Development As Ethics: The Principle - I

In this article, I introduce the fundamental argument which permeates the series you are reading: that economic development is ethics—and further, that this direct equivalence is profoundly instructive to policy.

            The Point of Economies.

There is a deceptively simple question at the heart of development ethics—but it is one of unbounded importance. That question is: what is an economy is for? Naturally—as any schoolboy could tell you—economies exist as things policymakers ought to care deeply about because their health is an abstractive synonym for the health of the attitudes, institutions, regulations, political and social norms that allocate our resources efficiently. This means, of course, that what “economy” is actually a synonym for is: resource allocation for social ends. To put this point another way, if economies exist to serve us, then—as a collective project—they exist to promote our collective welfare.

As any free-market theorist (who are often rather rudely accused of decoupling economic theory from social promotion in principle) will tell you: “the reason economic activity represents the sum total of our industriousness, resourcefulness, imagination, and aspiration is that we engage in economic activity to improve our circumstances, and the circumstances of those we care about”. At the other end of the spectrum, a neo-Marxist economist will put it brusquely and say: “if an economic activity is not directly in the interest of society as a collective, then bin it and try again”. Irrespective of the particular flavour of economics one is sympathetic to, all agree that its ultimate ends are human ends. Naturally, the simplicity with which I have staked out these positions belies the fact that between them is a mire of debate surrounding entitlement, equity, and apportionment. The reasons for this are many—they need not concern us here—what is important is that it emphatically is possible to evaluate economic policy from first principles. In other words, assuming we agree that promoting human wellbeing and dignity is the essential function of collaborative social infrastructure (of which the economy is a part), then we can make ethical claims about the usefulness of any given economic policy. Nowhere is this a more appropriate practise than for policies of economic development.

            Paternalism in Policy.

We have so far arrived at the position that development economics is about developing economies, which in turn denotes: collaborating to develop human ends. Implicit in this, on the grounds humans emphatically dislike being told how to live by others, is participation in that process. As such, in recent decades, one of the chief criticisms levelled by development ethicists at paternalistic development policy has been that: the autonomy of the people on the receiving end of development interventions often isn’t a priority because the paternalistic orthodoxy doesn’t trust those people to make sensible decisions for themselves and for their communities.

Substantively paternalistic policymaking attitudes still permeate a great deal of contemporary economic policy within the so-called ‘developed West’. An intellectual culture of elitism, intermingled with some questionable generalisations about what can be deduced from behavioural economics, tempered in a bucket of unabashed suspicion that people don’t know what’s good for them has habitually yielded policies which ‘see’ citizens as irrational, obstinate, and mercurial. Little wonder, then, that alienated voters are increasingly voicing their disgust at such paternalism by casting ‘disaffection votes’ (Schulte-Cloos & Leininger, 2022; Maher et al., 2018; Dassonneville & Lewis-Beck, 2017).

I don’t think anyone would find it objectionable for me to assert that people just don’t like being disrespected. They hate being ignored, they detest the erosion of their dignity, and they’re thoroughly peeved when they notice that the policies that they elect governments to formulate treat their lived experience as an afterthought. This, of course, is a sentiment most keenly felt within the political culture which underpins development policy. Rigorous ethical standards in that policymaking process are not only demanded on basic humanitarian grounds, the empowerment they safeguard also largely determines the ultimate success or failure of the resultant policy (Wuepper & Lybbert, 2017; Albuquerque, Santos, & Da Silva, 2016; Duflo & NBER, 2011). It simply is not sufficient to presume on behalf of the transiently powerless since it is they who will ultimately accept or reject the revitalised socioeconomic arrangement that is being developed in their name.

            Development as Ethics.

At the outset of this article, I made a (perhaps puzzling) assertion: development, in an absolutely literal sense, is ethics. This is very different from claiming that there is inherently moral content to be found within development policy (though that is certainly true). It is also very different from suggesting that ethical standards ought to govern the kind of policymaking that we do. My view is a little different, however. I argue that there’s something distinct about the logical structure and practise of development that makes it directly equivalent to ethics. In the following articles within this series, I proceed to unpack what I mean by this. The thought I will leave you with for now, however, is that there is a distinction to be made between moral and ethical claims. A moral claim is what is known to philosophers as a ‘value judgement’; the subjectively evaluative character of which effectively precludes good policy from being founded upon moral claims. This might seem surprising, especially given most of us treat ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ as interchangeable terms and concepts. However, what ethics is really all about establishing fair and harmonious ‘rules of the game’, it is (to a liberal) about ensuring we can all go on valuing what we choose to value, without disadvantaging anyone else in the process. As such, ethics empathically is development. My argument in full—as I develop it within this series of articles—is not that development obliges oversight to engender good ethical judgement—but rather that good development is exactly good ethical judgement. Development and ethics are one and the same exercise.

The title of this publication is: “development as ethics” – rather than “the ethics of development” or something to that effect. In this article, I will introduce the fundamental argument which permeates the series you are reading: that development is ethics—and further, that this direct equivalence is profoundly instructive to policy. Throughout this series I unravel the types of ethical claims that development ethicists rely upon, using their logical structure and implications to help make my subsumptive case. To give a better sense of where my own arguments fit in and how they function, this article begins by engaging with two ‘objects of interest’ for development ethicists: ‘Structural Adjustment Packages’ and ‘Human Development’. These are two starkly contrasting ‘development paradigms’ which have greatly encouraged development ethics to mature into its own distinct way of looking at the world, with its own claims about what we ought to do to help make that world a better place.

SAPs: Low-Hanging Fruit.

A particularly notorious example of a controversial development paradigm—and thus a rather easy target for development ethicists—is that of ‘Structural Adjustment Packages’ (SAPs). In effect, SAPs are (or rather were) conditional financial assistance programmes. SAPs typically took the basic form of a series of large loans and were extended to countries who found themselves in severe economic distress. Under the terms of these arrangements, embattled nations would receive large cash injections from the so-called ‘Bretton Woods’ institutions—the IMF and World Bank—on the condition that those institutions be allowed to make sweeping changes to the fundamental structure of those economies. These structural changes were precisely that: structural. They were concerned with the broad political, regulatory, and administrative factors that those Bretton Woods institutions deemed vital to economic stability and, in the medium-to-long run, growth. They engender a top-down, exogenously imposed, and—it must be said—rather paternalistic approach to development that dominated the development orthodoxy from approximately the early ‘80s right up until the late 00’s.

Owing to a very long, rather complex, and altogether shameful history of mercantilism, extractive colonialism, and flagrant racial discrimination—dynamics I regrettably do not here have to scope to discuss—the states who typically found themselves in need of SAP support were, of course, typically not ‘Western’ ones. Needless to say, this fact represented an especially expedient target for SAP’s critics who were only too happy to chuck their condemnation squarely in the face of a neo-colonial “we’re not poor so we know best” attitude they took SAPs to embody. As such, the critical argument from the development ethicist has essentially been some version of the following: “there’s a significant power imbalance, and you (the powerful Western states and financial institutions proselytising SAPs) are abusing that power imbalance in order to make the world in your own image; that’s morally indefensible, so don’t do that”.

Another, rather more systematic criticism of SAPs is that they privilege the organisation of an economy, rather than the welfare of the people who comprise that economy. When top-line issues—such as regulation or trade policy—take precedence, the strong tendency is to do so at the expense of social development. This is because the logic of the SAP, at its most fundamental level, is that: an ailing economy got itself into trouble in the first place precisely because it failed to allow the market to secure the conditions thought to be required for social development to occur in the ‘right sort of way’. To put this idea into the nomenclature: “that economy is insufficiently liberalised!”. The Bretton Woods ethos placed the greatest premium on economic policies which encouraged the market to allocate capital to socially beneficial ends. The social harms of SAPs thus thematically arose from an inability and unwillingness to adequately transition the socio-economic infrastructure that is required to insulate the welfare of its citizens from the prior, “problematic”, paradigm, and into the new and improved one. And so, the argument from the development ethicist is once again ultimately rather simple: “there’s a reckless disregard for the underlaying reason a society ought to care about their economic performance in the first place: to ensure its people can enjoy a life of meaning, opportunity, and contribution. SAPs erode a polity’s connection to that underlaying reason, so don’t do that!”

            What’s the Point of an Economy?

The whistle-stop tour of SAP-related grievances has led us to an all-important juncture: the question of what an economy is for. Naturally—as any schoolboy could tell you—economies exist as things policymakers ought to care deeply about because their health is an abstractive synonym for the health of the attitudes, institutions, regulations, political and social norms that allocate our resources efficiently. This means, of course, that what “economy” is actually a synonym for is: resource allocation for social ends. The socially optimum outcomes than an economy exists to serve is precisely that which sustains economic activity. As any free-market theorist (who are often rather rudely accused of decoupling economic theory from social promotion in principle) will tell you: “the reason economic activity represents the sum total of our industriousness, resourcefulness, imagination, and aspiration is that we engage in economic activity to improve our circumstances, and the circumstances of those we care about”. Here then, is the point: an economy ought to do us good. That is the only reason to care about its health. In abstraction from its social ends, an economy simply evaporates (presumably into meaningless corporate new-speak, social media campaigns that exist entirely to irk us, and the endless consumption of widgets do nothing but enfeeble our self-esteem). 

If economies exist to serve us, then—as a collective project—they exist to promote our collective welfare. In practise of course, the question of who the “us” are precisely and the ensuing debates surrounding entitlement, equity, and apportionment dominates our collective understanding of the subject of economics. The reasons for this are many—they need not concern us here—what is important is that it emphatically is possible to evaluate economic policy from first principles. In other words, assuming we agree that promoting human wellbeing and dignity is the essential function of collaborative social infrastructure (of which the economy is a part), then we can make ethical claims about the usefulness of any given economic policy. Nowhere is this a more appropriate practise than for policies of economic development. Let’s now take a look at what you get when you keep humans front-and-centre within the development process.

Human Development.

To say that Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen revolutionised our understanding of development theory would be a terrific understatement. After witnessing first-hand the unmitigated travesty that was the 1943 Bengal famine as a boy, Sen devoted his life to building a paradigm that would ultimately grow up to become “Human Development” (HD). On this theory, the agency and empowerment of the individuals to whom policy interventions pertain is the both the goal and strategy of development (Sen, 1999). Sen places front-and-centre the dignity and autonomy of human beings. In doing so, he makes an exceptionally compelling case that the best way to affect positive socio-economic change is to empower people to do it themselves. After all, are they not the only agents with a complete understanding of what they want? Are they not the agents most sincerely motivated to bring about positive change for themselves, their families, and their communities? I use the term ‘agent’ here as this is ultimately how HD sees individuals—it is thus a profoundly liberal theory—and treats the liberty of human beings to ‘do and be’ as sacrosanct.

As one would expect, there is a great deal of nuance to HD, not least because the kind of liberal theory that it is built upon is a pluralistic one: people are to be empowered to live the kind of life they want to lead based on what they value and have reason to value. Naturally, the resulting incompatibility in ways-of-life, the exact character, function, and extent of the “substantive freedoms” that people ought to be afforded, and so forth all pose substantial theoretical challenges. These and other challenges have attracted a great deal of attention over the years, but it is safe to say that—while not all is conclusively resolved—those challenges no longer pose existential threats to the paradigm. The essential contribution that HD makes to development ethics is that it not only emphasises, but practically whacks one over the head with the realisation that development is an exercise in developing people, not abstractions of the things people are thought to do and demand.

            Conclusions: Development Ethics & Policymaking.

It might come as something of a surprise that, given the centuries-old Western obsession with personal liberties, HD’s approach to development took as long as it did to articulate. To be sure, there are a laundry-list of reasons why ultimately illiberal paradigms, such as SAPs, have managed to cling on like a dog poo on the sole of a tennis shoe. In the interest of brevity, I’ll summarise this rather bluntly: the freedom of the people on the receiving end of development interventions simply wasn’t a priority because the structuralist orthodoxy didn’t trust those people to make sensible decisions for themselves and for their communities. As intensely paternalistic—and indeed prejudiced—as this worldview is, we ought not forget that such a mindset still transfuses itself into a great deal of contemporary economic policy within the so-called ‘developed West’. An intellectual culture of elitism, intermingled with some questionable generalisations about what can be deduced from behavioural economics, tempered in a bucket of unabashed suspicion that people don’t know what’s good for them has habitually yielded policies which ‘see’ citizens as irrational, obstinate, and mercurial. Little wonder, then, that alienated voters are increasingly voicing their disgust at such paternalism by casting ‘disaffection votes’ (Schulte-Cloos & Leininger, 2022; Maher et al., 2018; Dassonneville & Lewis-Beck, 2017).

I don’t think anyone would find it objectionable for me to assert that people just don’t like being disrespected. They hate being ignored, they detest the erosion of their dignity, and they’re thoroughly peeved when they notice that the policies that they elect governments to formulate treat their lived experience as an afterthought. This, of course, is a sentiment most keenly felt within the political culture which underpins development policy. Rigorous ethical standards in that policymaking process are not only demanded on basic humanitarian grounds, the empowerment they safeguard also largely determines the ultimate success or failure of the resultant policy (Wuepper & Lybbert, 2017; Albuquerque, Santos, & Da Silva, 2016; Duflo & NBER, 2011). It simply is not sufficient to presume on behalf of the transiently powerless since it is they who will ultimately accept or reject the revitalised socioeconomic arrangement that is being developed in their name.

At the outset of this article, I made a (perhaps puzzling) assertion: development, in an absolutely literal sense, is ethics. This is very different from claiming that there is inherently moral content to be found within development policy (though that is certainly true). It is also very different from suggesting that ethical standards ought to govern the kind of policymaking that we do. Both of those positions are, unsurprisingly, held by development ethicists other than myself, but my view is that there’s something rather different about the logical structure and practise of development that makes it directly equivalent to ethics. In the following articles within this series, I proceed to unpack what I mean by this. The thought I will leave you with for now, however, is that there is a distinction to be made between moral and ethical claims. A moral claim is what is known to philosophers as a ‘value judgement’; the subjectively evaluative character of which effectively precludes good policy from being founded upon moral claims. This might seem surprising, especially given most of us treat ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ as interchangeable terms and concepts. However, what ethics is really all about establishing fair and harmonious ‘rules of the game’, it is (to a liberal) about ensuring we can all go on valuing what we choose to value, without disadvantaging anyone else in the process. As such, ethics empathically is development. My argument in full—as I develop it within this series of articles—is not that development obliges oversight to engender good ethical judgement—but rather that good development is exactly good ethical judgement. Development and ethics are one and the same exercise.

The title of this publication is: “development as ethics” – rather than ‘the ethics of development’ or something to that effect. In this article, I will introduce the fundamental argument which permeates the series you are reading: that development is ethics—and further, that this direct equivalence is profoundly instructive to policy. Before that task can be tackled head-on, however, what is required is a way to distinguish my own conception from what is broadly called “development ethics” elsewhere. To that end, as it seems to me, the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is as good a place as any to start; it defines the concept as an: “ethical reflection on the ends and means of socioeconomic change…[it is a framework which argues that] the process of development should be reconceived as beneficial change” (Crocker, 1998). Accordingly, we can see from this that development ethics makes two types of claims. The first claim is of an ‘evaluative’ sort; the second claim is a ‘normative’ one. Throughout this series I will unravel those claim-types, using their logical structure and implications to help make my subsumptive case. 

The first steps along that rather long and winding road are taken in this article. In it, I sketch out the position of the development ethicist as a species of moral philosopher, briefly demonstrating the way in which such ethicists parse the claims that they make of historical or contemporary development policy. Along the way, we encounter a little of the broad intellectual context within which those claims can be found. I will not offer a complete account—as such a task would take us far beyond scope—rather, I will draw upon two particularly well-known applications. These are development paradigms which have greatly helped development ethics to mature into its own distinct way of looking at the world, with its own claims about what we ought to do to help make that world a better place.

            SAPs: Low-Hanging Fruit.  

There are, to be sure, an abundance of arguments that ethicists have produced which variously criticise the status quo, and/or offer alternative approaches to socioeconomic change. One particularly notorious example of a controversial development paradigm—and thus a rather easy target for those ethicists—is that of ‘Structural Adjustment Packages’ (SAPs). In effect, SAPs are (or rather were) conditional financial assistance programmes. SAPs typically took the basic form of a series of large loans and were extended to countries who found themselves in severe fiscal and/or monetary distress. Under the terms of these arrangements, embattled nations would receive large cash injections from the so-called ‘Bretton Woods’ institutions—the IMF and World Bank—on the condition that those institutions be allowed to make sweeping changes to the fundamental structure of those economies. These structural changes were precisely that: structural. They were concerned with the broad political, regulatory, and administrative factors that those Bretton Woods institutions deemed vital to economic stability and, in the medium-to-long run, growth. During the heyday the SAP (roughly from the mid ‘80s to the ’09 crisis), the top-down, exogenously imposed, and—it must be said—rather paternalistic approach to development dominated thinking amongst Western economists and institution theorists.

Owing to a very long, rather complex, and altogether shameful history of mercantilism, extractive colonialism, and flagrant racial discrimination—dynamics I regrettably do not here have to scope to discuss—the states who typically found themselves in need of SAP support were, of course, typically not ‘Western’ ones. Needless to say, this fact represented a especially expedient target for SAP’s detractors who were only too happy to chuck their condemnation squarely in the face of a neo-colonial “we’re not poor so we know best” attitude they took SAPs to embody. Specific formulations varied—with some taking issue with the operative Bretton Woods institutions themselves (and their backers), others directed their disgust at neo-liberalism in the abstract—yet the common tenor of their critique was rather simple: “there’s a significant power imbalance, and you (the powerful Western states and financial institutions proselytising SAPs) are abusing that power imbalance in order to make the world in your own image; that’s morally indefensible, so don’t do that”. As we can see, there’s an evaluation, and a normative prescription.

SAPs have been criticised along other—arguably even more damming—lines also. Take, for example, Ghana’s 1983 SAP. The programme was initially touted as a resounding success—resulting in reduced inflation, consistent and tangible GDP growth, a (comparatively) reliable budget surplus, and revived export earnings; however, this success deceives (Kraus, 1991; Odutayo, 2015). While the structural performance of Ghana’s economy was undeniably resuscitated, the programme has profoundly undermined the welfare and economic mobility of Ghana’s citizens (Konadu-Agyemang, 2000; Drafor et al., 2000). This is because SAPs privilege the organisation of an economy, rather than the welfare of the people who comprise that economy. When top-line issues—such as regulation or trade policy—take precedence, the strong tendency is to do so at the expense of social development. This is simultaneously accidental and quite intentional.

Why? Because the logic of SAPs, at their most fundamental level, is that an ailing economy got itself into trouble in the first place precisely because it failed to allow the market to secure the conditions thought to be required for social development to occur in the ‘right sort of way’. Which is to say: that economy was thought to be insufficiently liberalised. The Bretton Woods ethos placed the greatest premium on economic policies which encouraged the market to allocate capital to socially beneficial ends. The social harms of SAPs for nations like Ghana arose from an inability and unwillingness to adequately transition the socio-economic infrastructure that is required to insulate the welfare of its citizens from the prior, “problematic”, paradigm, and into the new and improved one. And so, the argument from the development ethicist is once again ultimately rather simple: “there’s a reckless disregard for the underlaying reason a society ought to care about their economic performance in the first place: to ensure its people can enjoy a life of meaning, opportunity, and contribution. SAPs erode a polity’s connection to that underlaying reason, so don’t do that”. Once again: evaluation, prescription.

            What’s the Point of an Economy?

 The whistle-stop tour of SAP-related grievances has led us to an all-important juncture: the question of what an economy is for. Naturally—as any schoolboy could tell you—economies exist as things policymakers ought to care deeply about because their health is an abstractive synonym for the health of the attitudes, institutions, regulations, political and social norms that allocate our resources efficiently. Rarely, however, do we see economic policies that are expressly appealing to the socially optimum outcomes they are intended to serve. Instead, what we tend to see is a culture of ideological association: presenting a certain policy as “good” because it is good for a certain way of seeing the world. The underlaying point of capital allocation is seldom, if ever, expressly invoked. By the same token, treating economic activity as a decadent afterthought, a mere distraction from the glorious world of ideals (I’m looking at you, USSR), just doesn’t do anyone any good either. But therein is the point: an economy ought to do us good. In practise, who the “us” are and debate about what degree of entitlement, equity, and apportionment is justified dominates our collective understanding of the subject of economics. The reasons for this are many—they need not concern us here— what is important is that it emphatically is possible to evaluate economic policy from first principles. In other words, assuming we agree that promoting human wellbeing and dignity is the essential function of collaborative social infrastructure (of which the economy is a part), then we can make moral claims about the usefulness of any given economic policy. Nowhere is this a more appropriate practise than for policies of economic development.

Human Development.

I have thus-far danced around the two kinds of claims that development ethics is inclined to make: ‘evaluative’ and ‘normative/prescriptive’. In order to make the distinction between those claim-types clearer—and to better situate development economics within ethics—the next task for you and I is to bring into focus the work of Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen.

To say that Sen revolutionised our understanding of development theory would be a terrific understatement. After witnessing first-hand the unmitigated travesty that was the 1943 Bengal famine as a boy, Sen devoted his life to building a paradigm that would ultimately grow up to become “Human Development” (HD). On this theory, the agency and empowerment of the individuals to whom policy interventions pertain is the both the goal and strategy of development. As Sen famously put it: “freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means” (Sen, 1999). The pluralisation of freedoms is a critical aspect of Sens theory, though discussing that will have to remain a topic for another day. What is most salient to the matter at hand is that Sen places front-and-centre the dignity and autonomy of human beings. In doing so, he makes an exceptionally compelling case that the best way to affect positive socio-economic change is to empower people to do it themselves. After all, are they not the only agents with a complete understanding of what they want? Are they not the agents most sincerely motivated to bring about positive change for themselves, their families, and their communities? I use the term ‘agent’ here as this is ultimately how HD sees individuals—it is thus a profoundly liberal theory—and treats the liberty of human beings to ‘do and be’ as sacrosanct.

HD is as much a theory of ethics in itself as it is a branch of development economics. It would not, however, be correct to conclude that—as a species of Berlinian pluralistic political liberalism (Berlin, 2002)—HD simply understands freedom in the abstract as the ‘good stuff’ then moves on to the practicalities of promoting that. Key to understanding Sen’s theory and the seismic impact it’s had upon the disciplines of philosophy and economics, is the role of responsibility. On Sen’s view, there is a moral and rational basis for the obligation that society (and its policymakers) has to promote the agency of the individual. To Sen, individual responsibility (to lead a certain kind of life) is something which is sustained by the expansion and protection of freedom as a social enterprise. Neither the social duty to promote general welfare, nor any individual responsibility for one’s actions and one’s wellbeing, can endure in isolation; for, “without the [socially afforded] substantive freedom and capability to do something, a person cannot be responsible for doing it” (Sen, 2009, p.158). In other words, individual responsibility for one’s choices (the cornerstone of any collective arrangement) is contingent upon society affording the necessary conditions for that individual responsibility. If those conditions are not present, a person is not free. They cannot, in a meaningful sense, be held to account for behaviour that runs counter to the common good. In short: promoting personal liberties is a communal task.

As we have seen, HD simultaneously makes both evaluative and normative (prescriptive) claims. The evaluative: it’s neither fair nor logically coherent to cut personal liberties (thus social responsibility) out of the picture. The normative: we ought to empower people to chart a course for their own economic development. Taken together, the essential contribution that HD makes to development ethics is that it not only emphasises, but practically whacks one over the head with the realisation that development must regard people themselves, not abstractions of the things people are thought to do and demand.

            Conclusions: Development Ethics & Policymaking.

It might come as something of a surprise that, given the centuries-old Western obsession with personal liberties, HD’s approach to development took as long as it did to articulate. To be sure, there are a laundry-list of reasons why SAPs and its ilk have dominated antecedent thinking, but in the interest of brevity I will make a rather blunt claim: the freedom of the people on the receiving end of development interventions simply wasn’t a priority because the structuralist orthodoxy didn’t trust those people to make sensible decisions for themselves and for their communities. As intensely paternalistic—and indeed prejudiced—as this worldview is, we ought not forget that such a mindset still transfuses itself into a great deal of contemporary economic policy within the so-called ‘developed West’. An intellectual culture of elitism, intermingled with some questionable generalisations about what can be deduced from behavioural economics, tempered in a bucket of unabashed suspicion that people don’t know what’s good for them has habitually yielded policies which ‘see’ citizens as irrational, obstinate, and mercurial. Little wonder, then, that alienated voters are increasingly voicing their disgust at such paternalism by casting ‘disaffection votes’ (Schulte-Cloos & Leininger, 2022; Maher et al., 2018; Dassonneville & Lewis-Beck, 2017).

I don’t think anyone would find it objectionable for me to assert that people just don’t like being disrespected. They hate being ignored, they detest the erosion of their dignity, and they’re thoroughly peeved when they notice that the policies they elect governments to formulate treat their lived experience as an afterthought. This, of course, is a sentiment most keenly felt within the political culture which underpins development policy. Rigorous ethical standards in that policymaking process are not only demanded on basic humanitarian grounds, the empowerment they safeguard also largely determines the ultimate success or failure of the resultant policy (Wuepper & Lybbert, 2017; Albuquerque, Santos, & Da Silva, 2016; Duflo & NBER, 2011). It simply is not sufficient to presume on behalf of the transiently powerless since it is they who will ultimately accept or reject the revitalised socioeconomic arrangement that is being developed in their name.

Throughout this article I have drizzled, here and there, the notion of evaluative and normative claims-types. While a subsequent article will tackle those concepts head on, the relevance of their inclusion is that they demonstrate that sound judgements about what development is and how it ought to be done is, in an absolutely literal sense, ethics. While generally treated as interchange concepts by policymakers, ethics is of course, not actually the same thing as morality. The logical structure of moral claims are profoundly different to those of ethical claims (which is the subject of another forthcoming article). Suffice it to say for our purposes here, that the role played by ‘value judgements’—subjective, moralised assessments about what I, the assessor, value—is radically limited when applied to public policy. By contrast, ethics is all about establishing fair and harmonious ‘rules of the game’, it is (to a liberal) about ensuring we can all go on valuing what we choose to value, without disadvantaging anyone else in the process. As such, ethics empathically is development. My argument in full—as I develop it within this series of articles—is not that development obliges oversight to engender good ethical judgement—but rather that development is exactly the operationalisation of good ethical judgement.