Chapter 30 Review Questions Answer Key

Ethics of Development
  1. Natural law assumes that ethical implications are proposed based on the nature of human beings and their environment. There are various such ethics, according to how human nature and “the human condition” are interpreted, as we saw above. Las Casas, Grotius, and Locke all reasoned partly in this way, but making different interpretations. Human rights thinking comes from this tradition, in the line of Las Casas: humans are seen as a single species, with a common worth and common necessities, and they are both deserving and capable of mutual respect and sympathy. [p. 548]
  1. Utilitarianism grew out of the type of rational calculation fostered by business and markets: costs and benefits should be calculated, summed, and compared. Predominant now in business-dominated societies is an economic variant of utilitarianism we can call “money-tarianism”: costs and benefits are assessed in terms of monetized market values. This tends to lead to the following: only monetized effects are included; a rich person’s well-being becomes considered more important, because greater purchasing power brings greater monetary impact; interpersonal distribution is sometimes treated as unimportant, so that gains for the rich can outweigh costs for the poor, even the deaths of the poor because those have little or no monetary weight. Saving some minutes of businessmen’s time can be used to justify ever more air travel that, through its impact on greenhouse gases and climate change, may cost lives of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people around the world, especially infants. [p. 548]
  1. Social contract theory essentially asks: what do or would participants freely agree on? It treats the participants, in important respects, as free, equal, and intelligent; everyone pursues his/her own advantage (or own values), and together they negotiate a contract that supposedly is agreed by all. This bargaining may be specified as being between all households within a nation-state, as outlined in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), or only between full citizens (so, in John Locke’s context, white male property-holders), or between states, as in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1999), or, instead, between all human beings seen as members of a global society. Social contract theory sometimes ignores the record of his­tory by assuming that countries are self-enclosed and have engaged only in free and equal inter-country ne­gotiation, and even when formulated in the context of such an immigrant nation as the United States, it can ignore migration (as Rawls did in A Theory of Justice) or rule it out as irregular (as he did in The Law of Peoples). [p. 548]
  1. Core development processes—expansion of cities, construction of irrigation and transport systems, generation and distribution of energy, mining projects, and so on—often physically displace many people. An estimated 10–15 million people each year are directly displaced. For centuries, displacement frequently has occurred with little or no consultation with, compensation to, or benefit for the displaced people, and in many contemporary cases this continues. Such displacement often mainly involves people who are relatively or absolutely poor, for the sake of bringing benefits mainly to people who are already better off. It removes livelihoods and can bring massive cultural and psychological disruption. In their book Displacement by Development, Canadian scholars Peter Penz, Jay Drydyk, and Pablo Bose propose a detailed ethical approach for balancing the potential benefits from development investments with the rights and interests of people liable to suffer through displacement. It deepens ideas in the report of the World Commission on Dams. [p. 551]
  1. Human rights thinking and practice comprise the biggest stream of development ethics. The human rights movement that was consolidated under the new United Nations in the 1940s chose to focus not on underlying doctrine but on consensual commitments. Such commitments can be supported on the basis of different ethical traditions, religious or secular. We will not go further into human rights approaches, for which there is a huge literature. Note, though, that broader development ethics work exists partly because human rights approaches, while essential, are not sufficient. Human rights thinking tends to represent values in a rigid format: definite rights to which correspond definite duties of definite duty-holders. This rigidity is its strength, helping to make the claims enforceable, but is also its limitation. It leads, for example, to difficulties when values clash, as they inevitably do. Even the Christian theological language of “indivisibility” that is used in human rights conventions cannot resolve such clashes. Additional discourses for thinking about values and threats to values are necessary. [p. 552]
  1. There are three ideas in this model. (1) Progress—fundamental improvement—has a universal meaning, content, and destination, though there can be local variation in details. (2) In broad terms, there is a universally necessary path to this progress—involving science, investment, economic growth, urbanization, etc.—though again there can be local variation in details. (3) Given the belief in a universal path to a universal destination, there is a lack of sensitivity to alternative paths and alternative destinations and to how development paths differently affect different groups and values. [p. 553]
  1. The main idea to be discussed is that national economic product is the central measure of progress—has contributed to hiding the choices of priorities and the choices between alternative paths. National economic product measures volume of monetized activity. So, first, it is a measure of activity rather than of valuable achievement; it includes, for example, the costs of medical bills, not the length and healthiness of people’s lives. Second, besides inappropriately including costs, it excludes many types of major value, such as friendship, justice, peace, dignity, identity, and so on. Third, national economic product ignores how costs and benefits are distributed across different people and across generations; for example, much monetized activity can occur at the expense of exhausting resources and bequeathing problems to future generations. Unfortunately, business leaders and political leaders have frequently acted as if all important values are subsumed within gross national product (GNP), and as if any other values should be sacrificed for the sake of GNP growth. Development became equated to GNP. [p. 553]
  1. It makes sense to start the discussion with ill-being. As we saw, to identify harm or what is wrong may be easier than to agree extensively on what is good. The one thing that every theory of well-being agrees on is that suffering is undesirable in itself. Various dimensions of ill-being require separate attention, however; one cannot simply compare and sum different types. Narayan highlights voicelessness and powerlessness, for example, in her summary of the Voices of the Poor study, which reviewed more than 60,000 interviews with poor people: The study establishes, first, that poverty is multidimensional and has important noneconomic dimensions; second, that poverty is always specific to a location and a social group, and awareness of these specifics is essential . . . ; and third, that despite [these] differences in the way poverty is experienced by different groups and in different places, there are striking commonalities. . . . Poor people’s lives are characterized by powerlessness and voicelessness (Narayan 2000, 18). Worse than suffering is undeserved suffering. Historically, and still currently, ruling groups nationally and internationally often have argued that most of the suffering poor deserve their situation because of misdeeds in a previous life or alleged indolence or incompetence. “The deserving poor” were a minority. We saw that European invaders of the New World mostly considered the Indigenous Peoples incompetent wasters of resources who did not even deserve their own lands. We noted how especially inapplicable these sorts of arguments are in relation to babies and children. Of critical ethical significance is undeserved avoidable suffering. Modern technology and riches make it relatively easily possible to fulfill basic needs around the world, notably children’s health and education needs. Yet health research funding has been and remains overwhelmingly focused not on the diseases of the people who live short, vulnerable lives but on further extension of the lives and comfort of the rich. Transferring just eight days of global military budgets would cover the additional annual costs required for achieving good-quality universal pre-primary, primary, and lower secondary education, according to UNESCO. These are cases of non-inclusion in the benefits of economic development. We saw earlier cases of deliberate exclusion through forcible displacement. Other cases concern “collateral damage” through negative externalities of economic expansion, like climate deterioration. Others still, such as the frequent farmer suicides in India, involve “disadvantageous inclusion”; farmers are seduced into taking large loans for high-input agriculture, and these loans can bankrupt them in climatically adverse years. [pp. 553-4]
  1. A strong liberal strand in development ethics, as in the work of Amartya Sen, proposes leaving the choice of priorities to personal and societal reflection, case by case, with such reflection and choice seen as themselves central features in “the good life.” Nonetheless, Sen recognizes the priority for a good life of fulfillment of some universal basic needs, such as in nutrition, education, and health. This needs-fulfillment can be seen as the removal of fundamental elements of ill-being, including most notably not living a full, healthy lifespan.

    Beyond those elements, well-being research does suggest some shared fundamentals of well-being. Etzioni (2012) similarly highlights three elements: (1) good personal relationships and friendship; (2) intellectual/spiritual life; (3) social participation and contribution. Much other well-being research underlines the prime importance of physical and mental health; balanced time budgets, not only monetary budgets, including having enough time for recreation, reflection, and participation; quality of work-time; and feeling treated with respect and dignity, including eventually in the process of dying. Chilean development theorist Manfred Max-Neef’s model of human needs (1991) reflects much of this: for each area of need, it considers not only a dimension of Having but also dimensions of Being, Doing, and Interacting. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and similar documents do not leave the elements of the good life purely to be discussed afresh in each situation without any constitutional-level prioritization, for that would leave too much power to the powerful. Market capitalism, for example, has built-in biases toward supplying “information” that says that having more commodities will bring all good things for everyone (if they are deserving) and urges us that economic growth should never end and is essential for social order. At the same time, market capitalism undersupplies information that is hard to make a profit from, including information about some non-commodity aspects of life and about negative side effects of commodity-centred society. Much work in development ethics considers the human quest for meaning and identity, a quest that unfortunately can also take undesirable forms such as nationalist aggression or religious zealotry or involve environmental destruction. Denis Goulet (1971) analyzed The Cruel Choice” felt in many cultures regarding a perceived need to abandon types of behaviour and tradition that constituted their felt identity, as the price of “catching up” with foreign powers and hence maintaining independence and respect. Peter Berger (1974) explored the associated “calculus of meaning.” Such issues remain of central importance. The 2015 encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (“On Care for Our Common Home”), is one recent exploration. Others include the Latin American schools of thought and practice on buen vivir or living well. [p. 554]
  1. Etzioni (2012) similarly highlights three elements of well-being: (1) good personal relationships and friendship; (2) intellectual/spiritual life; (3) social participation and contribution. Much other well-being research underlines the prime importance of physical and mental health; balanced time budgets, not only monetary budgets, including having enough time for recreation, reflection, and participation; quality of work-time; and feeling treated with respect and dignity, including eventually in the process of dying. Chilean development theorist Manfred Max-Neef’s model of human needs (1991) reflects much of this: for each area of need, it considers not only a dimension of Having but also dimensions of Being, Doing, and Interacting. [p. 554]
  1. Development ethics thinking and action can be seen as having three aspects: first, observation, experience, and exposure; second, conceptualizing, analyzing, and theorizing; third, attempted application, adaptation, and new learning. The three aspects are to some extent a sequence of stages, but they occur also in parallel and in continuing interaction. Each involves particular skills and potential pitfalls. [p. 555]
  1. Development in human societies involves value-laden choices. Different choices and ways of thinking about development bring greatly different outcomes for different people. We should try to think openly, carefully, and fairly about the priorities and principles that guide these choices, about which groups are favoured, neglected, or even sacrificed, and about the choices involved also in the related ways of thinking. Besides its importance for guiding action, attention to values is important for trying to understand people. Humans hold and use and are partly driven by values, including ethical ideas, and the types of ethical ideas they hold affect their motivation for thinking empathetically about other people and for engaging in action. Powerful groups often keep values concealed and deny choices, to hide who is favoured, neglected, or sacrificed. The key role of development ethics is to reveal, reflect on, and assess these choices and to add a voice for those who otherwise are unreasonably neglected or sacrificed. [p. 545]
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