research
Development ethics through the lenses of caring, gender, and human security.
- Publication date
- 1 September 2008
- Publisher
- Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development
in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces
of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction
(psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes
of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy,
not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally
interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security,
care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security
helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives
rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities.
It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions
the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics.