A NEW DISCIPLINE: DEVELOPMENT ETHICS
Denis Goulet
Working Paper #231 - August 1996
Denis Goulet, is O’Neill Professor in Education for Justice in the Department of Economics and
Fellow of the Kellogg Institute and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the
University of Notre Dame. A pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of development ethics, he has
conducted field research in Algeria, Lebanon, Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. He
has held visiting professorships in Canada (University of Saskatchewan), the USA (University of
California–San Diego and Indiana University), France (IRFED), Brazil (University of Pernambuco),
and Poland (Warsaw University). His publications include ten books and over 160 articles and
monographs.
A version of this paper is forthcoming in Socio-Economics of Community Development in World
Perspectives (Festschrift in Honour of the Great Eighteenth-Century Philosopher, Immanuel
Kant), Volume II, to be published by MCB University Press, West Yorkshire, England, as a special
issue of The International Journal of Social Economics.
ABSTRACT
‘Development’ has long been equated with modernization and Westernization and studied as a
straightforward economic issue. The discipline of economics has been the main source of policy
prescription for development decisionmakers. This view is now widely criticized as ethnocentric
and as economically reductionist. Change is occurring: economics itself is reintegrating ethics
into its conceptualization, methodology, and analysis; a new paradigm of development is in
gestation; and a new discipline, development ethics, has come into being. Development ethics
centers its study of development on the value questions posed: What is the relation between
having goods and being good in the pursuit of the good life; what are the foundations of a just
society; and what stance should societies adopt toward nature? The new discipline emerges from
two sources, which are... [continues]
Denis Goulet
Working Paper #231 - August 1996
Denis Goulet, is O’Neill Professor in Education for Justice in the Department of Economics and
Fellow of the Kellogg Institute and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the
University of Notre Dame. A pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of development ethics, he has
conducted field research in Algeria, Lebanon, Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. He
has held visiting professorships in Canada (University of Saskatchewan), the USA (University of
California–San Diego and Indiana University), France (IRFED), Brazil (University of Pernambuco),
and Poland (Warsaw University). His publications include ten books and over 160 articles and
monographs.
A version of this paper is forthcoming in Socio-Economics of Community Development in World
Perspectives (Festschrift in Honour of the Great Eighteenth-Century Philosopher, Immanuel
Kant), Volume II, to be published by MCB University Press, West Yorkshire, England, as a special
issue of The International Journal of Social Economics.
ABSTRACT
‘Development’ has long been equated with modernization and Westernization and studied as a
straightforward economic issue. The discipline of economics has been the main source of policy
prescription for development decisionmakers. This view is now widely criticized as ethnocentric
and as economically reductionist. Change is occurring: economics itself is reintegrating ethics
into its conceptualization, methodology, and analysis; a new paradigm of development is in
gestation; and a new discipline, development ethics, has come into being. Development ethics
centers its study of development on the value questions posed: What is the relation between
having goods and being good in the pursuit of the good life; what are the foundations of a just
society; and what stance should societies adopt toward nature? The new discipline emerges from
two sources, which are... [continues]
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