Culture and Development Ethics: Needs, Women's Rights, and Western Theories

Can development ethics avoid presuming that European cultures have universal validity and yet also avoid treating every distinct culture as sacrosanct and beyond criticism? While work on ‘culture and development’ valuably stresses the importance of cultural differences and identity it has often been hindered by conceptual limitations when faced with the ambiguities, variety, conflict and change within societies. This article queries a communitarian belief, that morality cannot be anything other than whatever a community's norms are, and suggests that recent development ethics work usefully blends universalist ethics with room for local traditions and choices. As advances on both (a) forms of liberalism that are universalist in scope but Eurocentric and over‐individualistic in content, and (b) relativist forms of communitarian or post‐modern ethics, three current approaches are noted: new work on Basic Human Needs theory, including Amartya Sen's capabilities approach; Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian extension of Sen; and Onora O'Neill's Kantian development ethic. Particular attention is paid in the article to disputes concerning women's rights.