Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?

For twenty years, a political philosopher named Michael Sandel has taught a course at Harvard simply called “Justice.” It’s been so wildly popular that it became the first Harvard course to be aired on public television and available for free online. I just read the bestseller he wrote, Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?, which takes some of the key themes of the course and, presumably, puts the proverbial cookies on a shelf low enough for folks like me to reach them.

Drawing on philosophers both ancient and modern, he wrestles through real life dilemmas that happen all around us, and shows that there are three main ways of thinking about justice: justice as maximizing welfare, justice as respecting freedom, and justice as promoting virtue. We hold our views, in many cases, with unexamined and unarticulated assumptions, which goes a long way in explaining why political and social debates often turn so nasty, even among people who generally like each other.

Of today’s most divisive issues, Sandel says: “Lying just beneath the surface, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.”

Sandel says that most political discourse — in mass media especially — pits the welfare camp against the freedom camp. You probably know with which of the two camps you generally align. But he proposes a version of the third view of justice, that of promoting virtue. I won’t go into detail explaining what he means by that; you’ll need to read the book. Or better yet, take the course!