Michael J. Sandel Quotes & Sayings

The most obvious reason for giving the best flutes to the best flute players is that doing so will produce the best music, making us listeners better off. But this is not Aristotle's reason. He thinks the best flutes should go to the best flute players because that's what flutes are for - to be played well. — Michael J. Sandel

A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or "crowding out" their intrinsic interest or commitment. — Michael J. Sandel

The idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve. — Michael J. Sandel

In 1945, the president of Dartmouth justified limits on Jewish enrollment by invoking the mission of the school: Dartmouth is a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students. — Michael J. Sandel

A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia. — Michael J. Sandel

And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy? — Michael J. Sandel

If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community.
'A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end. — Michael J. Sandel

The self-satisfaction and material preoccupations of his time was independent of his point about the injustices of poverty, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. But he saw them as connected. To reverse these injustices, Kennedy thought it necessary to challenge the complacent way of life he saw around him. He did not hesitate to be judgmental. And yet, by invoking Americans' pride in their country, he also, at the same time, appealed to a sense of community. — Michael J. Sandel

prison cell upgrade: $82 per night. — Michael J. Sandel

Of income and wealth would not matter very much. — Michael J. Sandel

Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what's just without arguing about the nature of the good life. — Michael J. Sandel

The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just. — Michael J. Sandel

As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall. — Michael J. Sandel

To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to the disagreements that will inevitably arise. — Michael J. Sandel

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. — Michael J. Sandel

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.29 — Michael J. Sandel

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. — Michael J. Sandel

The descent of sport into spectacle is not unique to the age of genetic engineering. But it illustrates how performance-enhancing technologies, genetic or otherwise, can erode the part of athletic and artistic performance that celebrates natural talents and gifts. — Michael J. Sandel

Ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom. And — Michael J. Sandel

Whenever my behavior is biologically determined or socially conditioned, it is not truly free. To act freely, according to Kant, is to act autonomously. And to act autonomously is to act according to a law I give myself - not according to the dictates of nature or social convention. — Michael J. Sandel

They defined one benefit of a higher speed limit as a quicker commute to and from work, calculated the economic benefit of the time saved (valued at an average wage of $20 an hour) and divided the savings by the number of additional deaths. They discovered that, for the convenience of driving faster, Americans were effectively valuing human life at the rate of $1.54 million per life. That was the economic gain, per fatality, of driving ten miles an hour faster.15 — Michael J. Sandel

Honesty is the best policy. It's also the most profitable. — Michael J. Sandel

If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities — Michael J. Sandel

Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm ... that all values are merely subjective. — Michael J. Sandel

Call center technology enables companies to "score" incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places. — Michael J. Sandel

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others. — Michael J. Sandel

If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth? — Michael J. Sandel

Philosophy is a distancing, if not debilitating, activity. — Michael J. Sandel

Now they can acquire "the egg from one source (including, in many cases, the intended mother) and the womb from another."50 This "unbundling" of the supply chain, Spar explains, has prompted growth in the surrogacy market.51 "By removing the traditional link between egg, womb, and mother, gestational surrogacy [has] reduced the legal and emotional risks that had surrounded traditional surrogacy and allowed a new market to thrive. — Michael J. Sandel

If you look closely at the price-gouging debate, you'll notice that the arguments for and against price-gouging laws revolve around three ideas: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue. — Michael J. Sandel

Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea. — Michael J. Sandel

Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an openness to the unbidden. — Michael J. Sandel

Government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person from himself, or to impose the majority's beliefs about how best to live. The only actions for which a person is accountable to society, Mill argues, are those that affect others. As long as I am not harming anyone else, my "independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."19 — Michael J. Sandel

[T]he commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value [ ... ] but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good. — Michael J. Sandel

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be — Michael J. Sandel

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. — Michael J. Sandel

When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Social Security in 1935, he did not present it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another ... Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to "true individual freedom," adding, "necessitous men are not free men. — Michael J. Sandel