and of the “ends and the goods involved.” Clearer to me now than in the 1980s – when I first employed the notion of “development theory‐practice” – is the Deweyan character of the idea of a development theory‐practice. For Dewey’s conception of the dialectical relation of theory and (political) practice, see below, n. 47.

2. Theotonio Dos Santos, “El modelo de desarrollo de Costa Rica está agotado,” Seminario Universidad, 757 (January 9–15, 1987): 14.

3. Ibid.

4. David A. Crocker, “Cuatro modelos del desarrollo costarricense: un análisis y evaluación ética,” Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 27 (1989): 317–32; “The Hope for 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.

5. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy, 2nd edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), xi.

6. J. Baird Callicott, “The Search for an Environmental Ethic,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, 2nd edn., ed. Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1986), 415.

7. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Lost in Space,” New York Times (July 24, 2004), A 27.

8. David A. Crocker, “Cuatro modelos del desarrollo costarricense”; and “The Hope for Just, Participatory Ecodevelopment in Costa Rica.”

9. Richard Biesanz, Karen Zubris Biesanz, and Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, The Costa Ricans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1982), 178. For an argument for a basic right to effective citizen participation, see Shue, Basic Rights, 65–87. For an argument that the empirical evidence shows that both income‐poor and rich democracies generally outperform – with respect to both economic growth and human development —autocracies at comparable levels of GDP, see Morton H. Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle, and Michael Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).

10. In graduate seminars in the early 1960s at Yale University, US philosopher John E. Smith often cited this Hegelian maxim, but I have been unable to find it in Hegel’s works.

11. See David A. Crocker, Praxis and Democratic Socialism: The Critical Social Theory of Marković and Stojanović (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), chs. 2 and 6.

12. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).

13. Mario Bunge, Ciencia y desarrollo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones XX, 1982), 27–38.

14. Catherine Z. Elgin’s general characterization of “a system of thought” comes very close to my concept of a “theory‐practice,” which I apply to the “domain” of international development. I would only make more explicit than Elgin does in the following passage the dialectical links between thought and action: “A category scheme provides the resources for stating various truths and falsehoods, for exhibiting particular patterns and discrepancies, for drawing specific distinctions, for demarcating conceptual boundaries. Purposes, values, and priorities are integral to the design. They constitute the basis for organizing the domain in one way rather than another. And the acceptability of any particular scheme depends on the truths it enables us to state, the methods it permits us to employ, the projects it furthers, and the values it promotes. Together these constitute a system of thought. A failure of the components to mesh undermines the system, preventing it from doing what it ought to do.” Catherine Z. Elgin, “The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 89.

15. See Victor Bulmer‐Thomas, The Political Economy of Central America since 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

16. “El modelo de desarrollo de Costa Rica está agotado,” 15; Socialismo o fascismo: El nuevo carácter de la dependencia y el dilema latinoamericano (Mexico: Editorial Educol, 1978).

17. Carlos Montaner, “Indagaciones sobre la libertad y la prosperidad,” La Nación (October 26, 1986): 15A–16A. Cf. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non‐Communist Manifesto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). For a very different analysis that (1) stresses mass poverty, powerlessness, and hopelessness as the factors that block authentic development and (2) defines (authentic) development quite differently, see Denis Goulet, “Obstacles to World Development: An Ethical Reflection,” World Development, 11 (1983): 609–24; and Development Ethics, ch. 14.

18. Hollis Chenery, Redistribution with Growth: Policies to Improve Income Distribution in Developing Countries in the Context of Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

19. Ariel Dorfman, “Bread and Burnt Rice: Culture and Economic Survival in Latin America,” Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter‐American Foundation, 8 (1984): 25.

20. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), xii. For a useful review of thirty major concepts of development that have emerged (many to be discarded) since World War II, see David Alexander Clark, Visions of Development: A Study of Human Values (Cheltenham, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2002), ch. 1. See also Diana Hunt, Economic Theories of Development: An Analysis of Competing Paradigms (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); and Marta Pedrajas Herrero, “El desarrollo humano en la economía ética de Amartya Sen,” PhD dissertation, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Spain, 2005, 46–172.

21. See Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and the journal Feminist Economics, esp. 9, 2–3 (2003).

23. See Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971); E. Roy Ramírez, La responsibilidad ética en ciencia y tecnología (Cartago: Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1987).

24. Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice (London: Penguin, 1974), 24.

25. See “Paradigms of Economic Development and Beyond,” Directions in Economic Development, ed. Charles K. Wilber and Kenneth P. Jameson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 1–41; David F. Ruccio and Lawrence H. Simon, “Radical Theories of Development: Frank, the Modes of Production School, and Amin,” in The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 4th edn., ed. Charles K. Wilber (New York: Random House, 1988), 121–73; Edward Weisband, Poverty Amidst Plenty: World Political Economy and Distributive Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989). In Economic Theories of Development, chs. 6–8, Diana Hunt critically compares the neo‐Marxist paradigm, dependency analyses, and the Maoist paradigm of development. In his recent writings Thomas W. Pogge explicitly embraces Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world systems” approach that explains (and condemns) national political and economic failures by reference to “a global order maintained by the rich democracies and their foreign policies”: World Poverty and Human Rights Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 147. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000).

26. Geoffrey Hunt, “Two Methodological Paradigms in Development Economics,” Philosophical Forum, 18 (1986): 55. For a brief but clear discussion of the differences between (1) an explanatory individualism that explains events by reference to (human) individual motivation or action (“motivational” or “ontological individualism”) and (2) a “justificatory or moral individualism” in which “it is only individuals ultimately that matter morally speaking and hence justifications for moral principles, actions, and policies must ultimately refer to the well‐being and freedom of individuals,” see Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self‐Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 158.

27. For a fuller consideration of the individualism/holism distinction in development economics, see Geoffrey Hunt, “Two Methodological Paradigms.”

28. For “rules of the game,” or institutional constraints that shape human interaction, including economic performance, see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

29. For an example of the latter sort of integrative theory, see Bunge, Ciencia y desarrollo, 19–24.

30. J.P. Dickenson, C.G. Clarke, W.T.S. Gould, et al., Geography of the Third World (London: Methuen, 1983), xv.

31. Keith Griffin, Underdevelopment in Spanish America (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 48; reprinted as “Underdevelopment in History,” in The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 2nd edn., ed. Charles K. Wilber (New York: Random House, 1979), 88.

32. Jorge Graciarena, “Poder y estilos de desarrolo: Una perspectiva heterodoxa,” Revista de la Cepal, 1 (1976): 187. For an interesting and important use of Graciarena’s thesis in an interpretation of Costa Rica, see Jorge Rovira Mas, Estado y política económica en Costa Rica 1948–1970, 2nd edn. (San José: Editorial Porvenir, 1983). For a clarification of the history of the “structure versus agency” debate in the social sciences, a discussion of the recent turn in development studies to “agency,” and the view that structure is increasingly conceptualized as a set of parameters that actors use to order their practices, see Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, “Structure and Agency,” in The Elgar Companion to Development Studies, ed. David Alexander Clark (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 607–12.

33. Graciarena, “Poder y estilos,” 184.

34. Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 148.

35. Ruccio and Simon, “Radical Theories,” 124.

36. Ibid. Cf. Thomas Carothers’ argument that “the transition paradigm” of democracy promotion assumes that all nations moving away from authoritarianism are on a single and inexorable path – with no u‐turns or dead‐ends – to full democracy: Thomas Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004), 167–83.

37. Ibid., 125–6.

38. Geoffrey Hunt, “Two Methodological Paradigms,” 62.

39. See Howard J. Wiarda, “Toward a Nonethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative Conceptions from the Third World,” in The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 4th edn., 59–82, esp. 75–7. For a recent discussion of what he calls “universalist” and “relativist” conceptions of development, see Gasper, The Ethics of Development, ch. 2.

40. Geoffrey Hunt, “Two Methodological Paradigms,” 59.

41. Although they cast themselves as opponents of all “development” theories, policies, and practices, the essayists in The Development Dictionary, ed. Wolfgang Sachs, (London: Zed, 1992), arguably are anti‐essentialists in the sense that they reject a fixed human nature.

42. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiii.

43. The text is an application to development theory of a point that Rorty makes with respect to the “Western Democracies” in ibid.

44. Amartya Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6 (1977): 317–44; “Economic Methodology: Heterogeneity and Relevance,” Social Research, 56 (1989): 319–29; Denis Goulet, Incentives for Development: The Key to Equity (New York: New Horizons Press, 1989); and Beyond Self‐Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

45. Sen, Development as Freedom, ch. 11.

46. See Amartya Sen, “Reason Before Identity,” Romanes Lecture, given in Oxford, November 17, 1998; “Beyond Identity: Other People,” The New Republic, 223, 25 (2000): 23–30; Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Sabina Alkire, Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140–1.

47. Some development theory‐practices have the ambition of deductively deriving ethical principles and goals (in A and C) as well as development goals and strategies (in D) from metaphysical assumptions in B. In contrast, some Marxists and Richard Rorty contend that metaphysical assumptions provide no “back‐up” or justification for practice but merely rationalize or articulate it. My own approach, which I can only suggest here, would be to emphasize the way in which metaphysical assumptions can both influence and be influenced by other elements of a development theory‐practice. We both tailor development practice to (metaphysical) theory and tailor theory to practice. See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 366–7, n. 37. For Rorty’s sympathetic critique of Dewey, see Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 74; and “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, eds. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 257–82.

48. See Gasper, The Ethics of Development, ch. 3, for a helpful discussion of diverse conceptions of the values of both efficiency and effectiveness.

49. See Eleanora Barbieri Masini, “Philosophical and Ethical Foundations for Future Studies,” World Future Studies, 17 (1981): 1–14. See also Joseph E. Stiglitz’s important point that development advisors have a duty to make clear the degree of probability of their forecasts as well as the cognitive quality of the evidence on which the forecasts are based: “On Liberty, the Right to Know, and Public Discourse: The Role of Transparency in Public Life,” in Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999, ed. Matthew J. Gibney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115–56.

50. Onora O’Neill, “Lifeboat Earth,” in World Hunger and Moral Obligation, ed. William Aiken and Hugh La Follette (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1977), 160.

51. Rorty argues that it is innovative political action in the “Third World” that is likely to open up new institutional possibilities in the rigidified, worn‐out, and apathetic (“Alexandrian”) First and Second Worlds: “To say, as I have been saying here, that if there is hope it lies in the imagination of the Third World, is to say that the best any of us here in Alexandria can hope for is that somebody out there will do something to tear up the present system of imaginary significations within which politics in (and between) the First and Second Worlds is conducted. It need not be equalization of incomes, but it has to be something like that – something so preposterously romantic as to be no longer discussed by us Alexandrians. Only some actual event (rather than some hopeful book), the actual success of some political move made in some actual country, is likely to help.” Richard Rorty, “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future,” Northwestern University Law Review, 82, 2 (1987–8): 351. Arguably Brazil in the early twenty‐first century can lay claim to two such “preposterously romantic” events, both of which seem to be bearing normative fruit – the election to the Brazilian presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the city of Porto Alegre’s fifteen years of experience with a participatory budgeting process. For the latter, see Gianpaolo Biaocchi, “Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment,” in Deepening Democracy, ed. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 45–76.

52. Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 156. See also my critique of what I call “realistic anti‐utopianism,” Praxis and Democratic Socialism, 168–73.

53. See Onora O’Neill’s treatment of Singer’s and Hardin’s contrary forecasts and moral evaluations in “Ending World Hunger,” in Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, 3rd edn., ed. Tom Regan (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1993), 235–79.

54. In the mid‐1980s Roger C. Riddell helpfully (1) examined the mixed record of foreign aid and (2) criticized the hasty generalizations of those who find aid always good or always bad. See Roger C. Riddell, Foreign Aid Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For more recent assessments, see World Bank, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006); Roger C. Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For critical assessments of Easterly’s most recent book, see Amartya Sen, “The Man Without a Plan: Can Foreign Aid Work?,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006): 171–7; and Nicholas Kristoff, “Aid: Can It Work?” New York Review of Books, LIII, 15 (October 5, 2006): 41–4. In Chapter 8, I take up the issue of food aid and what we know of its variable impact on people’s lives.

55. See Gasper, The Ethics of Development, esp. chs. 3 and 4, for helpful unmasking of value assumptions lurking in apparently value‐neutral economics.

56. Onora O’Neill argues against utilitarianism as a moral theory precisely because it requires an impossible predictive “science of society.” O’Neill tries to make a virtue of the necessary absence of a social science crystal ball by working out a version of Kantian ethics that is “far less sensitive than is utilitarian reasoning to gaps in our causal knowledge” and does not require “impossible calculations” of the future: O’Neill, “Ending World Hunger,” 266, 255.

57. For this notion of the positive dimension of critique, see Crocker, Praxis and Democratic Socialism, esp. 23–32. For a similar view of the way in which “thought” reflects upon and seeks to improve practice, see Jane Mansbridge, “Practice‐Thought‐Practice,” in Deepening Democracy, ed. Fung and Wright, 175–99.

58. Jorge G. Castañeda argues that the goals of the Latin American left – that “there must be a fundamental shift in resources and policy emphasis from the rich to the poor in order to solve the region’s problems” – can and should “constitute the aims and aspirations of all Latin Americans”: Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 1993): 429, 475. For Castañeda’s more recent reflections on two lefts in Latin America – a “wrong” (populist) left and a “right” (social democratic) left, see his “Latin America’s Left Turn,” Foreign Affairs, 85, 3 (May/June 2006): 45–59.

59. Denis Goulet, Development Ethics: A Guide to Theory and Practice (New York: Apex Press, 1995), 11.

60. Ibid., 11–12. I analyze and evaluate Goulet’s own rather abstract principles in my “Foreword” to Goulet, Development Ethics at Work: Explorations 1960–2002 (London: Routledge, 2006), xiv–xxxiii.

61. In a review of James M. McPherson’s history of the US Civil War, The Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Jean Baker comments on the appropriateness of the volume’s title: “According to McPherson, the Civil War was a revolution, on both sides. Both the North and South were fighting for alternative views of freedom, an ideal inherited from their shared revolutionary past.” For the South, but not for the North, continues Baker, freedom included “the right to own slaves and to take them anywhere as private property, including the territories such as Kansas, and the right to be free from the interfering North”: Jean Baker, “Our Other Revolution,” New Republic (September 5, 1988): 39.

62. For a conception of a social, cross‐cultural version of John Rawls’s method of “reflective equilibrium,” see David A. Crocker, Praxis and Democratic Socialism, ch. 6. One‐sided positions emphasize abstract principles at the expense of concrete judgments or vice versa. For the latter, see Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory, 15, 4 (1987): 538–63, esp. 549. For the former, see Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” Political Theory, 15, 4 (1987): 564–80, esp. 577, n. 20. David Alexander Clark, impatient with abstract normative theorizing, goes to the other extreme of uncritically appealing to the values of the poor: “a new approach, which draws on the perceptions of development among the poor, is required to provide potentially sterile debates about the nature of human well‐being and development with new impetus”: Visions of Development, 6. In Chapters 9 and 10 below, I offer an ideal of deliberative and democratic participation as a way of avoiding the dangers of both top‐down theorizing and unscrutinized popular preferences.

63. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” in The Institution of Philosophy, ed. Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 32–3, n. 37.

64. Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 569–70.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., 580, n. 31. See also Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” 33, n. 38.

67. For a discussion of the “practical turn” in Anglo‐American philosophy, see Stephen Toulmin, “The Recovery of Practical Philosophy,” American Scholar, 57, 3 (1988): 337–52; and Crocker, “Toward Development Ethics,” 471–3. For recent examples of philosophers making contributions to multidisciplinary and public issues, see Disability, Difference, Discrimination, ed. Anita Silvers, Mary B. Mahowald, and David Wasserman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy, Policy Studies Review Annual, 13, ed. Verna V. Gehring and William A. Galston (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 2002); Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights; Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly; Robert K. Fullinwider and Judith Lichtenberg, Leveling the Playing Field: Justice, Politics, and College Admissions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Jonathan Moreno, Is There an Ethicist in the House? On the Cutting Edge of Bioethics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For representative Spanish work in engaged policy‐oriented applied ethics, see Adela Cortina, Ética aplicada y democracia radical (Madrid: Tecnos, 1993); Ciudadanos del mundo: Hacia una teoría de la ciudadanía (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997); Los ciudadanos como protagonistas (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg, Círculo de Lectores, 1999); Adela Cortina et al., Construir confianza: Ética de la empresa en la sociedad de la información y las comunicaciones (Madrid: Trotta, 2003); Adela Cortina and Domingo García‐Marzá, eds., Razón pública y éticas aplicadas: Los caminos de la razón práctica en una sociedad pluralista (Madrid: Tecnos, 2003).

68. See Archon Fung, “Deliberation before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory, 32, 2 (2005): 401.

69. John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics [1908], The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, V, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 276; cited in Westbrook, John Dewey, 185. Westbrook’s perceptive gloss on this passage is as relevant for twenty‐first‐century development professionals as it was for early twentieth‐century social reformers: “As Dewey perceived, the language of middle‐class benevolence often betrayed a view of the masses as inert material on which reformers might work their will, and he called instead for a reconstructed conception of helping others which enlisted their full and willing participation in the provision of social welfare”: Westbrook, John Dewey, 185; see also 40–2.

70. Mitchell A. Seligson, “The Dual Gaps: An Overview of Theory and Research,” in The Gap Between Rich and Poor: Contending Perspectives on the Political Economy of Development, ed. Mitchell A. Seligson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 5.

71. Sen, Development as Freedom, 36.

72. Ibid., 296.

73. Ibid., 295.

74. What Stephen Toulmin says about the clinician can be generalized to the practical reasoner and then applied to the development planner, community member, or other development agent. See Toulmin, “The Recovery of Practical Philosophy,” 345–7. On phronēsis, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); and “Can We Justify Universal Moral Norms?,” in Universalism vs. Relativism: Making Moral Judgments in a Changing, Pluralistic, and Threatening World, ed. Don Browning (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 3–17.

75. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1179b.

76. Sen, Development as Freedom, 255.

77. Anna Malavisi, “The Application of Ethics in Development Practice,” abstract, conference paper “Global Ethics, Development, Environment and the Earth Charter,” April 14–17, 2004, Aberdeen, Scotland.

78. I use “exemplar” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of a “community’s standard examples,” as “concrete problem solutions, accepted by the group, as in a quite usual sense, paradigmatic.” See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 298, 306.

79. Javier Corrales, “Hugo Boss,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2006): 32–40.

80. Sen, Development as Freedom, 36; see also 291.

3 Ethics and development theory‐practice

Development ethics in action

The very idea of a development theory‐practice

Concluding remarks