A New Ethics Of Development

New Ethics Of Development

Denis Goulet examines alternatives to one-eyed views of the good life, the just society, and out relationship with nature.

A pioneer in the study of development ethics, Denis Goulet began exploring this new inter-disciplinary realm in 1956. For ten years he served apprenticeships in France, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Brazil to become familiar with the sociology and anthropology of underdevelopment. He has lived among nomadic tribesmen in the Sahara; worked as a factory hand and laborer in the United States, France, and Spain; served on development planning teams for national governments; and studied social change planning at universities and research institutes. He presently held concurrent appointments in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Department of Economics, and the Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Aurora: I would like to take you back a few years and start with something you wrote in the late l960s. You suggested much development in the Third World should more accurately be recognized as antidevelopment. Could you explain what you meant by antidevelopment and whether that claim still holds true today?

Goulet: Most development professionals simply talk about development in purely descriptive terms. But I think it’s impossible to talk about it except in normative terms, because development at least implies a view of a better life or a better society or some kind of improvement.

The whole point of development has been a particular kind of social engineering to create economic improvement, perhaps even institutional modernization and greater technological efficiency. Usually development practitioners or theorists simply assume that these goals are given. When they talk about development, particularly when they make comparisons between countries or different so-called levels of development, they basically speak of it descriptively. In other words, they describe a certain quantitative level of performance, a certain gross national product, a certain investment ratio, a certain level of trading activity, a certain structure of employment. In contrast, I harken back to a normative view of development as being a particular definition of the good life, a particular image of the just society, and a particular normative stance on what ought to be the posture of human beings towards nature. Much of what is called development in purely quantitative terms, for example, high industrial output or high level of GNP, may turn out not to be development at all in this qualitative and normative sense because it may be achieved in a mode that enhances social injustice and unacceptable social inequalities, or in ways that are far too destructive of cultural values, local institutions, and networks of solidarity.

Aurora: Could you give us a sense of the substance of this essentially normative view of development?

Goulet: Simply to reduce development to a high level of consumption or high level of production is not sufficient. Some content must be given to the view of the good life, of the better life, of the humanly fulfilled or realized life and this not in a purely individual way, but in some setting in which society’s institutions foster, or at least do not impede it. Society’s institutions should take into consideration the totality of human dimension, recalling that the human being is not just a producer, a consumer, a voter, or a technological operator but that persons also have spiritual, cultural, and societal dimensions.

That’s the idea I was trying to highlight in speaking of much development descriptively as being antidevelopment when judged normatively in the light of these larger values.

Aurora: Many progressive development workers would agree with this antidevelopment critique, but most would now argue that more positive approaches have improved upon the simplistic and destructive growth model that was found in modernization theory. Do you find this newer thinking about development, say basic human needs theory, more successfully addresses your call for an ethics of development, or does it still propose a limited sense of the better life?

Goulet: In my recent study of alternative development strategies in Mexico, I classified four basic paradigms of development. The first is a growth paradigm. The second is a slightly revised corrective of the first, namely, growth with redistribution. The third model is not just a corrective of the first, but an attempt to shift the focus of the goals of development decision making and development actions. Here, development actions take the form of projects with specific policies designed to meet basic human needs, and it may very well be that these can be met without aggregate quantitative economic growth.

So the emphasis is quite different from simply assuming that growth is the objective. The activities which promote growth are chosen with a view to assuring some minimally equitable distribution. The attention shifts quite centrally. Whether you grow or not, you must meet basic human needs. Now clearly in many preindustrial societies, basic human needs were met with no quantitative economic growth—what modern economists call steady state growth or a steady state economy. It wasn’t a highly monetized economy, so the basic human needs of people were met in a relatively stable way. I’m simply saying, without prejudice to either growth or nongrowth, that the attention of planners and decision makers—and the implementers of the development projects and programs—centres on economic activity which satisfies the basic needs of all. That is different from redistribution with growth, even though they may actually lead to similar policies because the whole way of thinking and priorizing is shifted to a different centre. Now, all of those three paradigms have in common a rather uncritical acceptance that the goals of development are threefold: economic betterment, institutional modernization, and maximum technological efficiency. I’m saying that if development decision making really poses the question, “What exactly is the good life and the just society and the proper stance towards nature?” then very different answers will be given by people with different belief systems, or philosophies of life, or cultural explanations of the meaning of life and death.

Aurora: Could you give us an example of your fourth approach to development?

Goulet: This fourth model is what I call development from tradition which simply says we don’t automatically assume that true human development consists of economic growth, even economic growth redistributed in a reasonably just way or even economic activity pursued with a view to satisfying the material basic human needs.

I develop this in my study of the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. Here we see a living community which is very conscious of having a rich philosophy of life. It defines human needs more broadly as cultural needs, affective needs, social needs, spiritual needs, and needs of expression. Sarvodaya has reversed the equation and said, “Let us look at modern patterns of human happiness and see if there is something in them which can contribute to our notion of what the good life is.” Basically, the good life for Sarvodaya is the virtuous and harmonious life that prepares individuals for nirvana. In the “development from tradition” approach you don’t necessarily reject the goals of the first three approaches; however, you treat these instrumentally. People who define development this way view modern technology or modern rationality systems or the primacy given to improving consumption or physical comfort in a radically different way from those who assume that these things are unconditionally good in themselves and not subject to the scrutiny of another set of values.

Aurora: The implication is that people could then reject the flashiest, the most advanced technology because it intrudes on their values of reciprocity and community.

Goulet: Precisely. For example, in one of my case studies, I write about two extremely poor and vulnerable Quechua communities living in the highlands north of Cochabamba in Bolivia. Like many people in poor rural areas, they were very, very poor in resources. There was almost no water, and they lived off a single staple cereal or grain, some onions, and tomatoes. There were no jobs, and these villages were losing most of their young, able-bodied people to the city. The youngsters were being assimilated into the impersonal, larger society that spoke Spanish and which was highly individualistic and did not place a premium on community solidarity the way their extended Quechua family did.

People started worrying that their culture and their identity as a group were being destroyed. So they said, “We’ve got to find a new way to get economic resources that will hold our young people here and make it attractive, or at least tolerable, for them to stay.” They clearly understood that the way to cultural survival was to ensure economic survival. But they didn’t want to simply ensure economic survival by borrowing the standard monetary or commercial approach. They decided to subordinate economics to their cultural goals.

With the help of one of their former residents—an agronomist who had been exposed to other cultures—they decided that they could make extra money by finding a marketable outlet for their traditional crafts of weaving and ceramics. Moreover, these earnings would come in a way that would not destroy their social structure or their local institutions. In short, they formed co-operatives which were very congenial with their traditional spirit of helping each other and trying to look for gains for everybody and not just for some individuals.

In theoretical terms, one could refer to Albert Hirschman’s distinction between what he calls an “ego focused” image of change or a “group focused” image of change. Hirschman judges that many traditional societies resist too ego focused an image of change because it tends disproportionately to betray their values of community solidarity.

To get back to the Quechua example, they wanted a co-operative that would not simply work like a company to realise profit. Each village had about two hundred families, and organizers of the co-operative invited all two hundred families to become members. Only about forty or fifty chose to join however, because they were skeptical that this scheme would really work.

But when they realised their first profit, this co-operative did not simply distribute it in the form of dividends to the forty members and then reinvest another part. The co-operative instead split up the profits in two hundred shares for each of the families in order to convey the message loudly and clearly that it was not operating as a conventional, modern business unit, a profit making enterprise. Rather, this co-operative offered a particular kind of economic activity that would revitalize their ancient Quechua values of mutual help. Indeed, members of the co-operative even rejected the offer of a battery-powered kiln for the ceramics, because a battery could only be run by one or two specially trained people and exclude others. Even though the total economic output would be the same, it would create a class of a few rewarded individuals and a small class of beneficiaries.

These are important examples of how to treat economics and technology instrumentally. The villagers of Thiataco and Hupycui did not oppose adopting new technology, but they did understand that technology should serve other values. So they attached higher importance to maintaining their cultural identity and their attachment to the place than to maximizing profit.

Aurora: This poses for me the question of the amount of unlearning that experts in developed countries have to go through. You call them at one point “one-eyed giants.”

Goulet: Well, it’s not only experts from outside countries. Most of the technocrats, bureaucrats, or the programme directors, even from the country itself, come from the capital city or from a bureaucratic organization. They show very little sympathy for or responsiveness to the felt needs and perceptions of the people they profess to help. So in a sense, these experts are just as much outsiders as somebody who is in fact a foreign technical expert.

Technical experts are often one-eyed giants because they come convinced that somehow or other they know what is good for people, and they have the answers. Their advice is to use fertilizer or artificial insemination or to mechanise agriculture. Well, sometimes this may in fact be the solution to an immediate material need, such as starvation, inadequate water supplies or rampant disease. But when I say such experts lack the eye of wisdom, I draw from an image in an African poem which asserts that the white man came to colonial Africa as a one-eyed giant. He was a giant in technical and military strength, but he lacked the eye of wisdom, an understanding of the total web of life, of the relationship of individuals to the larger cosmos. One-eyed giants lacked understanding of the people’s relationship to nature and the long-term significance of their interventions in nature.

The imagery of a one-eyed giant suggests that any “superior” technical, diagnostic, or organizational knowledge enjoys only a relative superiority. In order for that relatively superior knowledge to be received, accepted, and assimilated by others, change agents must display what the sociologist Peter Berger calls “cognitive respect” for a people’s reading of their own situation. This means that one must confer some cognitive status to the people’s more informal knowledge, even though it may be based on a different kind of rationality. Their rationality may not be a scientific and technical rationality, which is highly quantitative and very successful in one dimension but is very blind to the larger repercussions. We can see that in ecological controversies. We have in our western industrial societies a very narrow view of efficiency, what Lewis Mumford calls the engineer’s notion of efficiency—just maximizing output while minimizing input. But if we limit our conception of output solely to the physical products produced and do not look at the damage we are causing to nature, we can destroy human values; we can destroy very fragile webs of human solidarity, cultural values, social values, and other institutions. Such behaviour may turn out to be not very efficient or very rational, in a larger, broader understanding of that term.

Aurora: In the real confrontations that take place around development proposals, however, is there not a real disparity of power between those who present the kinds of ethical arguments you make and the power of technocrats and politicians who often reject them out of hand as not being part and parcel of the whole development discussion?

Goulet: Yes! But there is a way to offset that disparity of power. The interested or the affected populace must organize itself and make its voice heard in vital areas of decision making. Not that the disparity of power can be wished away, but it can be progressively and gradually reduced by the successful entry of the affected population into the areas of decision making, either directly or through their representatives.

Aurora: You contrast “doing ethics” with armchair ethical speculation. Could you explain why you feel ethics should be a “means of the means” and how that differs from traditional approaches to doing ethics?

Goulet: Obviously, ethics as a “means of the means” is a strange expression. It’s not immediately clear what it signifies. Ethics, as generally practiced, has done two things. First, it has passed judgement on goals declaring certain goals to be good, virtuous, just, truthful, and ethically acceptable and others less so.

Second, most ethics has tended to separate ends and means. So, they tended very greatly to separate the judgements they issued about goals from the normative judgements or the approval or the condemning judgements they passed on the use of certain means. In contrast, the idea of “means of the means” is that one does not simply make an ethical analysis of the objectives of a developmental strategy and then simply step aside and in a separate exercise look at means and see if they are adjusted or proportionate to the ends.

Ordinarily, the goodness or badness of a means has traditionally been determined primarily by looking at its degree of effectiveness to the ends, which is assumed to be the primary bearer of values. The means are either suitable or not suitable to these ends. Now I’m not saying you eliminate that, but you concentrate much more on passing judgement on the goodness or badness of means, from within the constraints of the means themselves, from within the dynamisms of the means. My assumption is that not only do the ends have value, but the means themselves are also bearers of values, independent of the ends to which they are referred: It’s an existentialist, situational kind of ethics. You have to view the means themselves as a system of value bearers, value promoters, and value destroyers. One conducts a sort of phenomenological peeling away of the value costs, the value benefits, and the value sacrifices entailed in the means themselves.

Let me try to illustrate. Western technology is not just a value neutral thing, but there’s a very powerful bias favouring one particular form of rationality, one conception of efficiency, one approach to power. An examination of this in the mode of means of the means would try to make that manifest, lay that bare. You then might recognise that this particular technological form of rationality is hostile to one’s basic culture and values. This is why the Bolivian potters mentioned earlier rejected the “best” technology and chose technical means that were least disruptive to their community life.

Aurora: I want to ask you a bit about my favourite topic, about ecology, and what you call ecological wisdom. On the one hand we want to preserve nature, but on the other hand we’re faced with the effort to promote social and economic justice. You said this creates a dualism because the two goals flow in different directions. Could you elaborate on that for us?

Goulet: Well, at the level of ideas, environmentalists and ecologists come across to development planners or economic policy makers as people eminently interested in ethical concerns: the survival of the planet, the preservation of biological species diversity, the maintenance of resources that should not irreversibly be depleted. These are all explicit ethical concerns.

On the other hand, the promoters of conventional, mainstream development growth find themselves attacked by people who aren’t critical of their environmental and ecological concerns. Instead, they criticize traditional development because it benefits only five or ten per cent of the people. They say that development, whether capitalist or socialist, has left people far worse off than before. It has concentrated wealth, and it has multiplied inequalities. These opponents also have very ethical concerns centering on concepts of justice and equity.

So we have two ethical streams of protest against the dominant paradigm of maximum economic growth, maximum GNP, and maximum consumption. Both ethical streams of protest have the same enemy, namely a narrow, reductionist or one-eyed giant concept of authentic development. In contrast, true development for the critics consists of the three things I mentioned earlier: an integral view of the humanly good life, a rich and broad conception of the just society, and an adequate conception of the stance towards nature. In their stance toward nature, they recognise that human beings are both part of nature and somehow on top of nature. We humans have the capacity to alter nature by our actions and our intelligence, or our stupidities, in ways that other members of nature don’t seem to be able to. In one sense we’re both immersed in nature and emerge from outside of it.

It is very, very important to discover some kind of nonreductionist, architectonic language or central images to address the ethical concerns of both the environmentalists and the social justice advocates. Somehow, a definition of human freedom and human mastery over nature must enter into the realm of those who say nature must be preserved. Nature must be preserved and conserved not only because it is the matrix in which humans must derive their resources but because it is a value in itself.

Nature is not just an aid or an obstacle to human purposes. There exist larger values than simply attending to human needs. Clearly we need a lot of wisdom, and we need a new approach to negotiating between environmentalists and people who are poor, powerless and marginalized, and who have to extract something from nature, who may even have to destroy some elements of nature in order to survive. At the same time we must ensure that this destruction is not irreversible or it will become catastrophic. Environmentalists can’t just come along and dismiss the concerns for social justice as somehow automatically secondary to environmental concerns. Nor, reciprocally, can we simply allow the actions of those in India or Brazil who might say, “Well you people of the United States and Europe have polluted for 150 years, and you’ve achieved great industrial wealth and consumption. Now it’s our turn. So don’t come and tell us that we can’t destroy the Amazon forests or our elephants or our teaks.”

We need to relativize the claims of absoluteness present in each of these two ethical streams. This cannot be judged in just practical terms. But at the epistemological level we must try to clarify the relationship between human freedom to exercise technological mastery over nature and the self-validating value of nature independent of its utility to human intervention.

Books by Denis Goulet

Incentives to Development: The Key to Equity. New Horizon Press, 1989.

Mexico: Development Strategies for the Future. University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

The Uncertain Promise: Value Conflicts in Technology Transfer. New Horizon Press, 1979.

A New Moral Order: Studies in Development Ethics and Liberation Theology. Orbis, 1974.

The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development. University Press of America, 1971.

An Aurora Update

Denis A. Goulet, professor emeritus of economics and policy studies and William and Dorothy O’Neill Chair in Education for Justice at the University of Notre Dame, died Dec. 26, 2007. He was75 years old.

Article originally published in 1990

Books by Denis Goulet

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