Michael J. Sandel Quotes

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.

Call center technology enables companies to "score" incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places.

The self-satisfaction and material preoccupations of his time was independent of his point about the injustices of poverty, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. But he saw them as connected. To reverse these injustices, Kennedy thought it necessary to challenge the complacent way of life he saw around him. He did not hesitate to be judgmental. And yet, by invoking Americans' pride in their country, he also, at the same time, appealed to a sense of community.

The idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve.

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself - not according to the dictates of nature or social convention.

Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what's just without arguing about the nature of the good life.

Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.

And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Meanwhile, the state has grown as addicted to the lottery as its problem gamblers. Lottery proceeds now account for 13 percent of the state revenues in Massachusetts, making radical change all but unthinkable. No politician, however troubled by the lottery's harmful effects, would dare raise taxes or cut spending sufficiently to offset the revenue the lottery brings in. With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across American must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune cosigns them.

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You.

If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.
'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end.

Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea.

[T]he commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value [ ... ] but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good.

They defined one benefit of a higher speed limit as a quicker commute to and from work, calculated the economic benefit of the time saved (valued at an average wage of $20 an hour) and divided the savings by the number of additional deaths. They discovered that, for the convenience of driving faster, Americans were effectively valuing human life at the rate of $1.54 million per life. That was the economic gain, per fatality, of driving ten miles an hour faster.15

In 1945, the president of Dartmouth justified limits on Jewish enrollment by invoking the mission of the school: Dartmouth is a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students.

A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or "crowding out" their intrinsic interest or commitment.

To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.

Here then is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant's idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake - a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls cannot.

Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm ... that all values are merely subjective.

The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just.

Now they can acquire "the egg from one source (including, in many cases, the intended mother) and the womb from another."50 This "unbundling" of the supply chain, Spar explains, has prompted growth in the surrogacy market.51 "By removing the traditional link between egg, womb, and mother, gestational surrogacy [has] reduced the legal and emotional risks that had surrounded traditional surrogacy and allowed a new market to thrive.

(...) greed that preys on human misery (...)

Of income and wealth would not matter very much.

Outrage is the special kind of anger you feel when you believe that people are getting things they don't deserve. Outrage of this kind is anger at injustice.

Government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person from himself, or to impose the majority's beliefs about how best to live. The only actions for which a person is accountable to society, Mill argues, are those that affect others. As long as I am not harming anyone else, my "independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."19

If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth?

Ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom. And

If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you'll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

Markets express and promote certain attitudes to the goods being exchanged.