This is really about my old-company colleagues, and some of the remaining friends from that time, and former neighbors – before we could no longer afford to live in my beautiful old neighborhood that we still walk through every day on the way to L’s daycare .
Basically, everyone we’re trying to compete with while living here.
Anyone who went to a liberal-arts school in the States will, too, recognize many of them as their classmates.
the questions the author raises are really quite important about the world we live in. As usual, there are no comfortable answers.
When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.
“Calls from liberal and left social critics for advantaged people to recognize their privilege also underscores this emphasis on individual identities. For individual people to admit that they are privileged is not necessarily going to change an unequal system of accumulation and distribution of resources.
Instead, we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth? Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries are?”
tinfoilparachute 