发展伦理学:一个亟待深化的研究领域

Development Ethics:an Important Research Field

发展伦理学是社会科学和发展研究领域中一个崭新和快速拓展的学科。培育发展伦理学能够为制定有益于人类幸福的发展政策提供有力的理论支持。尽管关于人类幸福的理论论争可以追溯到古希腊 ,但是许多发展经济学家都设法回避认真反思“发展”的概念和意义。与经济学家形成鲜明的对比 ,哲学家则充分地思考了幸福人生的本质和特征 ,但他们没有把其关于幸福的理论放到公众之中接受检验 ,也没有正视他们对幸福的解读与普通人价值观的关系。这部分是因为哲学家相对于社会科学家来说缺乏完成这种任务的工具和专业知识。我们只有通过哲学反思与科学探求二者的整合 ,才能揭示隐含于更真实的发展伦理学之中的核心人类价值观。

Development ethics is a new and rapidly expanding discipline within development studies and social science. The cultivation of development ethics has the potential to produce a coherent account of human wellbeing for guiding development policy and thinking. Although discussions of well being can be traced back to the Greek antiquity, most development economists have managed to avoid reflecting sufficiently on the concept and meaning of ”development”. While philosophers have reflected more fully on the nature and character of a good human life, they have not tested their theories of well being in the public domain or confronted their accounts of the ”good” with the values of ordinary people. This is partly because philosophers, in contrast to social scientists, lack the necessary tools and expertise for such tasks. Yet, it is only through the integration of scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection that we will uncover the central human values behind a more realistic development ethic.