Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

The question

Michael Sandel has taught a course called Justice at Harvard since 1980. It became one of the university’s largest classes, with around a thousand students in a lecture hall, and in 2009 the lectures were broadcast on public television and put online, where millions watched them. Justice, published the same year, is the book of the course.

Its question is how to think about justice. Sandel does not begin with theories. He begins with cases that divide people: whether it is fair for stores to raise prices sharply after a hurricane, whether soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder should receive the Purple Heart, whether a government should bail out companies whose executives paid themselves bonuses, whether affirmative action is just. He shows that people’s intuitions about such cases rest on deeper principles, and that those principles conflict.

The path through it

Sandel identifies three ways of thinking about justice. The first asks what will maximise welfare, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The second asks what respects freedom, the rights of individuals to choose for themselves. The third asks what promotes virtue, cultivating good character and honouring what deserves honour. He takes each in turn.

He begins with utilitarianism, as founded by Jeremy Bentham and refined by John Stuart Mill. Its appeal is clarity: weigh costs and benefits and choose the action that produces the most good. He tests it with famous cases, including the trolley problem, in which one can divert a runaway trolley to kill one person instead of five, and a nineteenth-century English case in which shipwrecked sailors killed and ate a cabin boy to survive. The test shows utilitarianism’s difficulties: it seems to permit sacrificing individuals for the majority, and it reduces all values to a single measure. He also discusses the Ford Pinto case, in which a company’s cost-benefit calculation of the value of lives became notorious.

He turns next to theories of freedom. Libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, argue that people own themselves and that taxation for redistribution violates their rights. Immanuel Kant argues that people must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means, and that morality consists in acting on principles one could will as universal laws, not in consequences. John Rawls asks what principles people would choose behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing their own position in society, and argues that they would choose equal basic liberties and allow inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged.

Then he turns to Aristotle. For Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve, and to know what people deserve one must know the purpose of the practice in question. To decide who should get the best flutes, ask what flutes are for: they should go to the best players. Sandel applies this teleological reasoning to modern controversies: to decide who deserves admission to a university, or what marriage is, one must ask what the institution is for and what virtues it honours.

Where it arrives

Sandel arrives at his own position. Theories of justice that try to remain neutral about the good life, as Kant’s and Rawls’s do in different ways, cannot actually stay neutral. Debates about abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action or the market’s limits cannot be settled without asking what is good, what deserves honour and what purpose institutions serve.

He argues for a politics of the common good. In his view, adding up welfare and protecting choice are both necessary and neither is enough. Citizens also have to argue with each other about what makes a life go well, and a democracy needs habits of public argument that can survive the disagreements this will bring. He suggests that citizens engage moral and religious convictions openly rather than set them aside, and that this engagement, done with mutual respect, makes for a healthier democracy.

What remains open

Sandel’s position is associated with communitarian critics of liberalism, though he has resisted the label. Defenders of liberal neutrality reply that in a society with deep disagreements about the good, public debate about virtue risks imposing the majority’s views on minorities, and that neutrality is a way of living together despite disagreement. The book presents the case for each view fairly, but the question of how much of the good life politics should address remains one of the central debates in political philosophy.

His method also leaves open how disagreements are to be resolved once they are aired. Reasoning together assumes that people can be persuaded, which is not always true.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks which principle is really driving a decision. Many arguments in organisations turn on unstated assumptions about whether the aim is to maximise results, respect people’s choices or honour what deserves honour. Naming the principle often clarifies the disagreement.

It asks what a practice is for. Sandel’s Aristotelian question, what is the purpose of this institution and what does it honour, applies to promotions, prizes, pricing and policies. Disputes about who deserves what often turn out to be disputes about purpose.

And it asks whether some things should not be for sale. Sandel’s work, here and in his later book on markets, asks where market reasoning corrupts the goods it is applied to. The site’s idea page Tragic Choices and What Remains touches on choices where values cannot be traded against each other.