A central set of questions in development ethics asks: what do and should we mean by social improvement', development' in a normative sense, human well-being and quality of life? A second central theme concerns: how far can we progress on these issues if talking on a global scale, and how far are answers culturally speciยฎc?
Work since the late 1970s on the capabilities (or capability) approach (CA), formalized by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, has much to oer on the nature of `development' and social improvement. UNDP has tried to draw on it in the Human Development Reports and its deยฎnition of development as enlargement of people's choices. From the mid-1980s new dimensions have been added to CA by the American moral philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum, working together with Sen but also deยฎning her own version. She has also faced the second theme above, the question of cultural relativity. This body of work centring on capabilities theory is the focus of the set of four papers that follows.
From its establishment in 1984ยฑ85 the Helsinki-based World Institute of Development Economics Research, part of the United Nations University, has promoted work in the spirit of its acronym: WIDER. Sen has exerted considerable inยฏuence. He, Stephen Marglin and other economists sensitive to philosophical limitations of mainstream development economics opened WIDER's research to face basic existential and ethical questions raised by development policies: meanings of development, the costs of conventional economic modernization and who bears them, the rights of women, and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of promoting views of well-being from one culture in other cultures. To enrich this research, WIDER has mingled economists with philosophers, anthropologists and others, at any rate from an elite circuit in American and British academe. Prominent examples are Nussbaum and the FrenchยฑAmerican cultural anthropologist Frederique Appfel Marglin. WIDER conferences in 1986, 1988, and 1991 have generated at a stately pace a series of major books: Marglin and Marglin (1990); and Nussbaum and Glover (1995). The volumes on The Quality of Life and Women, Culture, and Development consolidate work on the capabilities approach, and deserve special attention.