Abstract

Over the past forty years, development has attempted to right the wrongs that plague the impoverished regions of the Third World. Yet, in the absence of verifiable objective values, the notions of right and wrong are subject to personal opinion and unsubstantiated moralisms. This has led to the design of as many different models of development as there are notions of what is right for the Third World, and it has precipitated a situation in which development can be a vehicle of ethical imperialism. ;The development ethic put forth here is the product of both a rigorous analysis of moral theory and the ethical methodology of wide reflective equilibrium. It is neither consequential nor deontological in nature. Rather it is goal-rights based. The ethic maintains that development should be guided by the principle of equal freedom for all to pursue the realization of their potential. Personal freedom is seen to be the highest of values for all other values require the freedom needed for them to come into play. Yet, in as much as all people should be free to pursue the realization of their potential as human beings, no one has the right to be any more free in this regard than another. ;This development ethic maintains that all people who are more free to pursue the realization of their potential have a moral duty to help those people who are less free in this regard. It also maintains that all structures, be they political, economic, cultural, sociological, or organizational, that prevent all people from being equally free to pursue the realization of their potential must be broken down and replaced by structures that are more conducive to this end. ;The equal freedom principle also calls for the control of the overall development process to be in hands of all the people involved in a particular intervention. To the extent that this facilitates the equal freedom of all to pursue the realization of their potential, control should be distributed as equally as is practicably possible