SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW december 25, 2010 vol xlv no 52 71 Development and the Other: On the Bearing of Egalitarian Sensibility on Development Siby K George The comments of an anonymous referee on an earlier version of this paper are gratefully acknowledged. Siby K George (kgsiby@iitb.ac.in) is at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay. Inequities in society can be countered, it is usually argued, through an agency-centric approach of democratic political participation. While not denying the pertinence of such an approach, this paper contends, from a development ethics perspective with reference to India, that an ethos of egalitarian sensibility across the whole spectrum of society is fundamental to equitable development. Through the lens of Levinas’ notion of the “other but equal”, and Rawls’ rejection of moral deserts in the case of human natural endowments as basic to social cooperation, an egalitarian sensibility is viewed as the “moral-sensual” assertion of the other’s egality and dignity. Transformative education, civil society activism and cultural dynamism, the paper argues, are central to acquiring an egalitarian sensibility. D iscontent with development practice was instrumental in the birth and modest growth of the interdisciplinary ield of study called development ethics in the second half of the 20th century. Early critics of modernisation such as Mahatma Gandhi paved the way for the consolidating efforts of Denis Goulet (1931-2006) 1 and to a humanising rethinking of the development concept by Amartya Sen and others. Development ethics critiques development ideology, assumptions, processes and the results or beneits, and attempts to suggest more ethical alternatives. Its aim is to assist the unfolding of a less dilemmatic development because “even intended change for development’s sake produces unintended consequences” (Goulet 1978: 108). This paper engages with the development experiences of India from a development ethics perspective, and reassesses how inherited inequalities and inequities thrown up by development processes can be dealt with. It is argued that together with asser- tive political participation, the fostering of an egalitarian sensibility is fundamental to countering the problem of inequities in society. Development and Distress A remarkable feature of the 20th century development debate is the morally loaded agreement that its authentic end is “human development”, rather than any essentially economistic goal. A host of issues with moral import – sustainability, concern for the envi- ronment, peace, human security, freedom(s), and equity – entered the development discourse in an essential sense. However, the goals of freedom and equity can often produce mutually conlict- ing results. This is not an altogether surprising consequence since freedom is the most uncompromising value for modern demo- cratic societies. We want to argue that the uncritical extolling of freedom churns out undesirable consequences like glaring inequi- ties in society and that any serious moral engagement with devel- opment involves some noble and free restraint on freedom itself. This is the concern Charles Taylor raises when he laments that the democratic ethos has both lattened and narrowed our lives. The recognition that all individuals are equal has the spin-off that they are therefore free to be what they want to be, concentrate on their own lives and be “less concerned with others or society” (Taylor 2003: 4). If we rethink morality from the perspective of human sociality, as we shall do further down this paper, equality should yield fraternity and limit freedom’s impetuosity. The same democratic ethos which grants the individual free- dom to design her or his life and goals, even more primarily assumes the egality of all. This egality is one of the grounds for