Audrey King
Phd. Candidate
University of Colorado - Boulder

Friday, November 16, 2007; 4:10 p.m. in Hoyt Hall, Room 215
Title: Justice, Development, and Just Development: An Institutional Analysis of Development

Brief Abstract: I divide philosophical discussions of development into two general categories:  conventional and contemporary.  Conventional discussions or analyses of development reflect philosophical work in the area of applied ethics.  Central to this work is an understanding of development as a type of collective charity in which agents from affluent countries provide aid to the distant needy.  Conventional discussions are contrasted with more recent, contemporary analyses of development within social and political philosophy.  The latter challenge the conventional charity conception of development by revealing the causal role of the global institutional order in creating and maintaining pervasive suffering and deprivation in the global South.  My aim is to show how, in challenging the charity conception of development, contemporary analyses reveal a more fundamental problem with conventional discussions within philosophy.  First, by revealing the root causes of suffering and deprivation to be structural in nature, contemporary analyses reveal the object of development to be that of structural injustice at the global level.  In so doing, they show that development is more accurately conceived as a project of global justice, rather than one of charity.  I contend that corresponding to this shift in our conception of development, is the need for a shift in moral analysis.  More specifically, I argue that contemporary discussions highlight the need to move away from agent-centered, interactional analyses toward institutional analyses that situate development in a framework of global justice.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy