Working Paper No. 459: Development Ethics Through the Lenses of Caring, Gender, and Human Security

This paper 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. The paper examines 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.