Human Development

Human Development as Emancipation

Mastery, control, and autonomy are features of human emancipation emphasized in Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan's psychological theory of self-determination (2002). In the evolution of our species, self-awareness became the most salient feature of the human intellect. Self-awareness creates a need to realize oneself in what one is doing, and this implies a need to act in self-determined ways. Self-determination is thought to become a dominant striving as soon as humans are existentially secure, so that the trying to thrive can replace the struggle to survive as the main director of human energies. Self-determination is an inherently emancipative striving that, if satisfied, creates feelings of being in unison with oneself. Because self-awareness is an evolution-shaped feature of every human being, self-determination is the most universally and most specifically human striving.

Sen also draws on the emancipative notion of HD in psychology, but he relates it to societies as the unit of reference. When the good life is an emancipated life, the good society is a society that makes a maximum number of people capable to live emancipative lives. Because, as members of the human race, all people are of equal existential value, every person has the same right to an emancipated life; opportunities to live in emancipation must be equally distributed in a humane society. In that sense, HD theory construes the ideals of freedom and equality as interdependent rather than contradictory.

Due to Sen's capability approach, the HD of societies can be measured by how widely emancipative capabilities are distributed. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) follows the capability approach in its annual Human Development Report, which publishes a Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI summarizes on a per-country basis information on the average person's life expectancy, educational attainment, and per capita income, assuming that longevity, education, and income increase ordinary people's capabilities to live an emancipated life.

In the perspective of HD, democracy becomes an integral part of the definition of development for the following reasons: Human emancipation requires freedom of choice in private and public affairs, and such freedoms are granted through the civil and political rights that define democracy.

The emancipative notion of HD has been criticized as prescribing a Western view of the good life. But supporters of the HD approach note that this criticism is defensible only on two questionable premises: The potential to live an emancipated life is not a universal human potential but one that only Western people possess, and emancipation is not a universal human value because non-Western people do not desire it. Neither of these positions is tenable. First, the potential for emancipation is anchored in a most general feature of the human mind, namely, self-awareness, which is not the sole property of Westerners. Second, the claim that emancipation is not a valued feature of life among non-Westerners has been empirically disproven. Whether people value emancipation can be seen in whether feelings of being free in shaping their lives impact satisfaction [Page 1102]with their lives. Only if freedom over their lives increases people's satisfaction with their lives is emancipation of value for people. As Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have shown, feelings of freedom over their lives increase people's life satisfaction in all cultures. Thus, HD's emphasis on emancipation does not prescribe a specifically Western view of the good life. It champions a particularly humane view.

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