Agency, Citizenship, and Human Development: The Didactics to Promote the Idea of Global Justice

• In Event: Beyond Fragmentation: Global Perspectives on Didactics—Learning and Teaching

Abstract

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Martin Luther King Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail

The Nobel Laureate in Economics: Amartya Sen published in 2009 a key book entitled: The Idea of Justice. In this book, Sen undertakes a critical revision of John Rawls’ germinal ideas about the essential components for a “social contract”, which will yield a system of cooperation; and presents an alternative approach about justice. The capabilities approach has gained an important place, because it gives a philosophical, political and economical account of an idea of justice, which could be used, as a practical method across different cultures, to assess the possibilities of human freedom and development. However, such an important account lacks of a correlative psychological theory that could explain the particularities in the development of the moral and social reasoning, both at a personal and a societal level. The paper aims to present said psychological account that changes the idealized subject, from the theoretical perspective, for a real person that is developing as a free agent although within the particularities of the cultural world. Drawing from important advances in the field of developmental psychology (particularly taking into account the key work built by Elliot Turiel and Larry Nucci) it is possible as well to obtain significant criteria in order to carry on the key task of proposing strategies for educating global citizens that will encompass the values to achieve better standards of global justice.

Author

• Abel Ruben Hernandez Ulloa, Universidad de Guanajuato