#michael sandel

[weil-weil-lautre]

Bernard Williams & Michael Sandel on Justice (2000)

[maaarine]

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (Michael Sandel, 2020)

“Americans, more than most, adhere to the belief that hard work brings success, that our destiny is in our hands.

According to global public opinion surveys, most Americans (77 percent) believe that people can succeed if they work hard; only half of Germans think so

In France and Japan, majorities say hard work is no guarantee of success. (…)

The majority of Americans (57 percent) disagree with the statement “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.”

By contrast, majorities in most other countries, including most European countries, view success as determined mainly by forces outside our control.

These views about work and self-help have implications for solidarity and the mutual obligations of citizens.

If everyone who works hard can be expected to succeed, then those who fall short have no one to blame but themselves, and it is hard to make the case for helping them.

This is the harsh side of meritocracy.

If those who land on top, and those who land on the bottom, are wholly responsible for their fate, then social positions reflect what people deserve.

The rich are rich thanks to their own doing.

If, however, the most fortunate members of society are indebted for their success—to good luck or God’s grace or the community’s support—then the moral case for sharing one another’s fate is stronger. 

It is easier to make the case that we are all in this together.”

[sharpened--edges]

Michael Sandel provides an example of how shifting relationships onto contractual grounds undermines important social values. His example is of a kindergarten that dealt with the problem of parents turning up late to pick up their children by introducing a charge for late pick-up where previously there had not been one. Instead of the financial charge acting as a disincentive, late pick-ups increased. Previously, parents had recognised that turning up late was discourteous and an imposition on the childcare professionals; however, with the financial charge, their actions were no longer wrong but just an additional service that they had contracted. When the kindergarten returned to the original ‘honour’ system, parents did not immediately revert to their original, more virtuous behaviour. Once a practice has been corrupted by market reasoning, it remains distorted, though it is possible that it might be repaired in time. So too values of friendship, cooperation and solidarity can be undermined if contractualism is brought to bear. Imagine a close acquaintance asking you to sign a ‘friend’s contract’ outlining the obligations of friendship and penalties for violation: one would consider that they had misunderstood the very notion of friendship.

Benjamin Franks, Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), p. 70.

[confucianjustice]

It is doubtful that even a perfect meritocracy would be satisfying, either morally or politically. Morally, it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsize rewards that market-driven societies lavish on the successful. Central to the case for the meritocratic ethic is the idea that we do not deserve to be rewarded, or held back, based on factors beyond our control. But is having (or lacking) certain talents really our doing? If not, it is hard to see why those who rise thanks to their talents deserve greater rewards than those who may be equally hardworking but less endowed with the gifts a market society happens to prize. Those who celebrate the meritocratic ideal and make it the center of their political project overlook this moral question. They also ignore something more politically potent: the morally unattractive arttitudes the meritocartic ethic promotes, among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment.

Sandel 2020:25

[dedanhdoclai]

Với nhà kinh tế học, việc nhiều người xếp hàng dài để được hưởng hàng hóa và dịch vụ là lãng phí, không hiệu quả - một dấu hiệu cho thấy hệ thống giá cả không sắp xếp được cung cầu sao cho hợp lý. Cho phép mọi người trả tiền để được hưởng dịch vụ nhanh hơn ở sân bay, ở công viên giải trí, ở đường cao tốc đều làm tăng hiệu quả kinh tế, thông qua việc để con người định giá cho thời gian của mình.

Tiền không mua được gì?  Michael Sandel bàn về giới hạn đạo đức của thị trường. 

[e11evenseggos]

[wrathofgnon]

“To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth. For to have character is to know that I move in a history I neither summon nor command, which carries consequences none the less for my choices and conduct. It draws me closer to some and more distant from others; it makes some aims more appropriate, others less so. As a self-interpreting being, I am able to reflect on my history and in this sense to distance myself from it, but the distance is always precarious and provisional, the point of reflection never finally secured outside the history itself. A person with character thus knows that he is  implicated in various ways even as he reflects, and feels the moral weight of what he knows.”

— Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

[loveandknowledge]

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates compares ordinary citizens to a group of prisoners confined in a cave. All they ever see is the play of shadows on the wall, a reflection of objects they can never apprehend. Only the philosopher, in this account, is able to ascend from the cave to the bright light of day, where he sees things as they really are. Socrates suggests that, having glimpsed the sun, only the philosopher is fit to rule the cave dwellers, if he can somehow be coaxed back into the darkness where they live. Plato’s point is that to grasp the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, we must rise above the prejudices and routines of everyday life. He is right, I think, but only in part. The claims of the cave must be given their due. If moral reflection of dialectical - if it moves back and forth between the judgments we make in concrete situations and the principles that inform those judgments - it needs opinions and convictions, however partial and untutored, as ground and grist. A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.

Michael Sandel, ‘Justice’, Page 29