More broadly, you can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats people who can do absolutely nothing for him.
Nobody's "least valuable" unless their entire existence seems to serve to act to the detriment to absolutely everybody around them.
My first thought on reading it was: is that equivalence valid? A society is a collective; a collective functions at the behest of its members. My experience of human nature suggests to me that society will contain members who both are and aren't kind to "less valuable" members. So can, or should, a society enforce kindness towards them, even against the members who are disinclined to be so?
Another related question: should we measure a society's value by its total accumulated success, or the success afforded to its "less valuable"?
I don't claim to know the answers.
The HDI tries to evaluate that, check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality...
Total accumulated success is easily shown to be a false measure with a thought experiment. Consider two thousand-person communities, one full of middle-class professionals, and one with a single multi-billionaire and the rest are all downbeaten impoverished workers. You'd have to be pretty crazy to suggest that the one with widespread crushing poverty is a better society.