Michael Sandel’s book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. Based on Sandel's famously popular Harvard course, Justice is an introduction to political and moral philosophy; it covers the arguments of the major schools of moral thought like an introductory ethics course, but its focus is on understanding ethics as a tool for informing, assessing and debating the justice of our legal and political systems.
Before reading Justice, I already had some background in philosophy; I’ve been interested in the subject ever since my parents gave me A Little History of Philosophy (a book that also prompted me to read the last book I reviewed; The Life You Can Save) in the seventh grade. After that, I read a lot of introductory philosophy books during my middle school years, and although that phase ended before I reached high school I have still thought about and read up on philosophy, specifically ethics, relatively frequently since.
Consequently, when I picked up Justice last week I was already familiar with the major names and ideas of ethics; from the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative and John Rawls’s veil of ignorance. I was interested, however, to see how Sandel would apply these schools of philosophy to political thought - considering that I understand significantly more about politics now than I did in seventh grade.
Not only were my expectations easily exceeded by Justice’s ethics-based political analyses, I was blown away by how much I learned about the ethical theories I thought I already understood. Kant’s categorical imperative, the logic behind which had always eluded my comprehension, is something that I now am proud to say I understand thanks to Sandel’s explanation.
But Kant’s work is famously abstruse; and I’m not surprised that I was able to better understand it four years after having first read about it as a pre-teen. What did surprise me, however, was how much better I apprehended the nuances of utilitarianism and Rawlsian contractarianism after Sandel explained them. Sandel’s writing is lucid, logical and illuminating, and as I scribbled furiously in the margins I recorded many woah moments at previously unconsidered contingencies, objections, or implications of the various arguments I read about.
For that enlightenment alone I would have greatly enjoyed and appreciated Justice. But, of course, the most important aspect of the book is Sandel’s discussions of politics through the lens of ethics. As for these, I could not be a bigger fan. Sandel uses many of the most pressing political issues of our time - from taxation and the welfare state (distributive justice), immigration and the use of torture to the morality of free markets, affirmative action, and abortion - as starting points, illustrations, and counterexamples in discussing the respective merits and flaws of various schools of ethical thought. Most importantly, he uses those schools of thought to help us better understand the underlying ethical principles and assumptions that we’re arguing over when we debate politics. A quote from the first chapter:
Political philosophy cannot resolve these disagreements once and for all. But it can give shape to the arguments we have, and bring moral clarity to the alternatives we confront as democratic citizens.
In short, the purpose of the book is to make clear what exactly we’re choosing between when we consider competing policy options, conceptions of justice or visions of politics. What ethical principles are we implicitly affirming, or denying, when we choose one option or another? That’s the question Sandel tries to equip us to better ask and answer.
And in that mission, I think Sandel definitely succeeds. This book challenged a lot of the opinions I held on political issues going into it - and while most of those opinions ultimately didn’t change (although some definitely did), what’s more important is that it forced me to more precisely understand why I believe in the positions I do, and to subject those reasons to more rigorous scrutiny through the principles of ethics.
I don’t ultimately agree with the argument that Sandel makes in the final two chapters of the book, but it is because of the tools, knowledge and understanding that the book provided me that I was able to understand what his argument was and to articulate the reasons for my disagreement. As with many of the topics discussed in the book, while my fundamental position didn’t change, I now am far more aware of the nuances on both sides and the moral reasons for the difficulty and complexity of the issue.
I recommend Justice to anyone who has a passing knowledge of politics and an interest in better understanding the debates that surround it. No prior knowledge of moral philosophy is required; the book is an excellent starting point and brings its own explanations. The only thing required is a willingness to engage rigorously with the text, a resolve to think hard about the ideas it poses, and a desire to answer that basic question: What’s the right thing to do?
댓글