DEVELOPMENT ETHICS

Since the mid-twentieth century development has been promoted as the process of overcoming the condition of deprivation that prevails in many regions of the world. Underdevelopment is, correspondingly, a situation from which people and governments want to remove themselves, using science and technology to increase efficiency and generate innovations in the production of goods and services. Social science plays a crucial role in explaining the causes of and finding solutions to underdevelopment.

Development discourse often acts like an ideology, either as an uncritical recipe for all kinds of social ills or as a way of justifying policies that benefit the powerful while speciously purporting to aid the poor. In their 1992 work The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power Wolfgang Sachs, Ivan Illich, Vandana Shiva, Arturo Esteva, and others recommend dropping development discourse altogether as being part of a project based on the quantitative and global instead of the qualitative and local. They also consider development to be an imposition from outside and above. As an example, they explain that the countries dominated by the United States after World War II only became underdeveloped when Harry S. Truman in his 1949 inaugural speech announced a program aimed at improving what he called underdeveloped areas. Before that the label did not exist.

But the distinction between the two kinds of countries was already in place. Some were rich, powerful, and dominant; others were—and continue to be—poor, weak, and dependent. By using the categories of imperialism and neocolonialism instead of development and underdevelopment, Marxists point to the historical roots of the difference, although political strategies to fight neocolonial relations are obviously not the same as development plans, and success in the first aspect does not guarantee success in the second.

There is no controversy as to the description of underdevelopment in terms of lack of food, shelter, education, health care, job opportunities, rule of law, good governance, and political power. Developing nations—formerly known as the Third World and sometimes as the South—share similar problems although to different degrees. The countries consistently listed at the bottom of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) annual report suffer acutely from an overall condition of deprivation, often aggravated by civil strife and corruption. It is not coincidence that many of the countries at the top of the list were colonial powers and that all the nations at the bottom were colonies of those at the top until the late-twentieth century.

Defining Development

It is more difficult to define a developed country for at least three reasons. First there are several models of development. The United States and Canada, for instance, are both developed countries in the usual definition of the term. But they are not developed in exactly the same way. Their social security and health care systems operate differently and do not cover similar percentages of the population.

Second it is not contradictory to state that there are varying degrees of underdevelopment but no real development so far in the world. There is room for improvement even in countries such as Norway and Sweden with a human development index close to 1 according to the 2001 UNDP report.

Third development create new problems. Homelessness is more of a problem in countries at advanced stages of change than in societies devoted to subsistence agriculture where family ties are stronger. The connection between mass consumption and clinical depression has been documented by Yale psychologist Robert E. Lane.

Moreover the very idea of development has experienced an evolution as a consequence of both a deeper theoretical understanding of what developed means and because of the practical problems encountered by governments and international agencies. An asymmetry can thus be found between development and underdevelopment. Whereas underdevelopment has referred to similar facts and conditions since the term began to be used, development has taken on different meanings, so that the notion itself shows a history of development. From development as economic growth, the notion became more complex to include world peace (Pope Paul VI; growth with equity [Amin 1977]); satisfaction of basic needs (Streeten 1981); sustainable development (Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 1987); and development as freedom (Sen 1999), and human security measured in the index used by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project, based at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Ethics of Development

Among the most important tasks of the ethics of development is to work out an evolved notion of development and to propose alternative models to governments, international agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and communities. Louis Joseph Lebret (1959) and Denis Goulet (1965, 1971) are considered pioneers in this endeavor, and as a critical examination of the values underlying plans for social change, development ethics reached maturity when the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) was founded in Costa Rica in 1987. IDEA has been active in this work since its inception through conferences held in the Americas, Europe, India, and Africa. Another important task is 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. Experience demonstrates that technology is a necessary condition for the improvement of human well-being, but that it can also do harm.

Harmful technologies are scientifically unsound, wasteful, unsustainable, or inappropriate for their declared purposes. Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko's agricultural methods imposed by Stalin in the Soviet Union had no scientific basis and led to widespread famine. Those opposed to Lysenko's ideas and methods were persecuted and many died in prison. China's backyard iron furnaces during the period known as the Great Leap Forward (1958–1963) were a great failure, a cause of starvation for many millions, and led to the destruction of the precious few forests remaining in China at the time. Bad technologies in principle can be corrected or abandoned as soon as their inadequacies are clearly known, but some political regimes seem reluctant to do that.

Evil technologies are designed to enslave or eliminate individuals and groups. They respond to irrational hate, lust for power, or blind ideological commitments. Adolph Hitler's use of technology in the so-called Final Solution is an example. Torture instruments are widely used by repressive regimes, and terrorists employ different destructive technologies to wreak havoc among civilians.

Given the fact that technology can be used to do harm, it is important to discuss how to ethically assess it. According to some, technology is ethically neutral, and ethics becomes relevant only when dealing with applications of objects and processes. Responsibility would thus lie only with the users of technologies, not with the engineers who designed them. But because the possible uses and abuses of technology are already present at the design stage, questions of aims and purposes, of good and evil, arise even before artifacts come into being. This is especially true of highly specific technologies. Although a hammer can be used to drive a nail or to commit murder, electric chairs have very few possible uses. It seems contradictory to justify building a torture chamber on the grounds that some other possible benign uses may be found for it.

How technology modifies the environment is another question that can and should be answered at the design stage. Any answer implies values held either by individuals, corporations, governments, or societies. Who makes the decisions, and on what grounds, are likewise ethical issues of great importance. The ethical principles of inclusion and participation are relevant here: As a general rule, the opinions of those affected by decisions should be taken into consideration.

Underdevelopment and Asymmetrical Relations between Countries

A particular problem is posed by the asymmetry in power between developed and developing nations. Two examples of asymmetrical relations are often mentioned in this connection: the patent system and subsidies. First the patent system internationally enforced in the early-twenty-first century and as interpreted by many in developing nations and by the UNDP's Human Development Report 2001 is so rigid that it stifles possibilities of implementing changes necessary for the improvement of conditions in developing nations. One of the consequences of the strict imposition of the patent system is to give legal status and political power to huge monopolies that render it difficult for weak countries to develop their own technologies and protect their citizens from disease and death. In this connection, the Human Development Report 2001 mentions an emerging consensus on the unfair redistribution of knowledge as a consequence of intellectual property rights. It points out that since the late twentieth century the scope of patent claims has broadened considerably at the same time that the use of patents by corporations has become far more aggressive. Among those who may be interested in claiming patents, corporations are in the best position to do so because their focus on small improvements is geared to meet the required criteria for patenting. They also have the advantage of easy access to expensive legal advice in order to defend their patents under civil law. With such legal protection internationally enforced, companies use patent claims as a business asset to stake out their slice of the market. Although the report advocates fairness in international mechanisms for the protection of intellectual property, it also expresses concern because of the signals that the cards are stacked against latecomers. Another source of concern is the unequal relation between powerful corporations and the weak governments of developing countries. As pointed out by the UNDP report, advanced nations routinely issue compulsory licenses for pharmaceuticals and other products during national emergencies, and impose public, noncommercial use and antitrust measures. However by 2001 not a single compulsory license had been issued by a developing nation due to fear of the loss of foreign investments and the cost of possible litigation. Even the production of generic drugs is usually contested by advanced nations in trade negotiations with developing countries. Early-twenty-first century developed nations have profited enormously from the flow of information, discoveries, and inventions of previous eras and often have resorted to reverse engineering (procedures that are no longer available to developing nations because of the strict imposition of the patent system) to catch up with inventions. Yet they routinely oppose any such moves by developing nations.

Second the asymmetry among nations is also obvious in subsidies: In trade negotiations developed countries require developing nations to eliminate subsidies in the production of goods and services for export but refuse to abide by the same strictures. Marxists, dependency-theory scientists, and dependency-ethics theoreticians all denounce these unequal relations as an obstacle to the development of poor nations.

Ethics and Development Plans

Like technologies, development plans are designed for specific purposes and according to certain values, though implicit. Also as is the case in technologies, the selection of problems to be solved and the methods of solving them illustrate the values of decision makers. Those who formulate development plans often do so without consulting the people who may suffer the consequences of implementation of those plans.

Development ethics may follow two approaches. According to the first, which dates back to Plato and Aristotle and can also be found in the work of Hegel, justice is the main purpose of ethics and the state is the proper instrument by which to achieve a just society. Beyond commutative justice, in which personal differences are not taken into consideration in transactions between individuals, distributive justice aims at equality among people in unequal conditions. There must be an entity, which is greater than the individual, that is concerned with the interests of the many as opposed to the profits of the few; that entity is the state. Development ethics, in this perspective, is traditional ethics dressed in new clothes.

Some feel that a different approach is needed because there is little relation between public policies and distributive justice in modern states. They point out that politics is most often conceived of as the art of acquiring and keeping power. Rulers often stay in power by resorting to violence because they want to enrich themselves and their cronies or impose a particular ideology. Justice is the least of their concerns, and propaganda deflects the attention of the people from this fact. Consequently most people do not relate justice to the actions of the ruling classes and have many reasons to believe that governments are best described as instruments of injustice.

This view explains why ethics is often invoked against the rule of power and employed to overturn unjust laws. Because development plans in the hands of governments determined to impose a particular ideology or follow purely technocratic criteria often lead to suffering for the masses, development ethics, under this approach, is not simply traditional ethics in disguise. Rather 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. Because development ethics risks placing too much importance on development and too little on ethics, it must have a strong theoretical foundation.

In light of the above discussion, an analysis of the connection between development and technology is useful. Development, in its social and economic sense and in the most general terms, is often conceived of as an increase in income or consumption per capita, plus social change. The first aspect is referred to as economic growth, which is easy to measure but can be used for purposes other than the improvement of conditions of the population, for instance, when a country fosters economic growth as a means to achieve military power. Social change is more difficult to define or measure, and has been described as the idea of development evolved.

The important role of technology in both aspects of development is obvious. W. W. Rostow (1987) argues that post-Newtonian science and technology are conditions for economic take-off, a means to break through the limits of per person output traditionally imposed on nontechnologically advanced societies. Technology applied to agriculture makes labor more productive, thereby preparing traditional societies for the transition to high consumption, and freeing large numbers of people for work in industry. Technology also makes possible large-scale industrial production. As an impetus for social change, advances in technology create new techniques, careers, jobs, opportunities, businesses, procedures, legislation, and even lifestyles. According to sociologist David Freeman in Technology and Society (1974), the social impact of technology follows four successive phases. First new technological products simplify daily tasks and chores. A pocket calculator is easier to handle than a slide rule; a word processor more versatile than a typewriter. Second job qualifications change. In the early-twenty-first century, secretaries are expected to use computers, instead of just type and file. Third allocation of authority and prestige also changes. Those who have expertise in cutting-edge technologies are in high demand and therefore make more money and enjoy greater social status than people working in older technologies. Finally values held in great esteem by society change. The values of traditional as opposed to industrial societies differ.

Thus changes in how human beings make things lead to cultural change. Even the valuation of change is subject to modification. As pointed out by Rostow, the value system of traditional societies ruled out major changes whereas modern societies incorporate the assumption that transformation and growth will occur. Commercial propaganda in high-consumption societies emphasize change as valuable in itself.

Because technology influences morality by changes in valuation, it is possible to perform an ethical analysis of social change brought about by technology. For example, a society that uses advanced technology to build weapons of mass destruction, and in which the military enjoys great prestige, is not morally the same as one that uses advanced technology to improve conditions for the poor. The fact that a technology is new, and even that it allows for greater productivity, does not mean that it is better. It may increase the gap between the rich and poor, or damage the environment. Increased productivity in agriculture due to new methods is usually associated with monoculture, whereas traditional agricultural practices, with their typical combination of different species, were safer both for human beings and for the environment.

One argument for preserving older technologies is that there is no way to tell when and how they may be needed as practical solutions in the future. In the event that certain technologies can no longer be used, knowing the old way of doing things may represent the difference between life and death. Each particular technology requires certain conditions for its functioning and more advanced technologies usually require more specific inputs. If such inputs (electricity, for instance) are not available, the ability to use alternative technologies is crucial. Because of the increasing dependency of technology on science, science is central to development. Government agencies dedicated to the promotion of scientific and technological research have existed in Latin America and other developing areas since the 1970s. The success of such agencies is not uniform, but the Latin American countries included in the 2001 UNDP report as countries with high human development (Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Chile) also enjoy a long tradition of public support for science and technology.

Mastery of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology is the foundation of technological advancement. The social sciences also play an important role in developing nations. Because underdevelopment is a social condition, a scientific explanation could be found in social sciences. Development plans nevertheless tend to marginalize the importance of input from those disciplines.

Ethics of Science and Technology in Development

Before development economics existed, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) sought knowledge that could alleviate human misery. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) struggled to develop a logical method to solve all kinds of theoretical and practical problems, which he employed in an attempt to alleviate the social ills he saw in Europe. David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) discussed the difference between rich and poor countries and whether it was morally desirable to bridge the gap. Their answer was affirmative.

After the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, other countries experienced similar profound economic and social changes. In the nineteenth century, aspiration to better social conditions was summarized in the idea of progress. In the twentieth century, countries with different political regimes formulated and implemented far–reaching economic plans such as the Four-Year Plans in Germany and the Five-Year Plans in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous 100 Days, which included a number of measures designed to reverse the effects of the Great Depression. In the 1950s a clear distinction between the two kinds of countries entered the political arena, and plans were explicitly created to make change.

It became clear that development plans were not useful to large numbers of people forced to change their lives as part of the implementation of those plans. Several critics have examined the ends and means of development, the values implicit in plans, and the real beneficiaries of change. Denis Goulet (1965) devised a method to examine the choice of problems and solutions in light of values implicit and explicit. Because development ethics as conceived by authors such as Goulet and David A. Crocker aims at proposing alternative models to development, the question arises as to the feasibility of those models. Respect for cultural values is essential for these alternatives to succeed. Proponents hope that the social change brought about through such models will have a solid foundation and be, consequently, more sustainable for succeeding generations. The next generation should have at least the same natural, human-made and human capital than the previous one. If it has less than the previous generation, then development is not sustainable.

The connection of science and technology with development focuses on two questions: What, if any, is the relation between science and technology? and How do either or both relate to socioeconomic development? From the perspective of ethics, however, the basic question is not whether science and technology are subject to ethical analysis, but how science and technology can be used ethically for development.

A Development Ethics

At first glance, the answer to this question is simple. Development is morally justified 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. This position assumes that development plans are valid instruments by which to insure the universal right to an adequate standard of living, as expressed in Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that each person is entitled to economic, social, and cultural entitlements as a member of society. Human development must be realized through national effort, but government plans and policies often ignore those who should benefit from them. Thus it is necessary to ground the legitimacy of plans and projects in the active role of development subjects. Without adequate living standards, human life cannot flourish, but an arbitrary imposition of change denies human beings the condition of being free agents.

Science and technology, whatever their relation to development, should be included in the process of making human beings actors instead of passive recipients. In addition to taking into consideration local knowledge, scientific theories must be relevant in the solution of the problems of the dispossessed. An economic approach that fails to appreciate the importance of unemployment and asymmetrical relations in trade is morally defective. An economics of development able to explain the difference between developed and developing regions of the world is needed. But, in addition, an economics for development must be created. The same is true for other social sciences, especially psychology and anthropology. Also, obviously, the resources of natural science should be harnessed in the effort to increase productivity and reduce poverty.

A second stage in the move from passive recipient to actor concerns the formulation of development plans and projects. Local knowledge, techniques, and technologies are usually more efficient and appropriate than imported ones, a point often made in Latin American fiction, for example in Jorge Amado's novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1974). Local values embedded in cultural practices must respectfully be taken into account; mere lip service to those values, which is typical of political and social manipulation, should be condemned. When respect for a culture and its values is genuine, development plans are not arbitrary but are the outcome of consideration of the aspirations and desires of those who will be affected. Values that are deeply ingrained in cultures may be inimical to development and thus pose a challenge to development ethics. An ethics that includes not only values but also duties and obligations may counter antidevelopment sentiment.

However it is not enough for people to realize themselves as actors in development. Even when a project is rooted in local values and is the result of negotiation among individuals and groups, it may be morally indefensible or technically defective. Democracy guarantees public participation, but this in turn does not insure a morally correct result. Hence the interplay between insiders and outsiders in development is important, a point often made by Crocker.

Insiders are in a good position to incorporate local values into the process, whereas outsiders are not influenced by such values when assessing the rights and wrongs of plans and projects. Local experiences may be relevant but limited; outside expertise may be less relevant but wider in scope. For a fruitful collaboration to occur, insiders and outsiders must share some basic values and be committed to similar goals in connection with the improvement of human conditions. Thus development ethics can be conceived as a dialogue among cultures aimed at sharing valuable experiences in the struggle to overcome obstacles in the path of free social agents.

LUIS CAMACHO

SEE ALSO Alternative Technology;Bhutan;Change and Development;Colonialism and Postcolonialism;Mining;Progress;Sustainability and Sustainable Development.

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