Justice Quotes

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know; there's an irony: the difficulty consisted in this course is that it teaches what you already know; it works by taking what we know from familiar and unquestioned settings and making it strange. that's how the examples work. ... philosophy estranges us, not by providing us with new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. The risk is once the familiar turns strange it is never quiet the same again. Self-knowledge is like a lost innocence, however unsettling, you find it; it can never be unthought or unknown.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“The more we regard our success as our own doing, the less responsibility we feel for those who fall behind.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“Happiness is not a state of mind but a way of being, “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“We’re not only sentient beings, governed by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also rational beings, capable of reason. If reason determines my will, then the will becomes the power to choose independent of the dictates of nature or inclination”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used . . . He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.21”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“Here then is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant's idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake - a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls cannot.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Putting aside the issue of how compelling her need for money may have been, and how significant her understanding of the consequences, we suggest that her consent is irrelevant. There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy.41”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.40”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”23 This is the formula of humanity as an end.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“The debate over the priority of the right over the good is ultimately a debate about the meaning of human freedom.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“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, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“Science can investigate nature and inquire into the empirical world, but it cannot answer moral questions or disprove
free will. That is because morality and freedom are not empirical concepts.
We can’t prove that they exist, but neither can we make sense of our moral lives without presupposing them.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“the moral worth of an action consists not in the consequences that flow from it, but in the intention from which the act is done. What matters is the motive, and the motive must be of a certain kind. What matters is doing the right thing because it’s right, not for some ulterior motive.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“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.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do

“the idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do