Harvard Professor of Government and 2009 Reith Lecturer, Michael Sandel considers the role of justice in our society and our lives, revealing how an understanding of philosophy can help to make sense of politics, religion, morality - and our own convictions.
Bio
Michael Sandel
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.
He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997; translated into eight foreign languages), Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007).
His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times.
In philosophy, the concept of a proper proportion between a person's deserts (what is merited) and the good and bad things that befall or are allotted to him or her. Aristotle's discussion of the virtue of justice has been the starting point for almost all Western accounts. For him, the key element of justice is treating like cases alike, an idea that has set later thinkers the task of working out which similarities (need, desert, talent) are relevant. Aristotle distinguishes between justice in the distribution of wealth or other goods (distributive justice) and justice in reparation, as, for example, in punishing someone for a wrong he has done (retributive justice). The notion of justice is also essential in that of the just state, a central concept in political philosophy. See alsolaw.
What good are all your thoughts, if you can not act upon them?
NONE of US is not as Dumb as All Of US!
I do desire ,we become better strangers. Shakespeare.
The worth of the state in the long run,is the worth of the individuals composing it. Better to wear out than to rust out.
Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling. The darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making. William James. Wall Street next I slap you ,you will take it and like it! right public. We used to have a hoarding Law, the uncompassionate accumalation of wealth, when NOT putting anything back into the community, where you nmade your wealth. Hoarding sentence was very harsh/hanging! Computers? are we out sourcing our lives!? General rule of Justice is DO NO HARM, as the Kabbalihist Rabban of Jerusalem Gameliel, Do not kill or harm anything you can not replace!