Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics

Jay Drydyk, Lori Keleher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317236092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics provides readers with insight into the central questions of development ethics, the main approaches to answering them, and areas for future research. Over the past seventy years, it has been argued and increasingly accepted that worthwhile development cannot be reduced to economic growth. Rather, a number of other goals must be realised:

• Enhancement of people's well-being
• Equitable sharing in benefits of development
• Empowerment to participate freely in development
• Environmental sustainability
• Promotion of human rights
• Promotion of cultural freedom, consistent with human rights
• Responsible conduct, including integrity over corruption

Agreement that these are essential goals has also been accompanied by disagreements about how to conceptualize or apply them in different cases or contexts. Using these seven goals as an organizing principle, this handbook presents different approaches to achieving each one, drawing on academic literature, policy documents and practitioner experience.

This international and multi-disciplinary handbook will be of great interest to development policy makers and program workers, students and scholars in development studies, public policy, international studies, applied ethics and other related disciplines.

1
Introduction

What is development ethics?

Jay Drydyk and Lori Keleher

When we tell people that we work in development ethics, they typically understand us only well enough to be puzzled. They think they understand ‘ethics’. They think they understand ‘development’. But ‘development ethics’ – what is that? Our question, after hearing this so often, is why ‘development ethics’ seems so perplexing to so many people. The answer, we think, is relatively simple and yet reveals much about the concept of development ethics. So it is a good starting point for this book.

We pursue that question in the next section. Three further questions are taken up in subsequent sections. First, what are the values or goals that distinguish development that is worthwhile from that which is undesirable? Along which dimensions is some development comparable to others, as better or worse? Here we introduce the seven broad values around which this Handbook is organized: well-being, equality, agency and empowerment, environmental sustainability, human rights, cultural freedom, and responsibility. Second, why is it important for development decisions and processes to be ethically justifiable? Does their legitimacy depend on public justifiability? Third, the foregoing demonstrates how open and inclusive development ethics is to people working in development practice as well as to people in many different academic disciplines. Since both of the editors are philosophers by profession, we want to complete this introduction by discussing the particular contributions that our fellow philosophers are well suited to make, if they would like to join the development ethics team.

Judgment and justification

Consider the following comments made in later chapters of this book:

The paradigm of development as economic growth has been particularly pernicious in generating and entrenching inequalities within and across borders and specifically with respect to gender.

(Chapter 11, p. 117)

Governments and funding agencies, on the other hand, cling to vague expressions like ‘meaningful consultation’, leaving the details of how these are actualised largely to project proponents. Thus while national and international policy guidelines are firm and clear about unacceptable outcomes, they are slack and opaque about unacceptable exclusion of stakeholders from decision-making.

(Chapter 19 p. 203)

Indigenous tribal communities in valleys continue to suffer from the trauma of displacement, including the hardships and treacheries of resettlement and the ongoing struggle for justice; international funding agencies support the expansion of projects that aim to provide for aspiring urban sections of society, regardless of the environmental and cultural cost to marginalized communities.

(Chapter 33, p. 377)

After independence, the French-speaking countries of Africa were propelled towards a model of development that was greatly influenced by the colonial period. This institutional legacy, which is evidenced by France’s continued leverage, has left a trail of political cronyism and corruption.

(Chapter 36, p. 398)

These comments about models, projects, or processes of socio-economic development include critical assessments. They raise issues about practices of development – from individual projects to entire strategies. The thrust of criticism is not just that these practices were ineffective but that they reflect badly on the agents and institutions that chose them because these were the wrong things to do. The criticism is that, on the great spectrum from doing the right thing towards the many wrong things to do, these practices are closer to the wrong end. Since this right–wrong spectrum is the domain of ethical judgment, these judgments about development practices belong to development ethics.

If we think of development ethics in this way – as recognizing wrongdoing in development practices – then discussions of development ethics are perhaps more widespread than we would otherwise think. Discussing development ethics, in this sense, is reminiscent of speaking in prose, according to Moliere’s M. Jourdain: ‘Good heavens. For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it’ (Moliere 1671, act 2, scene 4; Ratcliffe 2017). So, too, many likely have been discussing development ethics without knowing it.

Why then does ‘development ethics’ seem so puzzling? The reason, we suggest, is that development ethics also has another domain: it is not just about judgments; it is also about their justification. Passing judgments is easy. But if we are interested in knowing about the right conduct (here, the right ways of conducting development) then we should also be seeking the right judgments, and so we will demand justifications for these judgments. So development ethics involves seeking and giving justifications for judgments about the right and wrong ways of conducting development. This may account for some of the puzzlement: the space of judgment seems familiar, but the space of justification may not. People may recognize that ethics involves ethical judgments, and they may also recognize ethical judgments that can be made about development, but the business of justifying those judgments may seem daunting. In other words, there is a divide between judgment and justification. As Des Gasper explains: first development ethics must identify ‘ethical concerns about development experiences and policies’, but from there it must go on to examine ‘major valuative concepts and theories used to guide, interpret or critique those experiences and actions’ (Gasper 2004, xii). Crossing this divide takes a further step that may seem unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

Whereas development thinkers and practitioners have approached this divide from one end, philosophers have approached it from the other. That is to say, when philosophers discuss applied ethics, they are often better informed about evaluative theories and concepts than they are about the practices that need to be evaluated. David Crocker was first asked to teach development ethics at a time when neither he nor anyone else knew what this might entail. As a philosopher, his initial response was to reach for well-known applications of evaluative theories and concepts related to practices that seemed to be relevant to development, particularly the arguments about duties of famine relief that were made prominent in the 1970s by Peter Singer. (Parallel arguments were drawn later from different ethical theories, notably the Kantian arguments by Onora O’Neill (1986, 1993; Aiken and LaFollette 1977).)

There can be much uncertainty on both sides of this divide. On one side, people with strong, clear judgments about the wrong things to do for development may be less certain about how to justify these judgments. On the other side of the divide, people who know enough about moral theories and concepts to evaluate nearly anything may be less certain of what the actual issues are in development practice. Crocker noticed this early on. For example, he noticed that the way in which Singer had framed the issue of international aid was incomplete, being oblivious to ‘how national development was conceived and what developing nations were already doing (or failing to do) to bring about good or better development’, giving too little attention to the agency of the people that aid was meant to benefit, and failing to recognize ‘deeper, more structural problems, such as maldistribution of wealth and power’ (Crocker 2008, 8–9).

Crocker responded by working both sides of this divide and promoting interaction across it. In the 1980s he drew upon the thinking of Denis Goulet, whose approach to values and justification was more anthropological than philosophical (Gasper 2011; Goulet 1971, 1995, 2006), and the thinking of Costa Rican philosophers Luis Camacho and E. Roy Rodriguez (Crocker 2008, 12). After, Crocker and his Costa Rican colleagues organized a Development Ethics Working Group in 1984 and held the first conference of the International Development Ethics Association in 1987 (IDEA 2017). Since then, many others joined this effort – including the co-editors of this book. IDEA has held ten international conferences and numerous smaller workshops on five continents on a wide range of themes, including economic crises; alternative development models; development needs, capabilities, and rights; environmental sustainability; dependency; globalization; corruption; global justice; and gender justice (IDEA 2017).

For the question of what development ethics is, this gives a good first answer: development ethics is ‘working both sides of the divide’ between ethical justifications and ethical judgments about development practices.

While this characterization is correct as far as it goes, it neglects two other important dimensions. One is that the term ‘development’ itself is often used normatively. Hence we should not just look to external moral theories and concepts for guidance; we should also consider what people mean by ‘development’ when they advocate for development as a social goal. What is meant when people use ‘development’ as a standard for evaluating how well or badly a society, its government, or its leaders are doing? The other neglected dimension is political. Governments direct much development activity and even private sector development takes place within legal and regulatory frameworks. Either way, some exercise of power is involved. If this exercise of power is not justifiable, then its legitimacy is open to question. Insofar as development ethics targets ethical justifiability, it bears on political legitimacy.

Acknowledging these two further dimensions of development ethics is one of the hallmarks of this book. Each has its own rationale. The first dimension expands the space of justification to include more people’s values – the values that are implicit when people demand development as a social goal. The justificatory space, then, is not just for philosophers. While philosophers have much to contribute to this space, it is not their fiefdom. The second dimension answers a particular kind of political skepticism about ethics. ‘You say that our development strategy is not ethically acceptable? So what? You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ The short answer is: if your omelet-making is not justifiable to those for whom, by whom, and with whom the omelet is made, then your claim to be a legitimate chef may vanish. Both points deserve to be discussed less metaphorically, more analytically, and this is what we will begin to do in the next two sections.

Normative dimensions: goals and values of worthwhile development

Even narrowly conceived as ‘economic development’, the concept of development has, since the middle of the twentieth century, undergone remarkable change. Currently, economic growth is only one part of its meaning according to a recent account, which defines ‘economic development’ as ‘the process in which an economy grows or changes and becomes more advanced, especially when both economic and social conditions are improved’ (‘Economic development’ 2017). As the term was used in the 1950s, the definition could have been reduced to the first part, ‘ … the economy grows’, as a measure of ‘improvements in material well-being’ (Okun and Richardson 1961, 230). Restricting the concept of development to growth, even in the 1950s, seems implausible to some, like economist Jacob Viner, who found it ‘a paradox to claim that country is achieving economic progress as long as the extent of … poverty has not lessened… .’ And yet, at the time, Viner feared that including poverty reduction as part of the meaning of ‘economic development’ would entail ‘separating myself from the whole body of literature in this field’ (Viner 1952, 126–127). Nevertheless, over the next twenty years this restriction could not hold out, and indeed by the 1970s poverty reduction had been incorporated into the dominant conception of development in the major institutions.

This was just one way in which the conception of development came to be expanded in this period, from mere growth to a richer conception of human development (Gasper 2004). Our question is, why did this change the concept of development? To say that the concept of development had to change in order to recognize the importance of poverty reduction is not sufficient as an explanation. What was wrong with calling for development (meaning growth) plus poverty reduction? Why was it necessary to think of development as including poverty reduction? The only plausible explanation acknowledges that ‘development’ had a normative connotation, the connotation of ‘improvement’ noted in the contemporary dictionary definition from which I began. If ‘development’ implies valuable social change, then it makes sense to feel uneasy about including, as development, a process of growth that fails to reduce poverty. We hear the same unease in Dudley Seers’s famous 1969 address on ‘The Meaning of Development’, when he says, ‘One cannot really say that there has been development for the world as a whole, when the benefits of technical progress have accrued to minorities which were already relatively rich’ (Seers 1969, 6).

Denis Goulet identified this normative connotation and based his call for development ethics upon it. As early as 1960 he stressed the importance of distinguishing between kinds of economic and social change that are worthy of being pursued as social goals, which sometimes he called ‘authentic human development’, and those undesirable kinds which he sometimes called ‘false development’ (Goulet 2006, 5) or ‘anti-development’ (Goulet 2006, 45). This terminology echoes and amplifies the normative connotation of the term ‘development’.

Goulet’s great legacy to development ethics is the idea, on which he expanded in his 1971 book The Cruel Choice, that this distinction between ‘authentic development’ and ‘false development’ or ‘anti-development’ or ‘maldevelopment’ is an ethical, value-based distinction:

Ancient barbarisms were characterized by the triumph of might over right. Today’s false development, which assigns supremacy to mere economic might, would lead to a new form of barbarism, on which is all the more dangerous because it hides behind the mask of progress and civilization. Today’s world is at a crossroads: either it will leave behind the ancient impasses bred of privilege and of limited solidarities, or it will get bogged down in new patterns of violent servitudes. If the world is to succeed in its development efforts, it needs to discover, to promote, and to propose an ethics which takes full account of the requirements of authentic development.

(Goulet 2006, 4)

This has enormous implications for where we locate discussions of development ethics. First, ethics is not isolated from politics or power, not disengaged from the messy world of conflict, privilege, solidarities, and servitudes. This entanglement of power, politics, public reason, and legitimacy with development ethics is discussed at greater length in the next section. Second, ethics is not confined to applying ethical theories to development practices. Rather, development ethics must also include discussions of what ‘development’ must be, in order to satisfy the normative connotation of the word – to be ‘authentic’ development, as Goulet called it. Development ethics is part of the discussion defining what else ‘development’ must mean (besides economic growth) in order to be the kind of worthwhile change that satisfies its normative meaning.

From this perspective the numbers of development ethics discussions are multiplied many times over, even if the discussants do not recognize themselves as ‘development ethicists’. More prose.

These discussions were treated in a systematic way as discussions of development ethics by Des Gasper in his 2004 book The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development. Ideas of ‘human development’ insist that development must enhance people’s well-being, it must be equitable, and it must be empowering, and it must be environmentally sustainable. Mahbub ul Haq, who is widely recognized as one of the founders of the human development approach, included these four values among the ‘pillars of human development’ (Haq 1995). In addition to these four, Jay Drydyk’s ‘Development Ethics Framework’ of 2011 identified three more values that have been relied upon to distinguish worthwhile development from undesirable maldevelopment: human rights, cultural freedom, and integrity (Penz et al. 2011, Chapter 6).

This Handbook is structured by those seven values. Some of the contributors refer to them as ‘ethical goals’ of development, and this may provoke questions about exactly whose goals these are. The answer is that they have been discovered, in wide-ranging public discussion of how ‘development’ can go wrong, as values that distinguish development that is worthwhile and justifiable from other processes of economic growth and social change that may be called ‘development’ in some quarters but do not live up to the normative connotations of the term. Rather than ‘goals’ it may be less misleading to refer to these values as dimensions in which development can be better or worse, succeeding or failing to meet justifiable normative expectations.

Why then do we need several chapters on each one? The reason is that these broad values are usefully vague: we can agree on them in general te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Contexts
• Part II Well-being
• Part III Social and global justice
• Part IV Empowerment and agency
• Part V Environmental sustainability
• Part VI Human rights
• Part VII Cultural freedom
• Part VIII Responsibility
• Part IX Regional perspectives