Michael J.
Sandel
is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard
University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. His classes
are packed and have a waiting list. It has been said that he is perhaps the
most prominent college professor in America. For Sandel, justice is not a
spectator sport. His book Justice: What’s
the Right Thing to Do? © 2009, should be required reading for all citizens
today. Below are excerpts that provide a much better path for finding solutions
that have the power to bring Americans together – instead of widening the gap
even more. They come from pages 262-269 (highlights have been added):
Today most of our political arguments
revolve around welfare and freedom — increasing
economic output and respecting people’s rights. For many people, talk of
virtue in politics brings to mind religious conservatives telling people how to
live. But this is not the only way that conceptions of virtue and the common
good can inform politics. The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes
moral and spiritual questions seriously, but brings them to bear on broad
economic and civic concerns, not only on sex and abortion. . . What might a new
politics of the common good look like? Here are some possible themes:
1.
Citizenship, sacrifice, and service.
If a just society requires a strong
sense of community, it must find a way to cultivate in citizens a concern
for the whole, a dedication to the common good. It can’t be indifferent to
the attitudes and dispositions, the “habits of the heart,” that citizens bring
to public life. It must find a way to lean against purely privatized notions
of the good life, and cultivate civic virtue.
2.
The moral limits of markets.
One of the most striking tendencies of
our time is the expansion of markets and market-oriented reasoning into
spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms.
These questions are not only about
utility and consent. They are also about the right ways of valuing key social
practices — military service,
child-bearing, teaching and learning, criminal punishment, the admission of new
citizens, and so on. Since marketizing
social practices may corrupt or degrade the norms that define them, we
need to ask what non-market norms we want to protect from market intrusion.
This is a question that requires public debate about competing conceptions
of the right way of valuing goods. 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.
3.
Inequality, solidarity, and civic virtue.
Within the United States, the gap
between rich and poor has grown in recent decades, reaching levels not seen
since the 1930s. Yet inequality has not loomed large as a political issue.
The dearth of attention to inequality in
contemporary politics does not reflect any lack of attention to the topic among
political philosophers. The just distribution of income and wealth has been a
mainstay of debate within political philosophy from the 1970s to the present. But
the tendency of philosophers to frame the question in terms of utility or
consent leads them to overlook the argument against inequality most likely to
receive a political hearing and most central to the project of moral and civic
renewal.
Some philosophers who would tax the rich
to help the poor argue in the name of utility; taking a hundred dollars from a
rich person and giving it to a poor person will diminish the rich person’s
happiness only slightly, they speculate, but greatly increase the happiness of
the poor person.
But there is a third, more important
reason to worry about the growing inequality of American life: Too great a gap between rich and poor
undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires. Here’s
how: As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives.
The affluent send their children to private schools (or to public schools in
wealthy suburbs), leaving urban public schools to the children of families who
have no alternative. A similar trend leads to the secession by the privileged
from other public institutions and facilities. Private health clubs replace
municipal recreation centers and swimming pools. Upscale residential communities
hire private security guards and rely less on public police protection. A
second or third car removes the need to rely on public transportation. And so
on. The affluent secede from public places and services, leaving them to
those who can’t afford anything else.
This has two bad effects, one fiscal,
the other civic.
First, public services deteriorate, as those who no longer use those services
become less willing to support them with their taxes. Second, public institutions
such as schools, parks, playgrounds, and community centers cease to be places
where citizens from different walks of life encounter one another. Institutions
that once gathered people together and served as informal schools of civic
virtue become few and far between. The hollowing out of the public realm
makes it difficult to cultivate the solidarity and sense of community on which
democratic citizenship depends.
So, quite apart from its effects on
utility or consent, inequality can be corrosive to civic virtue. Conservatives
enamored of markets and liberals concerned with redistribution overlook this
loss.
If the erosion of the public realm is
the problem, what is the solution? A politics of the common good would take
as one of its primary goals the reconstruction of the infrastructure of civic
life. Rather than focus on redistribution for the sake of broadening access
to private consumption, it would tax the affluent to rebuild public
institutions and services so that rich and poor alike would want to take
advantage them.
Focusing on the civic consequences of
inequality, and ways of reversing them, might find political traction that
arguments about income distribution as such do not. It would also
help highlight the connection between distributive justice and the common
good.
4.
A politics of moral engagement.
Some consider public engagement with
questions of the good life to be a civic transgression, a journey beyond the bounds
of liberal public reason. Politics and law should not become entangled in moral
and religious disputes, we often think, for such entanglement opens the way to
coercion and intolerance. This is a legitimate worry. Citizens of pluralist
societies do disagree about morality and religion. Even if, as I’ve argued, it’s
not possible for government to be neutral on these disagreements, is it nonetheless possible to conduct our
politics on the basis of mutual respect?
The answer, I think, is yes. But we need
a more robust candid engaged civic life than the one to which we’ve become
accustomed. In recent decades, we’ve come to assume that respecting our
fellow citizens’ moral and religious convictions means ignoring them (for
political purposes, at least), leaving them undisturbed, and conducting our public
life — insofar as possible — without reference to them. But this stance
of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually
avoiding it. This can provoke backlash and resentment. It can also
make for an impoverished public discourse, lurching from one news cycle to
the next, preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensational, and the trivial.
A
more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a
stronger, not a weaker, basis for mutual respect. Rather than
avoid the moral and religious convictions that our fellow citizens bring to
public life, we should attend to them more directly — sometimes by challenging and contesting them, sometimes by listening to
and learning from them. There is no guarantee that public deliberation
about hard moral questions will lead in any given situation to agreement — or even
to appreciation for moral and religious views of others. It’s always possible
that learning more about a moral or religious doctrine will lead us to like it
less. But we cannot know until we try.
A politics of moral engagement is not only a
more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more
promising basis for a just society.
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share this with others. It reflects many TOV Values and ideas.
