Abstract

This article will show that the work of international development organizations requires a constant reflection of the moral and political philosophical kind. A major reason for this is that while people agree that the abstract concept of development, in its normative usage, indeed, simply means social progress or good, or desirable, social change, they disagree profoundly about what social progress consists in exactly. There exists a normative disagreement about the conception of development that expresses best how social progress ought to be defined in concrete terms. For example, should we really think of social progress only in terms of economic growth, i.e. in the accumulation of goods and services? Or should we instead, for example, think of it in terms of the eradication of extreme poverty? Or in terms of yet something else, like the expansion of options for human choice?