Plato is dead

A post about the Human Development Index, and a critical response to the 2009 Jefferson Lucture (another TAS post praises it), given by Leon Kass, University of Chicago professor, controversial chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics (under Bush, 2001-2005), and prominent opponent of both stem-cell research (on the grounds, of course, that it is yucky) and ice-cream cones.

Call me a shameless modernist, but I happen to agree with Suderman that:

[I]n the Leon Kass speech, … I see a troubling tendency — not merely a recognition that wealth is not the only way to measure a good life, but an unsubstantiated romanticization of the hard, sad lives of the economically destitute.

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It’s a view that, frankly, can easily slip into condescension: Kass actually seems impressed that these lowly, uneducated people could manage to lead honorable lives, and drawing comparisons to the petty behavior of his Harvard cohort, seems to suggest that their decency and their poverty are connected.

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I might be more sympathetic to Kass’s viewpoint if he could actually back up the claim that the poor he encountered were of greater moral character. But he has nothing to offer except his own observations. It’s a difficult thing to quantify, admittedly, but what evidence we do have suggests that poverty does not, in fact, result in tougher moral fiber: poorer societies tend to be more corrupt and produce more human rights abuses than richer countries.

And from The New Republic (via Suderman):

[I]t has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development—never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty.

A condescending view that the poor are happier with less? Sounds awfully familiar…