The Rich and the Poor - by Philip Kitcher (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Rich and the Poor is part chronicle, part analysis of a disturbing sea-change: the abandonment of ethics in public policy. Seventy years ago, it was possible for serious thinkers, including some in the governments of affluent nations, to consider policies for raising living standards worldwide. Today, by contrast, the principal policy questions revolve around how to stay on top in a dog-eat-dog world.

Philip Kitcher, one of the world's most eminent philosophers, offers a new account of how ethics and politics should mix. The world needs to explore and reprioritize ethical questions, through inclusive deliberation that is both factually informed and mutually engaged with other perspectives. Achieving that end is hard, but without aspiring to it, we are likely to condemn our successors to lives of great hardship. Climate change demands global cooperation of a kind that can only be obtained by returning to ethical inquiry. The divorce between ethics and economics threatens disaster for all.

Review Quotes

�The Rich and the Poor argues that neoliberalism, among its other sins, has brought an �erosion of kindness.� Kitcher proposes a program of �ethical enquiry� that will restore ethics to policy, and that will bring an end to poverty, just as ethical enquiry once brought an end to slavery. A passionate and persuasive book.�
Professor Sir Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, Princeton University

"It was once common to hold that we have a moral obligation to take from the rich to help the poor. Philip Kitcher�s latest book explains how that assumption has been replaced by a supposedly neutral attention to economic efficiency. Far from being neutral, this focus actually reveres cheap consumer products as the highest good. Against those who call themselves political realists, Kitcher argues for a return to moral idealism. With clarity and compassion, The Rich and the Poor shows how we might return ethical deliberation to political economy. This book should be read far and wide by anyone who cares about politics, economics, or morality; its message could hardly be more timely.�
Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, and author of Left Is Not Woke

"A powerful call for pursuing an idealistic, hopeful path towards moral progress and social justice."
Kai Spiekermann, Department of Government, London School of Economics

�A courageous act of philosophical defiance, The Rich and the Poor asks that we reinsert ethics into politics and rethink science policy in a way that is accurate to the science and painstakingly aware of the complex interplay among economics, politics, and democratic institutions.�
Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University.