3071-The political economy of new slavery

190 The Global Framework for Development
Development ethics as global ethics
If our goal then is the alleviation of extreme poverty, all the above questions
are relevant at all levels and in all areas. They apply to all kinds of
agents: individuals and organizations in rich countries, individuals and
organizations in poor countries, rich governments, poor governments,
NGOs, business companies, international organizations. This is because
the way in which people make their decisions in terms of the ethical
criteria involved make some difference to what happens directly or
indirectly vis à vis extreme poverty. Development ethics needs to focus
more than it has on some of these questions.
I focus on one or two of these questions, without attempting to cover
the whole field. My suspicion is that a disproportionate amount of
intellectual energy has actually been poured into the debate about the
right theory of value underlying development – the debate between neo-
Aristotelians, Kantians, human rights thinkers and so on. This debate
is important, and in some cases adopting one approach as opposed to
another may result in different policy recommendations.
But these differences are little compared with the general differences
between these positions and a conventional approach to development,
which is more dominated by economic growth assumptions. Critiques of
the latter can be mounted from any of the ethically enriched positions.
A similar issue exists in connection with environmental ethics: much
intellectual energy is expended on the debates between biocentrists,
ecocentrists and enlightened anthropocentrists (who accept the de facto
ecological limits), though all of them have powerful arguments against
the conventional and shallow anthropocentrism of mainstream thinking.
For me the crucial challenge is the construction of an adequate global
ethic for the twenty-first century – a global ethic which both informs
what individuals do and how they perceive themselves, and also informs
our understanding of international relations and the norms that should
guide states and economic actors, and reflects the changing realities of our
increasingly globalized world. These concerns may seem far away from
the concerns of poverty alleviation, and yet like a boomerang, the way
they are thought through and the conclusions reached have, or could
have, powerful impacts on the prospects of the poor – possibly more than
the outcomes of ethical debates about the good in development itself.
This is relevant to the challenge of economic slavery since in many
ways the key issues are about: the extent to which ethical constraints on
international trade including trafficking are taken seriously; the extent
to which there is or is not a relativistic acceptance of practices elsewhere