Development and global ethics: five foci for the future

Abstract

In this paper’s first section, I briefly discuss the Journal’s Global Ethics Forum and various ways development ethics (DE) has been related to global ethics (GE). Regardless of which of these three (or other) conceptions of DE and GE one adopts, I believe that we should avoid two partial views of the causes of injustice: (1) “explanatory nationalism,” which “makes us look at poverty and oppression as problems whose root cause and possible solutions are domestic” (Pogge 2002); and (2) “explanatory globalism” in which local and national problems are ultimately due to global factors (and the rich democracies largely responsible for them). In the second section I identify five topics and argue that development and global ethicists should emphasize them and their relations in future work. These future foci should be the following: (1) inequality of power, (2) agency and empowerment, (3) democracy and development, (4) corruption, and (5) transitional justice. A final section concludes.

Keywords:

• development ethics
• political economy
• agency and democracy
• corruption
• transitional justice

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many colleagues who have contributed over the years to my evolving views on the nature and mission of development and global ethics. For their helpful comments on this paper, I thank Edna Crocker, Larry Crocker, Jay Drydyk, Sirkku Hellsten, Eric Palmer, Matthew Regan, Marie Claire Vasquez Durán, and Engda Wubneh.

Notes on contributor

Dr David A. Crocker is Senior Research Scholar and Director of the School of Public Policy's Specialization in International Development at the University of Maryland. He specializes in international development ethics, socio-political philosophy, transitional justice, and democracy. He was twice a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Costa Rica, and has taught elsewhere in Latin America and Europe. He was a founder and first president of the International Development Ethics Association. Publications include Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge 2008) and Democratic Leadership, Citizenship, and Social Justice in Hicks & Williamson, eds. Leadership and Global Justice (Palgrave 2012).

Notes

1. For arguments against Pogge's view (see Crocker 2008, 49–51; Drydyk 2014, 19).

2. For an accessible summary (see Doyle and Stiglitz 2014). Stiglitz (2012, 2013) more technically addresses the nature, causes, and consequences of various kinds of inequality (see Piketty 2014; Krugman 2014a). For evidence that ‘extractive' elites are a main cause of nation failure, and that economic and political ‘inclusiveness' is the basic solution (see also Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).

3. Development ethicists Peter Penz, Jay Drydyk, and Pablo S. Bose propose ‘integrity regarding corruption' as one of seven values for ‘worthwhile' development and rightly see a suitably clarified and defended norm of integrity as having an important role in combatting corruption (2011, 148–150).