THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF ZANZIBAR

(SUZA)

DEVELOPMENT STUDIES (DS 1101)

Development Ethics
Compiled by Nahoda, A.M

1
THEORIES OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
• Development Ethics: -
– The meaning of ethics & development ethics
– Sources of development ethics
– Areas of controversies in development ethics
– Areas of consensus in development ethics
 Etymology
• Began in the West with the ancient Greeks from Latin
Ethica GreeK Ethos meaning custom or habit
• Philosophical inquiry into ethics—the study of what
we ought to do
• Greek ethicists inquired into how a person could use
reason to achieve “the good life.”
• But they disagreed about both what the good life is
and the nature of the practical reason that can reach it
 What Is Ethics?
• We often use the terms "ethics" and "morals"
interchangeably.
• It is helpful to distinguish between moral values
and Ethic
• The term "ethics" has a more critical, self-
conscious edge. Ethics goes beyond living out our
values to thinking them through.
• The moral values is what we happen to hold or
believe in
 What Is Ethics?
• Ethics refers to standards of conduct . . . that
indicate how one should behave based on . .
.principles of right and wrong.
• As a practical matter, ethics is about how we
meet the challenge of doing the right thing
 What Is Ethics?
• Ethics refers to the study of what is morally
good and bad, what is right and wrong.
• It is concerned with questions like:
The meaning of the good life?
What are good and bad actions?
Who is a morally good person?
How society ought to be structured.
 ETHICAL THEORIES
• Consequentialism: We ought always to do
whatever brings about the greatest balance of
pleasure over pain for everyone affected by our
action
• Nonconsequentialism (deontology) says that
some kinds of action are wrong in themselves,
and not just wrong because they have bad
consequences.
• Virtue is having admirable characters?
 Development Ethics
• Development ethics is ethical reflection on the
ends and means of local, national and global
development.
• Stated differently, it is to ensure that painful
changes launched under the banners of
development do not result in anti development
which destroys cultures and exacts undue
sacrifices in individual suffering and societal well-
being – all in the name of profit, some
absolutised ideology or efficiency imperative.
 Development Ethics
– Development for what? For whom?
– Development meaning what? Who defines
this?
– How much is enough? Who gets to decide?
– Who is responsible for development? Why?
– What about trade-offs? And the losers?
 Development Ethics
• The essential task of development ethics is to
render development decisions and actions
humane.
• National policymakers, project managers,
grassroots communities, and international aid
donors involved in development in poor
countries often confront moral questions in
their work
 The Need for Development Ethics
• Ethics asks us to think carefully, even about feelings
that may be very strong. Ethics asks us to live
mindfully: to take some care about how we act and
even about how we feel.
• In the Development plans the selection of problems
to be solved and the methods of solving them are
based on the values of the decision makers
• DE help in achieving distributive justice. Distributive
justice aims at equality among people in unequal
conditions
 The Need for Development Ethics
• Development ethics is a critique of the unexamined
ends and means that can form the basis of a new
way of governing, a voice for the victims of
development projects, and a call for accountability of
those who consider themselves to be experts.
• Development needs to be morally justified, this
occurs when human beings are not mere objects in
plans and projects but subjects, in the sense of being
free agents who want to improve their condition
 The Need for Development Ethics
• DE work out an evolved notion of development and
propose alternative models to governments,
international agencies, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), and communities.
• To assess technological innovation from an ethical
perspective. New technologies and their implications
for the well-being of humans and nature pose urgent
ethical questions.
 Sources of development ethics
• First: Criticism of colonialism and orthodox
economic development
• Activists and social critics – such as Mohandas
Gandhi in India, Raúl Prébisch in Latin
America, and Frantz Fanon in Africa. criticized
colonialism and orthodox economic
development
 Sources of development ethics
• Second: The argument that development theory,
policy, and practices should be subjected to
ethical assessment.
• Denis Goulet and Peter Berger insisted that what
was often called development was bad for
human beings and that both ethics and
development would benefit from
interaction.
 Sources of development ethics
• In The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the
Theory of Development (1971), Goulet wrote
so called “development,” because of its costs
in human suffering and loss of meaning, can
amount to “anti-development.”
• Denis Goutlet argued that “development
needs to be redefined, demystified, and thrust
into the arena of moral debate”
 Sources of development ethics
• Peter Berger in his book Pyramids of Sacrifice,
argued that so-called “development “ often
sacrificed rather than benefited poor people and
what was needed was a marriage of political
ethics and social change in the “Third World:”
• Berger insisted that what was often called
development was bad for human beings and that
both ethics and development would benefit from
interaction.
 Sources of development ethics
Third: philosophical debate about famine relief and
food aid.
• This was in response to Peter Singer's utilitarian
argument for famine relief (1972)
• Philosophers debated whether affluent nations
(or their citizens) have moral obligations to aid
starving people in poor countries and, if they do,
what are the nature, bases and extent of those
obligations.
 Sources of development ethics
………Segal had come to argued:
• Famine relief and food aid were only one part of
the solution to the problems of hunger, poverty,
underdevelopment and international injustice.
• What is needed is not merely an ethics of aid but
a more comprehensive, empirically informed, and
policy relevant “ethics of Third World
development.”
 Sources of development ethics
The fourth source
• The work of Paul Streeten and Amartya Sen.
• Sen argues that development should be
understood ultimately not as economic growth,
industrialization or modernization, which are at
best means (and sometimes not very good
means), but as the expansion of people's
“valuable capabilities and functionings:”
 Sources of development ethics
The fourth source
• The valued functionings can vary from such
elementary ones as avoiding mortality or
preventable morbidity, or being sheltered,
clothed, and nourished, to
such complex achievements as taking part in the
life of the community, having a
joyful and stimulating life, or attaining self-
respect and the respect of others.
 Areas of Consensus
• First, There are still grave deprivations for many
in contrast to the elevated affluence of a few- in
spite of global progress with respect to outlawing
or reducing slavery and achieving higher living
standards
• Second, development practices and theories have
ethical and value dimensions and can benefit
from explicit ethical analysis, criticism, and
construction.
 Areas of Consensus
• Third, development is seen as a multidisciplinary
field that has both theoretical and practical
components that intertwine in various ways.
• Hence, development ethicists aim not merely to
understand the nature, causes and consequences
of development – conceived generally as
desirable social change – but also to argue for
and promote specific conceptions of such change
 Areas of Consensus
• Fourth, although they may understand the terms
in somewhat different ways, development
ethicists are committed to understanding and
reducing human deprivation and misery in poor
countries and regions.
• Fifth, a consensus exists that development
institutions, projects, and aid givers should seek
strategies in which both human well-being and a
healthy environment jointly exist and are
mutually reinforcing
 Areas of Consensus
• Sixth, these ethicists are aware that what is
frequently called “development” for instance,
economic growth has created as many
problems as it has solved.
• Seventh development ethics must be
conducted at various levels of generality and
specificity. Just as development debates occur
at various levels of abstraction, so
development ethics should assess:-
 Areas of Consensus
 (1) Basic ethical principles such as justice liberty,
autonomy, solidarity, and democracy;
 (2) development goals and models, such as
“economic growth,” “growth with equity,” “a new
international economic order,” “basic needs,”
and, most recently, “sustainable development,”
“structural adjustment,” and “human
development”
 (3) specific institutions, projects, and strategies
 Areas of Consensus
• Eighth, most development ethicists believe
their enterprise should be international or
global in the triple sense that the ethicists
engaged in this activity come from many
societies, including poor ones; that they are
seeking to forge a cross-cultural consensus;
and that this consensus emphasizes a
commitment to alleviating worldwide
deprivation.
 Areas of Consensus
• Ninth, although many development ethicists contend
that at least some development principles or
procedures are relevant for any poor community or
polity, most agree that development strategies must be
contextually sensitive.
• Tenth, this flexibility concerning development models
and strategies is compatible with the uniform rejection
of certain extremes. Ethically-based development is
not exclusive: it offers and protects development
benefits for everyone in a society – regardless of their
religion, gender, ethnicity, economic status, or age.
 Areas of Consensus
• There is also consensus on the basic ethical
questions such as:
• What is good or ‘real’ development?
• What is the good life which development policy
should seek to facilitate,
• what really are benefits? How are those benefits
and corresponding costs to be shared, within the
present generation and between generations?
• Who decides and how? What rights of individuals
should be respected and guaranteed?
 Areas of Controversies
• A first unresolved issue concerns the scope of
development ethics. Development ethics
originated as the “ethics of Third World
Development.” However, no consensus exists on
whether or how development ethics should
extend beyond its central concern of assessing
the development ends and means of poor or
traditional societies. Some argue that
development ethicists should criticize human
deprivation wherever it exists.
 Areas of Controversies
• Second, Northern and Southern poverty reduction are
linked; migrants from the South making money in the
North send valuable remittances to their families back
home.
• Third, there is the increasing prevalence of applying
“best practices” learned from development in the
South to destitution in the North (as well as vice
versa). For example, the United States Agency for
International Development is applying through its
Lessons without Borders program to destitute U.S.
cities lessons learned from overseas development
efforts
 Areas of Controversies
• Development ethicists also are divided on the
status of the moral norms that they seek to
justify and apply. Three positions have emerged.
Universalists, such as utilitarians and Kantians,
argue that development goals and principles are
valid for all societies. Particularists, especially
communitarians and postmodern relativists, reply
that universalism masks ethnocentrism and
(Northern or Western) cultural imperialism
 Areas of Controversies
• Pro-development particularists either reject the
existence of universal principles or affirm only the
procedural principle that each nation or society
should draw only on its own traditions and decide
its own development ethic and path.
• (Anti-development particularists, rejecting both
change brought from the outside and public
reasoning about social change, condemn all
development discourse and practice).
 Areas of Controversies
• Development ethicists also differ about whether
(good) societal development should have as an
ultimate goal – the promotion of values other than
the present and future human good.
• Others argue that non-human individuals and species,
as well as ecological communities, have equal and even
superior value to human individuals. Those committed
to “ecodevelopment” or “sustainable development”
often fail to agree on what should be sustained as an
end in itself and what should be maintained as an
indispensable or merely helpful means
 Areas of Controversies
• An increasingly important disagreement concerns
not values directly but the roles of various
experts (judges, political leaders, development
agents, philosophers), on the one hand, and
popular agency, on the other, in resolving moral
conflicts. On the one hand, popular participation
and democracy are suspect insofar as majorities
(or minorities) may dominate others and insofar
as people’s beliefs and preferences are deformed
by tradition, adapted to cope with deprivation,
and subject to demagogic manipulation.
 Areas of Controversies
• Finally, controversy also exists with respect to
which agents and structures are largely if not
exclusively to blame for the present state of
global destitution and unequal opportunity.
• “There is a large, complex, and unresolved
empirical question about the relative
contributions of local and global factors to the
wealth and poverty of societies.”
 Review Questions
• Argue for or against the argument :”The ultimate
goal of societal development is the promotion of
values of the present and future human good and
nothing else.”
• The objectives of development is to improve the
quality of life of every human being hence they
must be obtained in whatever means convincible.
Argue for or against the statement.
 References
• Blackburn, Simon (2003)Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford
University Press Inc., New York
• Copp, David (2006)The Oxford handbook of ethical theory. Oxford
University press. UK
• Crocker, David A. (2008) Ethics of Global Development; Agency,
Capability, and Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge University
Press:UK
• Gensler,Harry J. (2011)Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction.
Routledge : New Yourk
• Naagarazan, R.S(2006) A text book on proffessional Ethics and
Human Values. New Age International (P) Ltd. New Delhi
• Skorupski, John(Ed ). (2010) The Routledge Companion to Ethics.
[Link]
 Economist Michael Todaro specified
three objectives of development:
1. Life sustaining goods and services: To increase the
availability and widen the distribution of basic life-
sustaining goods such as food, shelter, health and
protection.
2. Higher incomes: To raise levels of living, including, in
addition to higher incomes, the provision of more jobs,
better education, and greater attention to cultural and
human values, all of which will serve not only to enhance
material well-being but also to generate greater individual
and national self-esteem
 Economist Michael Todaro specified
three objectives of development:
3. Freedom to make economic and social choices: To
expand the range of economic and social choices
available to individuals and nations by freeing them
from servitude and dependence not only in relation
to other people and nation-states but also to the
forces of ignorance and human misery.
• Note the emphasis placed on ‘cultural and human
values’, ‘self-esteem’ and freedom from ignorance; it
is important to remember that development is
about much more than advancing economic growth.
 Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs)
• The Millennium Development Goals represent an
ambitious set of development targets established
in 2000 and designed to be met as fully as possible
by the end of 2015.
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
 Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs)
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV / AIDS, malaria and other
diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for
development