3071-The political economy of new slavery

188 The Global Framework for Development
question the answer to which affects the extent to which and the
manner in which poverty reduction occurs is an ethical question for
development ethics. Wherever there are differences of view about what
is to be done which reflect differences of values and norms (not just
differences of factual belief, for example about effective means), we have
the appropriate subject matter for development ethics. The issues of
new slavery or corruption, for instance, reflect an important ethical
dimension to effective development – often not sufficiently recognized
in more idealized discussions of development. However, my own focus
will be on analogous failures – both in practical implementation and in
theoretical conception – in the global framework within which all
development efforts take place.
The complexity of development ethics
The complexity of development ethics is confirmed if we make explicit
two further assumptions generally shared by critics of conventional
development including most self-styled development ethicists. The first
assumption is that what we are not required to do is maximize some
good output. I mean by ‘not maximizing’ at least two distinct things.
First (and this is something defenders of conventional development
would agree with, too), we should not think that the whole of ethics is
about producing the best balance of good over bad, however defined.
I take it that if something like this were accepted, we would have a
revolution in ethics along the lines implied by Singer’s famous argument
that we ought to prevent all the preventable evils we can (Singer,
1972). Apart from distorting and flattening the ethical life, this would
turn all justification of action into just a matter of working out what
works – essentially questions of causality.
But second, more specifically, even if we did not accept a general maximizing
principle, we should also resist a targeted maximizing approach
towards the development goal of reducing poverty. By this I mean that if
an individual or a government has for whatever reasons (itself a matter
of ethical controversy) decided to use certain resources for the alleviation
of poverty, it then prioritizes the question of efficiency: how can she or
we use this resource most efficiently, that is by maximizing the good
outcomes? In these days of managerialist thinking it may seem perverse
to question this latter objective. My point is not that one should deliberately
not be efficient, rather that deciding whom to help and in what
ways is a more complex matter than working out what works or is
causally effective. The question of how we help raises various issues: