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
children thinking order
The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don't pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good.
good-life writing mean
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.
pain animal unjust
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.
design political back-when
When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.
children jewish-tradition giving
I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.
mistake philosophy thinking
One of the appeals of markets, as a public philosophy, is they seem to spare us the need to engage in public arguments about the meaning of goods. So markets seem to enable us to be non-judgmental about values. But I think that's a mistake.
philosophy moving political
I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.
past greed three
The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
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.