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Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics

de Michael J. Sandel

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In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.… (mais)
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A collection of essays written in the late 1990s, and early 2000s that both try to explain Sandel's philosophy and try to embody it. Some of the essays are a bit dated- there's a lot on Clinton and Bob Dole that would make even someone born in the 1990s scratch their heads. Sandel is writing from the perspective of a partisan democrat, so he has his leanings but the underlaying philosophy is interesting and anyone can learn from it.

Sandel's project has been to challenge what he sees is the dominant paradigm of political liberalism. Sandel argues that for decades, liberalism has been the dominant stream of thought in American politics. Both the right and left believe the individual should be left alone to pursue their own ends. There is slight disagreement on which rights the individual should have- the right focus on negative political rights against the government and the left focuses on positive socio-economic rights- but both share the premise that individual choice is the priority and a government should not dictate the "good life", but only provide a neutral framework for individuals to pursue their own ends.

I am a believer in the liberal tradition. But I find Sandel's criticism of liberalism interesting if not compelling. Sandel's philosophy which is known by some as communitarian (but this is somewhat a misnomer, Sandel and other "communitarians" do not believe that the mere fact that a community has a set of values makes those values morally correct), is a challenge to the individualist assumptions of liberalism. Sandel challenges the "neutrality" of liberalism. Liberalism is not simply a set of equations derived from pure logic but a set of ethical commitments itself. Therefore, liberalism in a way, perhaps even unknowingly to itself, purports to supplement ethical commitments with a neutral framework but actually backdoors a set of ethical commitment. The commitment to the sacredness of individual choice is just that, an ethical commitment. Additionally, when liberalism encourages pluralism of certain controversial moral questions, it must admit that the answers being provided to those controversial moral questions is morally reasonable. But that itself, requires a judgement of morality that liberalism purports to avoid.

Sandel also challenges the plausibility of having a political life without some conception of what is the good life or the purpose of political life (he challenges the priority of the right over the good). He argues that liberalism's focus on leaving people "alone" is a rather colorless and second best justification for privacy, when the best justification for certain rights may be that those rights are what we consider to be important in living the good life. Somewhat relatedly, liberalism's focus on choices and obligations only flowing from choice have a difficult time explaining our obligations to family, and communities. While most people intuitively recognize a moral duty to the families and communities they are born into, people do not choose which families and which communities they are born into. Sandel argues that liberalism has not always been the dominant tradition in America. Political thinkers from Jefferson to the Progressives worried about the effect on the growth of citizens of political and economic structures. Jefferson was worried about the growth of mercantile interests because he was worried it would corrupt the citizenry. The Progressives worried that the growth of power corporate interests that were beyond the traditional control of local institutions would hollow out the citizenry. Different Progressives responded differently, some arguing that a national power needed to be created to counterbalance these new concentrated interstate-interests while some argued that these concentrated interstate interests needed to broken up to be better be controlled by local institutions. Regardless, Progressives worried not just about the impact of these new conditions on the choices of citizens but the formation of citizens. Sandel notes that the modern day challenge is when these interests become global, and beyond the control of even nation states. In many ways this aspect of Sandel's philosophy is simply a return to republicanism (with a small "r"), that believed communities should (and in someways, this is inevitable) form their citizens. Sandel's belief in a "formative" or "constitutive" citizenship is what best makes him a "communitarian". Put this way, it seems relatively reasonable, but would challenge a core tenant of liberalism, that the government and society not attempt to shape or form the citizens at all. Of course, Sandel discusses the possible downsides of this approach, and that communities can sometimes become repressive of individuality. Sandel argues that communities need not be repressive, even if historically they occasionally have been and argues for a community that guides gently and is deliberative not one that forces people "to be free". Sandel writes interestingly of John Dewey, whose pragmatism and interest in democracy was based on this model of participation and practical experience.

A final strand in Sandel's thought, which is in line with his philosophy is the importance of the expressive nature of our communities allowing certain conduct. Sandel takes seriously that people do not want their laws to allow certain conduct or behavior because people find that conduct in that sphere of life to be morally wrong. He writes more about this in the "What Money Can't Buy" but Sandel worries that values that are traditionally restricted to the market place and commercial spheres have migrated into other parts of life, degrading and threatening the formation of a good citizenry. His critique of liberalism is tied to this, in that liberalism's supposed commitment to being value neutral makes it difficult for people to just say that they think x, y or z is wrong, so they are forced to contort their positions to fit liberalism.

The book is titled public philosophy, because Sandel believes in a deliberative community that debates seriously our moral commitments, competing visions of the good life and how to get there. Much of the book is comprised of short essays, op-eds, and book reviews previously published. The topics are varied, I have only reviewed the most general and abstract ideas here, but the essays range from the political hot topics of stem cell research to the right to self-assisted suicide (though I do believe there are coherent themes that run throughout). I do not agree with all of what Sandel says, but the book made me think and challenged strong political commitments I have in creative and serious way. I found myself having to think deeply about commitments I took for granted, and while my mind is not changed on the importance of liberalism, I better understand liberalism's merits, and limits. If we believe that morality and political philosophy is subject to reason, the ability to provoke us to think, engage and respond, is the prime mark of the excellence of a work such as this. ( )
  vhl219 | Jun 1, 2019 |
'Politiek en moraal'van Harvard filosoof Michael Sandel (bekend van o.a. optreden met Joris Luyendijk en Bas Heijne) behandelt de vraag of politiek, wetgeving en rechtspraak waardevrij kunnen zijn. Het bevat nooit eerder vertaalde artikelen over o.a. burgerschap, economie, liberalisme en positieve discriminatie. Het eerste essay is de hartstochtelijke toespraak 'De verleerde kunst van het democratisch debat', die Sandel hield in 2014 toen de Universiteit Utrecht hem een eredoctoraat verleende ( )
  aitastaes | Feb 25, 2018 |
I was first introduced to Michael Sandel a couple of years ago on YouTube while I was looking for a productive way to spend my newly free summer days. His course at Harvard called “Justice” is one of the fastest in the entire university to fill up – not something I had to worry about, since I could watch all twelve of the lectures at my leisure. The lectures were filmed in an enormous hall (over 1,000 student register for his class every time it is offered), and are full of students who would never think of necessarily majoring in philosophy, but are still interested in deep, meaningful questions like “What does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic society?” and “How does one pursue the good life in a world of so many competing interests?” This searching quality, and Sandel’s open, interactive maieutic method of engaging his students were some of the best parts of his lectures.

That same Socratic spirit continues within the pages of this book, a series of previously published essays. Sandel’s willingness and insistence on being a knowledgeable cicerone through the history of liberal political theory is a sincere and much-appreciated one. However, some of these pieces are simply too short, both in length and in moral force, to merit inclusion in what otherwise could have been an extremely powerful collection. Most of the short pieces I’m talking about are in Part II, “Moral and Political Arguments.” These are articles (I use this word instead of “essay” because they almost look more like, and it pains me to say it, op-ed pieces than they do well-considered philosophical arguments) discussing the relative positives and negatives of state lotteries, advertising in public classrooms, the morality of buying and selling pollution credits, affirmative action, and the Clinton imbroglio. Some of these sound a little dated, having been written while the public discussions behind these issues was still hot; some of them haven’t been updated, not to mention more fully fleshed out as they should be.

The lengths of the pieces here are pretty proportional to their quality. The opening essay, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy,” (p. 9-34) nicely sets the tone and informs the body of concerns that resurface throughout the book: our shift away from a kind of communitarian liberalism toward a more rights-based, autonomy-based, voluntarist liberalism in which the state is value-neutral. (This seems to be an essay-long distillation of his book, “Democracy’s Discontent.”) The best essays point out some of the contradictions residing within liberalism (liberalism in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow sense pundits use the word): for example, is toleration a good in itself if the thing being tolerated is morally dubious, like the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois? In other words, which is more morally fundamental – the toleration itself, or the inherent goodness or badness of the thing being tolerated? Sandel is right to point out that rudimentary questions like this rarely present themselves in the matter of public discourse.

Two more essays, “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours” and “Political Liberalism,” a discussion of some of the readings and misreadings Dewey has incurred since his death and a critical discussion of John Rawls respectively, are both equally worthy of attention. In fact, Dewey’s influence on Sandel looms large; both are extremely concerned with the cultivation of a democratic citizenry, and what precisely this would entail. Both are also clearly disenchanted with the rights-based, voluntarist liberalism that has come to be almost unquestioned in the United States over the last century.

While some of the shorter pieces come to the conclusions that you would expect of someone of a Deweyan, communitarian liberal bent who values goods before rights, the longer pieces that I mention above really are good places to see the various ways in which philosophy dovetails into practical political concerns. They are consistently thought-provoking and critical of the liberal tradition within political philosophy when necessary. The short articles, while not totally worthless, are more cursory and may be of interest to those with a passing or historical interest interest, but they don’t provide the intellectual sustenance found in other parts of the book. ( )
  kant1066 | Jun 7, 2013 |
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In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.

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