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
kids differences disease
My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society.
want limits needs
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.
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.
way doe determine
The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
spiritual justice moral
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
self innocence lost
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
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.
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.
motivation inspiration thinking
There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.
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.
religious thinking cells
I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.
kids giving goal
Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
goal important restoration
Aiming at health, restoring health - that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing.