Development ethics: a new discipline

States that “development” has long been equated with modernization and western‐ization and studied as a straightforward economic issue. Reports that the discipline of economics has been the main source of policy prescription for development decision makers and that this view is now widely criticized as ethnocentric and as economically reductionist. Reveals that change is occurring: economics itself is reintegrating ethics in its conceptualization, methodology, and analysis; a new paradigm of development is in gestation; and a new discipline, development ethics, has come into being. Explains that development ethics centres its study of development on the value questions posed: what is the relation of having goods and being good in the pursuit of the good life, what are the foundations of a just society, and what stance should societies adopt towards nature? Thinks that the new discipline emerges from two sources, which are now converging: from engagement in development action to the formulation of ethical theory, and from a critique of mainstream ethical theory to the crafting of normative strategies to guide development practice. Concludes that development ethics has a dual mission: to render the economy more human and to keep hope alive in the face of the seeming impossibility of achieving human development for all.