International Development Ethics Association
IDEA member Stephen Esquith together with Fred Gifford are the editors of the forthcoming volume:
CAPABILITIES, POWER, AND INSTITUTIONS Toward a more critical development ethics.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Development economics, political theory, and ethics long carried on their own scholarly dialogues and investigations with almost no interaction among them. Only in the mid-1990s did this situation begin to change, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of an economist, Amartya Sen, and a philosopher who doubled as a classicist and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s
Development as Freedom (1999)
and Nussbaum’s
Women and Human Development (2000)
together signalled the emergence of a powerful new paradigm that is commonly known as the “capabilities approach” to development ethics. Key to this approach is the recognition that citizens must have basic “capabilities” provided most crucially through health care and education if they are to function effectively as agents of economic development. Capabilities can be measured in terms of skills and abilities, opportunities and control over resources, and even moral virtues like the virtue of care and concern for others. The essays in this collection extend, criticize, and reformulate the capabilities approach to better understand the importance of power, especially institutional power.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sabina Alkire. David Barkin, Nigel Dower, Shelley Feldman, Des Gasper, Daniel Little, Asuncion Lera St. Clair, A. Allan Schmid, Paul B. Thompson, and Thanh-Dam Truong.
For further information go to:
http://www.psu.press.org
We are pleased to alert you to the latest ISS working paper 459,
DEVELOPMENT ETHICS THROUGH THE LENSES OF CARING, GENDER, AND HUMAN
SECURITY by Des Gasper, Associate Professor
of Public Policy Management, and Thanh-Dam Truong, Associate Professor
of Women, Gender and Development, at the Institute of Social Studies.
Abstract
Thinking about ethics of development and ‘human development’ must
both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the
content of ‘human’. The paper explores some faces of globalization by
using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction
(psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities
and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to
systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There
now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and
capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and
responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The
discourse of ‘human security’ helps here by better grounding an agenda
of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than
only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language
of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded
too. We examine the potential contributions here of three diverse
bodies of thought: the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of
philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics.
Keywords
Development ethics, Buddhism, care ethics, globalization, human development, human security, migration, vulnerability.
Click here to download the full text of the working paper
You can access the complete list of working papers by clicking here.
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Asuncion St. Clair together with Desmond McNeill have published a book titled, "GLOBAL POVERTY, ETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS (RETHINKING GLOBALIZATIONS). For more information follow the link: