A NOVEMBER 2024 report by the Social Metrics Commission found that child poverty in the United Kingdom has risen to 36 percent, the highest level it has yet to reach in the 21st century. The statistic matches an overall trend in poverty and destitution, measured in the UK according to a set of benchmarks that includes access to material resources, non-overcrowded housing, education, healthcare, and labor market opportunities. The report further highlighted a disproportionally high rate of poverty for Black and other minority ethnic groups -- 41 percent.
This sobering picture finds its cross-Atlantic counterpart in the most recent US Census Bureau data. The 2023 report, released in September 2024, calculated that 11 million children (15.3 percent) in the United States fell below the poverty threshold. The overall poverty rate for 2023 was at 11 percent (equivalent to 36.8 million people falling below the threshold, which is set at $30,900 for a family of four). The data demonstrated that, compared to the 7.7 percent (14.9 million people) of non-Hispanic Whites falling below the poverty threshold, 16.6 percent of Hispanic or Latino people, 17.9 percent of Black people, 21.2 percent of Native Americans, and 22.3 percent of people with disabilities fell below it.
The hard statistics underlying poverty and social mobility opportunities for children and other marginalized individuals might seem like an unlikely entry point for a philosophy book. Yet they are the impetus for philosopher of science Philip Kitcher's latest project: The Rich and the Poor (2025). The book's cover sets the tone. Featuring side-by-side portraits of rich individuals enjoying cocktails by an infinity pool and a woman with children kicking home canisters filled with water collected at a nearby water aid station, it is meant to be -- and is -- uncanny.
Kitcher is not new to book projects that engage with ethical problems and wider policy questions. From Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001) to The Ethical Project (2011), from The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts (co-authored with Evelyn Fox Keller, 2017) to Moral Progress (2021), he has pioneered a method of philosophy and thinking about science that is both sensitive to socioeconomic realities and responsive to ethical challenges. The Rich and the Poor continues this intellectual trajectory while also bringing in autobiographical details: Kitcher himself benefited from an improbable combination of "progressive politicians, a sensitive boy king, and an unusually thoughtful and kind schoolmaster." This, he writes, made it possible for him to receive an education the likes of which his parents and grandparents could only have dreamed: first, in Christ's Hospital (an institution originally created for the poor by the boy king Edward VI, the only male heir of Henry VIII), and then at the University of Cambridge and Princeton. Yet since the 1980s, he laments,
the diminishing interest in funding public institutions, especially in programs to enlarge the fortunes of the poor, and the correlative hostility to taxing the rich, on both sides of the Atlantic, have led me to despair of the political condition of the two prosperous nations I know best.
The book originates from Kitcher's C. P. Snow Lecture, delivered at Christ's College Cambridge in March 2023, taking an additional cue from Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture entitled "The Two Cultures." The latter lecture infamously pitted scientific culture against humanistic endeavors. Kitcher's book engages with a variant of those two allegedly orthogonal perspectives -- "those of the idealist who regards the neglect of ethical ideals as scandalous, and those of the realist who recommends that we figure out what works in the world we live in." The contrast, then, is between the "starry-eyed dreamers" that go under the name of moral idealists and the "hard-bitten realists" of realpolitik. For the former, moral ideals and principles are imperatives that cannot be trumped by socioeconomic circumstances and considerations. The latter, by contrast, are quite happy to bend moral principles in the name of adapting to socioeconomic realities. The moral idealists show concern for the neglected poor, while realists accuse the idealists of utopistic plans -- and, ultimately, of "ethically worse outcomes than might have been achieved." The former see redistribution as a necessary tool for fighting child poverty; the latter have long dispensed with ideals of redistribution in favor of various forms of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism.
The aforementioned data concerning poverty in the UK and US (the "two prosperous nations" Kitcher "know[s] best") seem to corroborate the triumph of the hard-bitten realists of realpolitik. In Kitcher's analysis, this triumph originates with a misconstrued ethical inquiry that aims, in quasi-Newtonian fashion, to apply top-down moral principles to particular states of affairs and mold the former to the latter as needed. The net result: In the name of the wealth of the nations, democratic societies have concluded that it is acceptable to let suffering people suffer, and to let ever more disadvantaged people slide below the poverty threshold.
Again, the question arises: what is the antidote to this "dogmatic pessimism"? Kitcher argues for a methodology broadly inspired by economist and philosopher Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach -- "expand the capabilities of [...] less fortunate citizens" by investing in collective goods like healthcare and education. Of course, the very conditions on which such methodology hinges -- namely, being inclusive, well informed, and mutually engaged -- might seem to hearken back to an outmoded utopistic form of moral idealism. "None of us," after all, "has the power to summon into being a fully inclusive, impeccably informed, completely mutually engaged group of deliberators at a snap of our fingers." Still, Kitcher is undeterred. His proposal is not, he argues, "the pie-in-the-sky suggestion to institute ideal deliberation tomorrow," but rather to "craft measures to overcome the defects of the discussions people have. The goal: pragmatic progress in ethical inquiry."
Returning to a theme dear to Kitcher's later work, pragmatic progress is not progress to a long-term unachievable goal (i.e., ideal deliberation). Instead, it is progress from a problematic situation, in part by having a keen sense of its limits and defects. In other words, "pragmatic progress" is a problem-solving activity built on the bedrock of science. For Kitcher, "scientific progress" is not measured in terms of getting closer to the truth, accumulating knowledge, or improving understanding; science makes progress by addressing problems, identifying gaps and lacunae, and offering workable solutions. With this view, one might argue, for example, that the scientific progress made by Einstein's general relativity theory over its predecessor -- Newton's mechanics -- consists in the ability of Einstein's theory to solve outstanding problems of the latter (by offering an explanation, say, for the anomalous perihelion of the planet Mercury).
The methodology of ethical inquiry should therefore, according to Kitcher, follow these same steps. Rather than applying top-down abstract principles to specific situations (in a quasi-Newtonian fashion), the goal of scientific inquiry, no less than the goal of ethical inquiry, is ameliorative: to tackle pressing problems and offer solutions. "Newton's dream" of a systematic science has long been broken, and -- Kitcher argues -- moral realists should wake up from their quasi-Newtonian dream and rediscover a pragmatist methodology for ethical inquiry.
Why does all this matter? Not just for ameliorating the appalling statistics on poverty in some of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth, Kitcher suggests, but also for better understanding the empowering role of science in democratic societies. Take climate science, wherein the challenge posed by man-made greenhouse gases in causing global warming "demands cooperation on a pan-human scale." Cutting greenhouse gas emissions globally and delivering on the Paris Agreement targets are directly at odds with the socioeconomic demands of realpolitik. Who cares about grand moral ideas -- e.g., not polluting the air, not contaminating waterways with industrial waste, not preventing loss of biodiversity for future generations -- when people can barely put food on their plate, afford a decent place to live, or have job security? The "starry-eyed dreamers" may well appeal to these laudable-yet-unachievable high-ground moral ideals, the moral realist is quick to observe -- but at the end of the day, if we want to improve the sobering stats on poverty, we'd better "drill, baby, drill."
"We need ethical inquiry," avers Kitcher, "not the self-interested jostlings of current climate summits," adding that "these days, ethical inquiry seems passé." What can a pragmatist methodology of ethical inquiry do, or even say, on this matter, when the perspectives of the moral idealist and moral realist so obviously clash? Kitcher suggests two answers, one coming from science, and the other from ethics itself.
On the scientific front, successfully tackling global warming has, as a prerequisite, successfully engaging with responsible decision-making. But the problem here is that, unfortunately, "most of our decisions cannot emulate the ideally rational agent. All too often we know that we do not know all the potential outcomes, and even for those of which we are aware, we cannot assign either precise probabilities or precise utilities." This is where pragmatic progress can make a difference: instead of climate policy inaction in the name of presumed, unachievable goals, we need to foster better public understanding of climate science. And the first step toward a better public understanding of climate science is conveying to the public and policymakers the message that the purpose of climate modeling under different greenhouse gas concentration scenarios is not to predict the future in the face of uncertainty. It is instead to reliably inform science policy -- and enable responsible political decision-making by displaying the full range of possibilities.
In the words of D. A. Stainforth et al.,
the likelihood of drowning is low in the shower, higher if we choose to swim in a shallow children's swimming pool, higher still in an adult pool and even higher along a beach with a strong undertow. Given that the anthropogenic GHG emissions are considered to be the most significant drivers of changes in climatic forcing in the twenty-first century [...] the future is therefore in "our" control in the sense that we can choose if and where to swim. There is therefore no need to remove this uncertainty so long as reliable information can be given for the outcome of any particular choice.
But a better public understanding of climate science by itself is no longer sufficient in a society torn apart by political partisanship, powerful economic lobbies, and a floodgate of disinformation and misinformation. On the ethical front, the "erosion of kindness" and removal of ethics from politics has done untold damage, Kitcher remarks early on:
Climate action would rub salt in wounds inflicted when politics abandoned ethical inquiry, when it withdrew social protections in the name of increased production and greater aggregate wealth. Those who have not shared in any such increase and who feel the pain of social neglect will resist. Instead, they should be recruited as allies.
Ultimately, the problems of poverty and climate inaction are dangerously interlinked in the political landscape of realpolitik. Make no mistake: Kitcher is not calling for a covert socialist agenda. The real, complex meaning of the first chapter's deceptively simple title, "The Erosion of Kindness," becomes apparent only at the end of the book when Kitcher -- a secular humanist -- tells us that "socialism existed before Marx wrote a word. There was once a thriving Christian socialist movement. Eminent writers have hailed Christ as the first socialist."
Kitcher's discussion of rediscovering kindness in an ever more inequal society beset with powerful economic lobbies, partisan policies, and polarized political institutions reminded me of a famous scene in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). At the end of a long invective by the Grand Inquisitor, the character of Jesus approaches him silently and leaves a kiss on his cheek. 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. Maybe fighting the erosion of kindness as part of an ethical project means seeing enemies with new eyes. Maybe it means regarding all humans, enemies included, as worthy of care.