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39 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi39 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39: 1-9 DOI: 10.1007/s 10790-006-6284-4 © Springer 2006 EDITORIAL Privilege, Responsibility, and Dimensions of Value with Liberal Education THOMAS MAGNELL Editor-in-Chief 1. Privilege and Coordinate Responsibility We lead lives of privilege. In a world where all too many people remain impoverished, this is hard to gainsay. Privilege is a comparative notion, and the comparisons are not difficult to make. Despite the abundance of material goods so prevalent in market economies that governments actively intervene to curtail their production, vast numbers of individuals live at subsistence levels. Literacy, a near precondition of moderate intellectual development, is far from universal. Freedom, a political requirement for autonomy and a shield against collective exploitation, is not enjoyed in much of the world. If we include considerations that range across time, judgments of our good fortune are no less difficult to make. Compared with our forebears, we are privileged indeed. Life-expectancy alone is an index of our enviable position. Someone born in the West as recently as the nineteenth century had less than a fifty percent chance of living long enough to have a child. In just the last hundred years, life-expectancy at birth has increased by well over fifty percent in the United States and Europe, and contrary, perhaps, to what might be supposed, this is at the low end of these kinds of statistics. Over the same period, in much of the rest of the world, life-expectancy has increased even more, starting as it did from a lower base. Put a bit differently, average life-expectancy over the entire world today is greater than life-expectancy in Sweden just a little over a century ago.1 Or as Tom Lehrer once quipped: It is a sobering fact that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. Among temporal cohorts from past to present, belonging to the cohort of today is closest to a Florida country club membership, and membership, as has been said, has its privileges. A life long enough for leisure may or may not be a life of leisure, and horrors and tragedies can certainly gnaw away at the joys of any life. But when someone has a prospect of decades beyond adolescence, as most children today do, that is a privilege to relish.

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