Development As Ethics: The Principle - II

The previous article in this series ended on the idea that economic development and ethics are equivalent undertakings. That is to say, rather than conceptualising development as an activity which demands good ethical judgement, I argue that development and ethics collapse down into one another. This is what is meant by “development as ethics”. The task of this article, then, is to begin unpacking that argument in earnest—it aims to stake out how this equivalence can be possible, especially given the—at some level—rather counter-intuitive nature of my claim. I begin where we left off last time, examining the claim-types that philosophy as a discipline uses to distinguish the moral from the ethical. With this in hand, we can access the argument that development should not entail a series of private value judgements, but rather must be thought of as something which is irreducibly collaborative and pluralistic. Throughout this article, my arguments are intended to promote a very specific interpretation of what ethics actually is (vis-à-vis social policy). That interpretation is that ethics is all about establishing fair and harmonious rules for inter-personal conduct. Before we set out, I need to preface everything that follows by pointing out that the accounts of ethics and morality herein are exceptionally reductive—this is necessitated on the basis philosophers really can’t make their mind up on what these words mean exactly, nor how they fit together; my approach is but one approach and doesn’t pretend for a moment to be meticulous about it.

Distinguishing Claim-Types.

In ventriloquizing development ethicists as a category of, understandably rather incensed, critics of the structuralist development orthodoxy in the previous article, I introduced the notion of ‘claim-types’. To recap, these are ‘evaluative’ and ‘normative’. To evaluate a state of affairs in this context is to make an evaluative judgement about the interpretation you have of a thing, and to make a normative prescription is to say that thing ought to be some particular way. Here, in the service of the task at hand, we must set aside some discomfort around the simplicity of these claim types, except to acknowledge the lurking presence of Hume’s infamous ‘is-ought’ problem. According to which, we should treat with some suspicion prescriptive claims about the way things should be, given they emerge from a judgement about the way that they are, and it’s not terribly clear how to get from A to B on that (Pigden, 2010). The relevance of this is that it is hard to think of undertakings in applied ethics which are more infested with the is-ought fallacy than policymaking seems to be, save perhaps for jurisprudence. For our purposes here however, I think the issue can be largely sidestepped on the basis that the sorts of claims development ethicists make only really pay regard to the ethical implications of a certain policy, thereby relating them in a less troubled sort of way to the ethical prescriptions made as a result. Economists of the usual sort face a substantially more serious charge on that count. Regardless, we’ll proceed as though that’s settled (which pedantic scrutiny would reveal it likely isn’t, but we’re moving on anyway; that’s philosophy folks).

Evaluative and normative claim-types are very much distinct from one another. The former is an assessment about the ethical content of something in line with one’s estimation of the facts; the latter is a prescription about what ought to be done about it. A significant confusion one usually encounters at this stage derives from the variable role that ‘ethical content’ and ‘morals/values’ have to play within both evaluative and normative claims. I will attempt to clear that confusion up right away: while evaluative claims do, to be sure, depend at some level on one’s first principles—they are derivative of those principles in a way that normative claims just aren’t (Willemsen & Reuter, 2021; Tappolet, 2014; Sen, 1983). Evaluating a state of affairs is first and foremost about interpreting accurately those affairs. While interpretation is surely done through the lens of one’s value system at some level, that is in fact an undesirable feature of interpretation which the assessor ideally wants to guard against and/or compensate for. Casual observation would illustrate that most, if not all of us are positively dreadful at doing so, but the point remains: evaluations place the highest premium on the accuracy of the conversation from interpretation to evaluation, as mediated by your evaluative (higher-level cognitive) faculties. Anyone who does not privilege accuracy to the best of their ability is not undertaking evaluation in good faith, and can thus cannot meet the standard good ethical judgement requires.

Once you have an evaluation—say: “this regressive tax is unfair”—the next step is to operationalise it with a resultant normative claim: “let’s redesign the tax”. In the interest of keeping this article on track, I will only consider the normative claims of the sort that stand as a response to the evaluative claim which has preceded it. This is because ‘good ethical judgement’ in policy depends upon the ability of the policymaker/assessor to understand the ‘multifaceted’ nature of what it is they’re judging (wherein, for our purposes here, the standard of ‘good’ is met when a person’s judgement substantively coheres with what ‘ethical conduct’ is most commonly understood to mean). Given the context of this discussion is ethics and social policy, you should read “multifaceted” to mean: affecting or having the potential to affect a diversity of people with their own values, perspectives, desires, and circumstances.

Assuming, then, that a valid evaluation of a multifaceted problem has been reached, the private moral character of the person doing the prescribing begins to play a far more significant role. Normative claims (insofar as they are normative claims of the ethical sort, the only sort I address herein) invoke one’s preference/attitude-determining values and as such are founded directly upon the moral character of the person making that normative prescription (Chrisman, 2018; Turner, 2013). Valid normative claims are thus not founded on (aspirational) ideals of impartiality in anything like the same way as evaluative ones. To say: “I argue that all badgers should wear ties as a matter of national conservation policy” is to ‘should’ both the badgers and the government, with the implementing vehicle of that ‘should’ being conservation policy. For a ‘should claim’ to reflect what I would prefer the world ought to be like (i.e., badgers cutting about in little bow ties), it needs to draw directly from my preference-determining values. Accordingly, the degree to which an ethicist imposes their private system of values upon public affairs is greatly ratcheted up as the transition from evaluating to prescribing occurs.

What Does Ethics Require?

For ethics to be ethics, it must involve both evaluative and normative claim-types. If it were merely the practise of evaluating, then ethics would be much closer to birdwatching, which isn’t where we want to go at all. Conversely, if ethics only entailed normative claims, then it would exclusively mean people running about imposing their preferences on the world. That’s no good either—given the most basic sense in which ethics can be understood is as establishing, I argue, a justifiably fair system of interpersonal conduct—it’s impossible to see how such things would be established qua the unbridled reckoning of the loudest people in the room. Depressingly, once again, this would generally seem to be the sense in which ethics is understood by most people: as moralising arguments and behaviours. In point of fact, ethics is emphatically not ‘in the business’ of moralising. Ethics is all about consensus-building, and as such, it strictly requires both evaluative and prescriptive components. So here, then, is the distinction to be made between ethicality and morality: ethics depends upon both claim-types, morality just needs one. Morality is, to cut a very long a complex story short, a private system of values. It is from our morality that we formulate values; from these we derive our own preferences, and as a result are endowed with that crucial additional motivation to make normative prescriptions in response to our evaluations. Similarly, it is to the value system that generates our preferences that we ascribe the emotive experience of ‘right and wrong’, ‘fair and unfair’, as those categories strike us. Critically, a healthy value system enables a person to feel compassion.

            Compassion as a Necessary Condition.

Compassion, to be clear, is the moral phenomenon of most relevance to the themes of this article. It is upon a foundation of compassion that we refine the derivative ability to produce fair and harmonious normative prescriptions. In the absence of compassion, ethics is hopelessly eroded to the point that it becomes the practise of establishing rules because it suits that person (and only that person) to do so; clearly, that’s just not what anyone means when they use the label “ethical”. To put this point another way: what makes compassion distinct from empathy or selflessness is that it is an emotive quality which does not depend on a coherence between you (the person experiencing compassion) and the person to whom it is referring. A healthy capacity for compassion allows you to sense the humanity which binds us all as members of the same kind, even when the person to whom it is referring holds fundamentally incompatible, even grotesque, values/beliefs. A healthy sense of compassion is a backstop against dehumanisation. It is compassion that prevents us from advocating for atrocities as a punitive measure. It is compassion that allows us to accept that there are many different ways of seeing the world, many different stories we tell ourselves, but that this all comes second to that which we are at the most fundamental level of all: human beings, equally worthy of dignity and respect. Compassion is as such, a necessary condition for good ethical judgement. The status of compassion as a virtue—and whether or not we ought to be sympathetic to that conceptualisation—is a task I will leave for another day. Today, compassion will play the role of an ethics-enabling private value, without which good ethical judgement becomes unmoored from what we generally understand ‘good’ inter-personal conduct to mean (as attentive, considerate, responsive, respectful, etc.).

What has preceded in this article is in many ways a word salad of moral philosophy, drawing equivalence from loose example to reach the assertion that ethics depends upon the inward-facing value of compassion, and the outward-facing ability to perceive ethically-relevant things as close to how they actually are in the world as possible. So, to spell that out in full: the capacity to make coherently ethical normative prescriptions is partially dependent upon compassion as the private quality (the phenomenology of) which generates our motivation to instantiate a change, but to meet the standard that good ethical judgement requires, this capacity must be paired with a clear-eyed estimation of the thing to which the prescription will apply. Any resultant prescriptions of this paring can thus be thought of as a synthesis of our comprehension of what a certain state of affairs demands of us as ethically-minded people. Ethics therefore strictly necessitates both: astute observational abilities, and compassion. Going forward, I will treat the evaluative-normative pairing that characterises ethics as always inclusive of those elements.

Why Can’t Development be Moral?

The commendable minority of readers who made it all the way to the bottom of the previous article will already know where I’m going with this, but it needs to be spelt out in full regardless. The question is: why can’t social policy be an exercise in morality? Surely, we want moral content to be the basis of our social institutions, no? The answer is that morality is, to put it as I already have, private. Morality consists of value-bound judgements we make about things, such as: “I do/don’t believe in fairies”. Value claims, for that is what they are called, are thus slippery things—they do not need to invoke evidence to have the power to compel us. Humans, it certainly seems, just sort of have values, and no amount of public input on the matter can directly change them. While a dialectical exchange between one’s values and the reasoning of the senses, or of others, or of a 4am Wikipedia binge, can influence those values—we, at some meta-cognitive level, ultimately do the changing as synthesis. This implies the private value system—and thus morality—is very probably a priori, occupying a place in personhood which is as private as it gets (Kant, 1781). Needless to say, all this makes it a very bad candidate indeed for the thing to be basing our social policy on, given, well, social policy is just that: social.

Pluralism and Policy.

At this juncture we have, by the standards of what is required to make the argument at hand, a fairly exacting account of what distinguishes ethics from morality, and why morality is a rubbish candidate for being the basis of social policy. Instead of a fundamentalist and moralising society led entirely by obstinate dingbats, we’d surely much prefer ethicality to yield authority. As a very brief recap, ethical judgments are drawn from observations about the world and its complexity; but are operationalised on the basis of compassion. To ‘do’ ethics is to accept that your point of view simply isn’t privileged, but it is simultaneously to safeguard your conduct from moral nihilism or gross relativism by systematically contrasting the product of your (hopefully astute) observation with the moral phenomenology exerted by your private system of values. It is to rely equally upon your evaluative and prescriptive capacity. So far so good.

This is all very neat, you might think, but how does this offer meaningful evidence for the core argument of this article? Nothing you’ve said makes it clear that all this stuff does indeed collapse down into economic development! In answer to that, we now need to bring into the concoction an argument from the previous article: that economies serve us, precisely because economic activity is the collaborative task of promoting our welfare. Since it is collaborative, good ethical judgement presupposes that economic activity pay equal regard to the welfare of everyone participating in that collaboration. If it did not, then economic activity would amount to systematically riding on the coattails of everyone else to enrich yourself (…no comment). The motivational power of self-interest aside, such a free-for-all at a systematic level would render an economy nothing more than a chaotic feeding frenzy.  Regardless, as this is a treatise on ethics, I’ll proceed by setting out how to get from “equal regard for welfare” to ethics. The following steps are intended to solidify the transition from a specific interpretation (of the “point” of an economy) as the development ethicist regards it, to the abstract metaphysical category of ethics:

1. Taking the ‘point of view’ of an economy as a social undertaking: equal regard for welfare on the basis of equal collaboration means everyone is entitled to ‘get out what they put in’. An economy therefore cannot discriminate its benefits on the basis of identity (since a plurality have participated).
   

2. This equal right necessitates ‘value pluralism’: a strict commitment to the idea that there is no singular objectively ‘better’ way for people to live. Everyone has their own preferences, motivations, beliefs, and modes of interpreting the world around them.
   

3. As we have seen, for ethics to be ethics in any meaningful sense, resultant prescriptions about the way an economy ought to be must be predicated on a valid evaluative judgement about that economy. Since there are a plurality of values represented by participating members of that economy, any evaluative-normative pairing used to justify policy (if it is to resemble and apply to reality) strictly must be deferential to value pluralism.
   

4. Any prescriptions generated by a valid evaluative-normative pairing (e.g., development policy) cannot coherently privilege one specific way of being (one set of values). Since that approach to ‘doing’ development is foreclosed, the alternative (as demanded by value pluralism) is to promote an equal foundation upon which individuals are empowered to chart a course for their own development.
   

5. Supposing you agree that ethics isn’t about moralising (projecting private preferences onto the public), then—as I have argued throughout—the remaining conceptualisation is one of ensuring there are fair and harmonious rules of the game: interpersonal ‘codes of conduct’ which are grounded both in the compassion ethics necessitates, and in a justified evaluation about the way society is, namely: irreducibly pluralistic.  

As these steps illustrate, there is a profound equivalence in kind to be found between development as “promot[ing] an equal foundation” and ethics as ensuring “fair and harmonious rules of the game”. This isn’t a mere similarity, rather, it is a direct correspondence between the two undertakings since neither one depends upon conceptual resources that cannot be arrived at by the other. While this assertion will be unpacked in subsequent articles in this series, here is a simple thought experiment to underscore the point:

Given development policies apply to a socio-cultural plurality both within and across borders, is it possible to imagine a (feasible) intervention which will unanimously improve the lot of all its benefactors without simultaneously requiring that at least some of them compromise something of their own value system (preferred way of life) to benefit from it? It certainly seems as though the only way to avoid that injustice is to establish fair and harmonious rules of the economic game, since any alternative prescription would appeal to one particular way in which a life is ‘better off’ in order to merit intervention in the first place.

Naturally, you might be able to come up with a raft of hair-brained schemes like offering everyone a bust of Trotsky made entirely of gold, or whatever. Policy recommendations must be feasible and if they are not, they come to nothing more than idealistic warbling. This is also true of ethics, since it’s impossible to guarantee, say, that one cultural tradition which maintains execution as a valid means of punishment could co-exist within the same jurisdiction as Buddhists without supressing the values of the minority or hopelessly destabilising the judicial system as a result. Regardless, comparative analysis is a task for another day, so let’s wrap this up.

            Next Steps.

It would be something of an understatement to say that there are holes in the case I have just made. For instance, supposing ‘value monism’ is a plausible reflection of what humans are characterised by (Schroeder, 2021; Lin, 2015; DePaul, 2001), then the apparently distinct incompatibility in the value systems maintained from one person to the next is, in fact, evidence of incomplete information. In such a scenario, ethics becomes about helping unfortunate souls to ‘see the light’, as it were, since central to value monism is that there is only one ultimately good way for humans to do and be. This problem is complex, and I do not have the scope to address it here (though it will make an appearance later in this series). Another concern that arises from my case as I have presented it is that it might be argued that casting ethics and development as equivalent undertakings may erode the meaning of both, since these terms are hitherto used to label rather different activities in the world. Similarly: why do we even need all this laboriously circumspect development-as-ethics nonsense to ensure development interventions are fair and beneficial when we could just be mad-dog utilitarians about it and pursue whatever is of the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people? These concerns and more will be addressed in the next article, but the thought I will leave you with for today is that—given (as I argued in the previous article) social policy which strikes those to whom it pertains as unfair will ultimately both fail to achieve its potential and, worse, likely contribute to a destabilising of the social order which initiated it—it would seem that genuine inclusivity is not merely an important ingredient, rather, it is the ingredient. This is development as ethics in application.