Development ethics through the lenses of caring, gender and human security

Thinking about ethics of development and ‘human development’ must both
treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of
‘human’. The paper1
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. We2
examine the potential
contributions here of three diverse bodies of thought: the tradition of Mahayana
Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist
care ethics.