The Heller School for Social Policy and Management s4

Ethics, Rights and Development Module I

Fall 2015

Brandeis University

The Heller School for Social Policy and Management

Master of Arts in Sustainable International Development

HS 319f-1

Ethics, Rights and Development

Syllabus: Fall (Module 1)

Instructor: Professor Raj Sampath, PhD

Office: Heller-Brown 157

Phone: 781-736-5338

Email:

Office hours: by appointment

UNIVERSITY NOTICES

1. If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please see me immediately.

2. You are expected to be honest in all of your academic work. The University policy on academic honesty is distributed annually as section 5 of the Rights and Responsibilities handbook. Instances of alleged dishonesty are subject to possible judicial action. Potential sanctions include failure in the course and suspension from the University. If you have any questions about my expectations, please ask.

Academic integrity is central to the mission of educational excellence at Brandeis University. Each student is expected to turn in work completed independently, except when assignments specifically authorize collaborative effort. It is not acceptable to use the words or ideas of another person – be it a world expert or your roommate – without proper acknowledgement of the source. This means you must use footnotes and quotation marks to indicate the source of phrases, sentences, paragraphs or ideas found in published volumes, on the internet, or created by another student. If you are in doubt, you must ask for clarification.

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This course meets Fridays from 2:00 to 4:50 PM on Aug. 26, Sept. 2, Sept. 9, Sept. 16, Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 7. This course is an SID core requirement. The syllabus is subject to change.

COURSE INFORMATION

Course description:

This intensive seven week module will provide an introductory framework to handle theoretical and practical questions about ethics, rights and values while developing practical skills to approach ethical dilemmas in the field of development. The seminar is geared primarily for current and future development practitioners and researchers. However, students from other MA/MS programs are more than welcome as we will touch on concepts and themes, which may be transferred to other fields.

This module explores the theoretical and practical perspectives underpinning critical ethics, rights and development for development practitioners, including:

(1) basic applied social-science, including sociological, anthropological, political-economic, historical or philosophical perspectives on ethics and rights and the viability of different methods for sustainable development studies and practice.

(2) how normative frameworks and values influence our views and may unconsciously underlie how we present ideas in ethics, human rights, justice, liberty, equality, freedom and well-being as motivating forces or destabilizing barriers to social transformation and sustainable development.

Readings, written assignments, and discussions are designed to equip participants with an appreciation of the way ethical orientations and rights-based approaches are realized as a material, social and cultural force in global and local political-economic systems to increase sustainable development. At the same time, they will provide analytical tools and references that will allow students to compare and contrast their ideas and experiences as a factor in formal and informal institutional and social community contexts, where advancement of justice may be a force for peace-making, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, gender parity, education, literacy and sustainable development. Simultaneously we will look at complex social structures and situations that inhibit or prohibit development in explicit and implicit (hidden) ways along gendered, class, race and ethnic lines.

Goals and learning outcomes:

· Ethical duties, rights and obligations to justify world action to alleviate global poverty

· Historical considerations of injustices between North– South Relations: colonization to de-colonization to neo-colonization and beyond

· History of development as a concept and field and its ethical assumptions

· Rights and Development in international, multilateral institutions and NGOs

· The Ethics of Charitable Aid- Helping or Hindering?

· Insider vs. Outsider dilemmas and the viability of participatory approaches

· Questions of measurement and impact

· Ethical dilemmas and rights-based approaches of international NGO development practitioners working in the field

· Ethical behavior of NGOs and rights issues in relation to local contexts in light of 'failed' states or conflict situations: questions of obligations, entitlements, democracy, governance and accountability

· Limits of Washington Consensus, Bretton Woods Institutions, Structural Adjustment Programs and purely Neoliberal models of economic growth measured by GDP per capita

· The relationship between ethics, rights and international law when it comes to fairness and equity in the current international economic and financial system

· Ethics and rights in gender and development studies and practice

· Ethics and rights in LGBT and development studies and practice

· Alternative visions for the direction of human history—the emergence of Global South definitions of ethical values and civilization in contrast to the history of the West from colonization to the end of the Cold War (1500-1989)

· The early origins of ‘development ethics’ as a field of study and practice and its reconstruction today

· Global Ethics and Global Justice debates today

· Conclusion: How do we know if we are doing right or wrong and how can we predict the short-term and long-term consequences of our decision-making and actions as individuals and collective groups given the diverse plurality of cultures, religions, values, societies in the global economy? Who determines what is right and what is wrong when it comes to global poverty eradication? How should we frame the field and practice of ethics and rights in relation to global sustainable development?

Core Competency Statement:

This course teaches concepts and skills that have been identified as core competencies for a degree in SID, particularly in regard to 1. Literacy, 4. Contextual analysis and application, and 10. Communication:

· Achieving literacy of the ethical underpinnings of different theories and models of development and the history of development approaches; achieving a basic literacy of contemporary discussions on intersections of ethics, rights and development.

· Ability to analyze contexts of broad socio-economic, political, social and historical structures at the global and local levels and the various ethical assumptions about values that underpin the goals of development ideas and practices.

· Improving communications that is sensitive to a diversity of ethical perspectives between development agents, local communities, NGOs, and development practitioners about the means and ends of development at the macro-institutional level of global economic and political institutions and the local level of community-driven projects.

Gender Perspective Statement:

Students will learn how to think critically andwrite about ethical orientations in an inclusive manner that is sensitiveto differinggender roles and relationswhen it comes to development policy formulation while taking into account different value-systems, practices,beliefs and social relations in other cultures, particularly in developing countries.Students will become aware of the effects of their writing, arguments, and communications about ethical, moral and rights issues,which may be received differently from the standpoints of different regions, countries, traditions and groups: the aim isto increase the effectiveness of communicating information, projects and policies that respects diversity. This can lay the ground work for participatory attempts to build consensus on social justice goals to improve thewell-being ofwomenthroughout the developing world.

Race and Ethnicity Statement:

This course examines concepts and themes of applied ethics and rights in sustainable international development. It seeks to understand patterns between basic human biological needs, environments, systems, beliefs, norms, virtues and practices while exploring different political, ethical, legal, moral and multicultural, gendered ways to experience and treat situations of extreme, global poverty and general human suffering. We will be sensitive to global diversity to contextualize an authentic dialogue on universal values vs. cultural relativism when it comes to Western and Eastern, Global North and Global South relations.

Sustainable Development Statement:

Course Requirements:

1. Attendance at all sessions.

2. Preparation of all readings: required are those highlighted in yellow.

3. Participation in class discussions.

4. Completion of three weekly exercises, a midterm paper and final paper. Instructions for paper assignments and grading criteria will be handed out in class.

5. Helpfulness to other students and encouragement of collaborative spirit.

Your Grade will be calculated as follows:

· Class participation (20%)

· midterm paper- 5-6 double-spaced pages (35%) due at the end of the third week- Friday Sept 11th at 9pm. Choose two of the readings in either week 1, 2 or 3 but not readings from two different weeks. Compare and contrast them. See the midterm guidelines sheet.

· final paper – 7-8 double-spaced pages (45%). Due Date TBD.

CLASS SESSIONS

Description:

An opening session will invite participants to share ethics, rights and development questions or perspectives, or any other reasons for enrolling in this particular module.

Readings (not all are required) are available on LATTE:

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmpolitanism: Ethics in A World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006)

Balakrishnan, Radhika and Diane Elson, eds., Economic Policy and Human Rights (New York: Zed Books, 2011)

Basu, Kaushik and Ravi Kanbur eds., Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Chatterjee, Deen, ed., Ethics of Assistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Crocker, David, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Dower, Nigel, “Development and Globalization: The Ethical Challenges” (Michigan State University Lecture, 2005)

“Aid, Trade and Development,” in World Ethics: The New Agenda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998)

Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)

Gasper, Des, Ethics of Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Goulet, Dennis, “A New Discipline: Development Ethics.” The International Journal of Socio-Economics (1996)

Horton, Keith and Chris Roche, eds., Ethical Questions and International NGOs: An Exchange between Philosophers and NGOs (London: Springer, 2010)

McNeill, Desmond and Asuncion Lera St. Clair, “Ethics, Human Rights and Global Justice” in Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2009)

Peet, Richard and Elaine Hartwick, Theories of Development (New York: Guilford Press, 1999)

Sachedina, Abdulaziz, Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

Shiva, Vandana and Maria Miles, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993)

Shue, Henry, Basic Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)

Organizations:

International Development Ethics Association

Human Development and Capabilities Association

Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International

International Criminal Court

International Commission of Jurists

Doctors without Borders

Oxfam

UNHCR

Human Rights Council (UN)

UN Security Council

European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 1950 –Council of Europe and European Court of Human Rights

The Inter-American System- Organization of American States

African System - Organization of African Unity – currently African Union

Class Schedule:

Weeks 1 and 2: Introduction to Ethics and Rights as They Relate to Sustainable International Development

This session introduces the history of modern ethics and rights as it relates to the history of development beginning with the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It introduces basic theoretical concepts about what ‘rights’ and ‘ethics’ are and how different development paradigms evolved based on shifting social, political, cultural, economic and institutional priorities of different historical periods.

Required:

Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 5-88

Watch “The End of Poverty?”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pktOXJr1vOQ

Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” and “Conclusion” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963)

Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick, “Critical Modernism, Radical Democracy, Development” in Theories of Development (1999)

Desmond McNeill and Asuncion Lera St. Clair, “Ethics, Human Rights and Global Justice” in Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 30-62

Recommended (NOT required for this class- for your future reference only):

Asuncion Lera St.Clair, “Global Poverty: Development Ethics Meets Global Justice,” in Amitva Krishna Dutt and Charles Wilbur, eds., New Directions in Development Ethics: Essays in Honor of Denis Goulet (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), p. 249-273

World Bank, 2006 World Development Report: Equity and Development (Washington D.C: The World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2006)

Margot Saloman, Global Responsbility for Human Rights: World Poverty and Development of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Amy Gutmann, ed., Michael Ignatieff: Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)

James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007)

A.H. Robertson and J.G. Merrills, Human Rights in the World, 4th ed. (London: Manchester University Press, 1986)

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)

Charles Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

J. Crawford, The Rights of Peoples (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

A. Gerwith, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)

Thomas Pogge, ed., Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

D. Bell and J.-M Coicaud, eds., Ethics in Action: The Ethical Challenges of International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2ndEdn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003)

The Concept of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985)

Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)

Jeremy Waldron, ed., A Theory of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)