Development Ethics at Work

Explorations – 1960-2002

Denis Goulet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135987787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In recent years, global institutions such as the World Bank have become increasingly conscious of the role that ethical reflection may play in leading towards more successful knowledge and policy for development.

This key book, written by Denis Goulet (founder of the field of development ethics), gathers together his main contributions in three distinct parts, covering:

• the early journeys of the author's thinking
• an exposition of the main themes he has explored
• the transition from early alternative development to alternative globalizations.

Goulet examines the evolution of development ethics, illustrates how a development ethicist can function in varied development arenas, explores the ethical dimensions of competing change strategies, and investigates the language of interdependence which prevails in development discourse.

The interdisciplinary work traces not only Goulet's own thinking but also wider theoretical debates, seeking to integrate the findings of analytical, policy, and normative 'sciences', as they bear on the development process at the practical level. This makes it an essential read for postgraduates and professionals in the field of economics.

Part I: Early journeys

1 Needed – a development ethics for our time*

To walk in the dark is always a disconcerting and dangerous thing. Too often it is by groping in the dark that leaders must make decisions affecting the lives of millions of people; one understands their hesitations. When, to guide their decisions, they search for clear, reality-based principles suited to a world of multiple permanent tensions, they are in a void, and instead of taking calculated risks, they are forced to take blind risks. They do so because they lack sound ethical guiding principles, for, especially in matters of development, one searches in vain for a coherent body of principles capable of orienting political decision-makers. Contemporary political thinking tends either to be starkly Machiavellian (politics has nothing to do with ethics, and vice versa), or to pursue a vision of justice shrouded in a Utopian halo because it is not deeply imbedded in the world of real constraints. In a domain so important as that of development – however odd and abnormal this may seem – ethics has not until now assumed its full responsibilities and begun to play its proper normative role.

Missing: a sound body of ethical thought

There is no lack of thinkers who reflect on collective responsibilities, who formulate ethical critiques of the colonial heritage, of racism, of inequities that result from paternalistic economic practices. But we are held back by the lack of a comprehensive “corpus” of thought bearing on the full range of problems posed by development and modernity. Yet, wherever structural imbalances, systems of privilege, massive waste, conspicuous consumption, and discriminatory exclusion abound, collective responsibilities cannot be absent. The question needs to be pushed further: Do we not too readily identify the abundance of “goods” with the plentitude of “good,” confuse the “value” of things with their “price,” conflate “happiness” with mere “possessions?” All efforts at achieving development rest on presuppositions, explicit or implicit, about a universe of values and a certain view of civilization. Therefore, it becomes an urgent task to study competing models of development in detail and critically, and to pass judgment on the values and civilizational forms which underlie each model.

A creative surge of intellectual courage

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, one 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. Otherwise, universal prosperity and fraternity will remain an unrealizable dream and become a new “opium of the people.” It may well be that the greatest task facing technical experts today consists in transcending their strictly technical skills in a creative surge of intellectual courage and audacity in execution. In the words of France’s Minister of Public works: “[T]he technical expert who is truly valuable to a developing country is the one who goes beyond all the boundaries of technical expertise, and situates technique in the larger scheme of things and places man (sic!) in his place in that whole.”¹

For the truly humanistic development expert, the crucial issue is to know how to prevent the reductionist materialization of human beings. The human task is to use technology to triumph over matter, which is often enemy to the human, and to harness matter to beneficent human purposes by dominating it. When confronting hostile nature, technology and technique hold out the promise of transforming barren matter into the very stuff of a human paradise. Furthermore, the chronic hunger of two-thirds of living humanity calls forth the obligation to aim for the optimal development and value enhancement of matter itself.

Discovering a new human scale

The time has come for ethics to turn its attention away from the dangers of pride, and will for power which may reside in the drive toward progress. Instead, it must powerfully incite the world to effective and enlightened action, while condemning the willful obscurantism and timid commitment which paralyze it and confine it to development efforts so far below what is needed. In a word, if moral conscience needs to be aroused, it is to its “sins of omission.” The sad truth is that ethical voices remain silent at the very moment when monumental tasks need to be undertaken: these revolve around the numerous defective structures which need to be renovated to fit the requirements of global solidarity on the foundations of a model of a disciplined and moderate well-being. True needs must be distinguished from capricious wants. All energies and resources are to be mobilized, in freedom yet efficiently, to carry out research on the most urgent issues: population, new criteria of distribution, the harmonization of national interests with the larger international common good, how to assist backward societies to evolve rapidly but not in brutally destructive fashion towards a pattern of life which is better organized technologically, and how to find a new “human scale” to overpopulated megacities.

The rights of the weak and the rights of the powerful

Yesterday’s moral philosophers taught respect for private property. Today’s moral philosophers need to emphasize the final destination of private property – the utility of all. Property owners do not have absolute rights over their wealth; they must not dispose of their goods without regard for the real needs of others. Moreover, we need to learn, especially in the field of international trade, that an exchange transaction is not just or ethically acceptable from the simple fact that it fulfills the legal conditions for a contract or obeys ordinary business practices. When one partner to an exchange is economically weaker, it is sheer mystification to speak of conditions of equality. Gunnar Myrdal, in such works as An International Economy and Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions has shown to what degree less developed countries are at the mercy of the economic great powers in all economic activities. There has not yet been found a formula which sets a fair and just equilibrium between the right of the weak not to be exploited because they are weak, and the right of the strong to conduct their affairs by the ordinary rules of economic exchange. To speak more concretely, it is not solely in function of their need for industry inputs that developed countries should regulate their purchases of raw materials: exporting countries must also be protected from excessively damaging price fluctuations.

Rejecting false development

Sustainable development calls for certain qualities in institutional administration, which must be enlightened, honest, and committed to the common good. No less essential are a systematic organization of work and the wise and careful utilization of resources. Accordingly, administrative corruption, bribery, unjustified and prolonged “lying down on the job,” and large-scale waste must all be condemned as immoral activities because they undermine the aspirations of the population as a whole to a more human mode of life, one more completely freed from the shackles of misery. It is not enough, however, simply to condemn what blocks or slows down development; it is also necessary to reject false or spurious forms of development which assign greater importance to the accumulation of goods than to the “essential good,” or which subordinate the value of the human person to mere material goods. Embracing spurious development would eventually lead to the acceptance only of values measurable in monetary terms; doing so would simply “materialize” human beings, treating them simply as instruments of production, units of consumption, voters, or bearers of arms.

The universal human ascent

In the realm of international affairs, we need to identify the precise ethical “valence” or weight to the objectives which different countries pursue. Is it ethically acceptable, for instance, that this or that nation aim, in an unconditional or absolute manner, at always raising its national standard of living while some other neighboring country stagnates at an infra-subsistence level? Can the desire to have a higher level of national well-being (through “having more”) be properly viewed as a value independent of the universal human ascent? How can one country have the right to grandiose luxury or opulence while another wallows in dehumanizing misery? Can one keep on believing that development assistance is a purely optional thing, a mere free gesture of good will to be indulged in or not at one’s fancy with an equally tranquil conscience? By holding to this high moral standard one no doubt risks being unrealistic. Nevertheless, the latent potential for destructive social explosions in this world of high tensions is so great that it is equally unrealistic for the rich nations to simply hold on to their privileges and to maintain poorer nations in misery. If rich nations cannot muster up enough ethical lucidity or moral grandeur to acknowledge the obligations attaching to their privileges, they should do so, at the very least, on grounds of enlightened self-interest.

Over and beyond competing views on the ends of development, debates should also come to grips with the means. Should we judge the two major paths to development as ethically equivalent: an economic system which controls demand and where production is determined, this at the price of repressing legitimate personal desires and of excessively regulating work rules, or a system where needs and demands are allowed to evolve, where people work to earn ever more and where we eventually reach a point where superfluous consumption becomes a veritable duty? Are these two options equally good, or equally bad? Are they good just for certain countries, in certain circumstances? Do other alternatives exist? All are questions which must be addressed by a development ethics which masters not only its own philosophical discipline, but is well conversant with the sciences of economics, sociology, politics, agronomy, and law upon which it depends.

To flee from battle is not virtue, but cowardice

To counter the guilty abstention of those who flee their responsibilities in history on the grounds that the world of economics or of politics is “a rotten world,” one must assert forcefully that even for the purest spiritual idealist, as Mounier well understood, it is a crime not to make the talents confided to one bear fruit. To run away from danger or to flee from battle is not virtue: it is cowardice. The danger obviously exists that one will get dirty hands. And without doubt truly virtuous moral agents who commit themselves, because of their “calling” or because of a generous adherence to the tasks imposed upon them by their economic and political responsibilities, often suffer from being often obliged to make complex choices where good is allied to evil, where the pure is mixed with the impure, where their principles are constantly in danger of sliding into facile expedience or leading to betrayals in order to achieve immediate success. The world has already accommodated itself to too much cynicism, and it is already peopled with too many whose central thesis is that “in a crisis principles are the first thing to go.” But if those who are “pure” distance themselves from this “impure world,” what are the prospects of finding in human laws, in structures, in all areas of human involvement, a little more justice, a little more genuine love, a little more equity, a little more respect for human beings? Even if it is only to come to the aid of victims of arrogant wars or of structures of greed, or of institutionalized selfishness, those with ethical concerns should enter the arenas of economics, politics, scientific research, and international organizations and make their voices heard therein. Here, more than elsewhere, abstention and omission are serious moral faults. As Toynbee reminds us (in A Study of History), we will be judged by the cup of water we have not brought to those who were thirsty, by the bread we have not given to those who were hungry, by the access door to dignity which we have not opened for those who thirst more ardently after human communion and respect than after calories or money.

Collective responsibility

It is not a question, however, solely or even mainly of individual morality, of mere personal responsibility. On the contrary: at issue here are collective responsibility and obligation. Rich and advanced nations have duties toward poor nations. And “underdeveloped” nations have a duty to provide all their subjects, within the limits of real possibilities and taking all circumstances into account, the opportunity to have enough goods to live undiminished human lives in all human registers – spiritual, intellectual, artistic, social, familial, personal, psychological, and biological. All countries have the duty to work with prudence and realism but also with imagination, discipline, and sacrifice, to tend in the direction of laws, structures, and networks of relationships which come ever closer to the requirements of global solidarity, of the active respect of persons, and of the establishment of political and economic regimes suited to meeting all human needs – needs of body and spirit. “Development” imposes itself even on populations which, because of conservative ideologies or a lack of enthusiasm to embrace a modern technological civilization which they deem to be inferior to their own. In such a world it becomes imperative to invoke the ethical category of the “common good” long in use in traditional ethical discourse and which closely approximates, if it is not identical with, what nowadays is conventionally called “development.” What is meant by “development” here is a series of adjustments and changes which allow human beings, both as individual persons and as members of groups, to move from one condition of life to one which is more human in some meaningful way, and to make these changes as rapidly and at the lowest human cost possible.

Aiming at a “mature” kind of ethics

Accordingly, our notion of what is the proper rule of politics must undergo profound changes. It is not a matter of preserving a political order already in place so much as of creating conditions capable of leading to an order which does not yet exist. It is a matter of finding new laws and adequate structures rather than consolidating existing statutes uncritically presumed to assure justice and equity.

In short, if an ethics of development does not yet exist, we can nonetheless already see how indispensable it has become. Moreover, it has now become possible to sketch the broad contours of such an ethics, while we recognize that only further research and additional practical experience will enable us to trace its finished form. What is needed is not a totally new ethics, similar to what certain contemporary existential moral philosophers or situation ethicists advocate in the personal domain. Rather, what is needed is an old ethics that liberates itself from its adolescent fixation with protecting the status quo in which it has imprisoned and immobilized itself, so as to assume all its responsibilities as a mature ethics. Some call this ethics an ethics of “being more” (“plus être”), an ethics of the universal human ascent, an ethics of human plenitude. These labels seem valid inasmuch as everything must be thought out in terms of an objective scale of values at the service of all the dimensions of the human and this to the benefit of all human beings. It needs to be pointed out, however, that a workable development ethics must concern itself more than did earlier virtue ethics with the virtues of magnanimity, magnificence, and munificence. It must likewise speak of limits and restraints, of accepting obligations, of freedom, of intellectual audacity which is indispensable in the search for new solutions in such fields as demography, agronomy and energy. Magnanimity (“greatness of soul”) is needed if we are to rise to the heights of the tasks to accomplish and to overcome obstacles to the full and balanced development of the whole earth – obstacles of a technical, psychological, physical, pedagogical, and ideological nature. And these operations will be expensive: hence munificence, the willingness to expend treasure, will be needed.

The only worthy model of human development

Why must we speak of restraint, of austerity? At the outset it needs to be explained that “austerity,” as understood here, is not synonymous with the privations we associate with misery or the mere abstention of possessions; on the contrary, true austerity² does not resemble misery any more than it does luxurious display. Less-developed countries should certainly discipline themselves in order to build the infrastructures they need to become producers. They will have to content themselves, for many years, with a level of consumer purchasing – not a “standard of living,” something far more comprehensive than mere “having” or “spending” – below that currently found in Western countries. For their part, rich countries will also need to practice limits (or “austerity”), without which human beings become the slaves of material things rather than their masters. Austerity, in this sense, is necessary in rich nations for two reasons. First, in order to agree to a level of external assistance to poor countries, they will have to accept to improve their purely material conditions less rapidly than they might otherwise. In addition, as they progress in wealth, they will need to abstain, freely and consciously, from getting mired in servitude to uncontrolled desires to possess material goods. If they are to safeguard their dignity as human beings and keep their liberty, people must know how to free themselves from excessive attachment to superfluous goods. Thus is an interdependent circuit created: the “austerity” of poor countries facilitates the magnanimity of rich countries. Indeed, rich countries will find it all the easier to be generous in their aid to the extent that aid-receiving countries eliminate useless expenditure and waste. Moreover, to the degree that those who have plenty free themselves from their excessive attachment to having more, they will be able to marshal additional resources for aid purposes. It comes down to this: an ethics of development broadly practiced will create the basis of a civilization whose attributes are the mastery of nature and the victory over selfishness. This would not, as in the past, lead to abundance for the very few co-existing alongside misery for the many, but rather to the decent sufficiency of goods for all. Although they would not aim at suppressing all inequalities, the new structures envisaged here would aim at assuring everyone something more than mere subsistence: in fact, abundance itself would be shared by all.

The only worthy model of human develop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Development Ethics at Work
• Routledge studies in development economics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Works by the author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Early journeys
• Part II: Thematic explorations
• Part III: From interdependence to globalization
• Notes