The Rich and the Poor

Philip Kitcher has written a cri de couer lamenting the decline of the welfare states he recalls flourished in his native Britain in the 1950’s and 60’s. He begins by recounting the kindness of a schoolmaster who picked the seven-year old Philip out as a promising candidate for a selective school, an opportunity that changed his life. He expresses repugnance at the “free market” or neoliberal policies adopted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and is appalled by the competitive spirit fostered by free market economic policies. Ethics has been banished from policy analysis and kindness has diminished, displaced by capitalism’s summum bonum of cheap consumer goods (118).

We have, in Kitcher’s view, inherited an “ethical catastrophe” (xiv). In his youth, says Kitcher, academics and government officials were not only confident that rich nations “have the obligation to spread their wealth and their expertise to aid the poor”, but they also “believed firmly in the…inevitability, of attaining the goal demanded by the obligations” (9). Kitcher’s book is an effort to revive the “large scale moral mission to give aid to those who have less” (xii). He says he is a “reformed moral idealist”, “attentive to the possibility of our own moral blindness” but confident that we can approximate forms of “ideal deliberation” and thereby “uncover difficulties in our current institutions” and devise solutions for them (152).

It is hard not to sympathize with Kitcher’s complaints: the stubborn persistence of poverty, the crassness of much commercial society, and the sharp rise in economic and political inequality, especially in the US. Few will deny that our politics and political economy need repair. But any sound analysis must take account of the many sources of disagreement and conflict, and the limits of moral motivation, in vastly diverse commercial societies like the US and the UK. Despite its noble intentions, this book pulls up short.

*****

Chapter 1, “The…