Michael Sandel
Michael Sandel
Michael J. Sandelis an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course "Justice" and for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth5 March 1953
CountryUnited States of America
real ideas giving
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
children college thinking
Very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college.
children love-is parent
Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an “openness to the unbidden.
frustration japan europe
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
tools politics way
A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
children ambition thinking
I think part of being a parent, to love one's child, is to accept them as they come - not to see them as instruments of our ambition or as creatures to be molded, as if they were themselves commodities.
spiritual justice moral
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
liberty citizens way
[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
self innocence lost
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
children good-life thinking
I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.
way doe determine
The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
motivation inspiration people
A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.
children teaching humility
The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.
mean egalitarianism ideas
Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.