Michael Sandel Quotations

If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.

One of the appeals of markets, as a public philosophy, is they seem to spare us the need to engage in public arguments about the meaning of goods. So markets seem to enable us to be non-judgmental about values. But I think that's a mistake.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.

The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.

To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.

My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life.

Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

You can't go wrong with fish and chips.

I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.

I am fortunate to have enough money not to have to worry about the necessities of life. Beyond that, I try to think about money as little as possible.

The responsibility of political philosophy that tries to engage with practice is to be clear, or at least accessible.

I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.

It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.

I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I've tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings.

In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality.

I do think it is very important that the religious communities do try to bring their teachings and their insights to bear on the stem cell debate and on the debate about genetic engineering.

I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

Parenthood is a school for humility. We can't choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls "an openness to the unbidden."

In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion- - over nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy.

It's true that to speak of an ethic of giftedness, which is very much the ethic that I deploy in raising questions about designer children and genetic engineering - an appreciation of the giftedness of the child or the giftedness of life does have religious resonance, because a great many religious traditions emphasize the sense in which the good things in life are not all our own doing; they are gifts from God.

I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed.

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.

What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life.

There are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don't have the same moral weight as medicine or health.

Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's.

There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.

I would include non-medical sex selection as one of those practices that I think is morally questionable and that can carry adverse social consequences.

In some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys - and it's usually for boys - reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances - in China, in Korea, in India - in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls.

I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.

One can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race or genetic arms race, whether it's to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future. So it's limitless, and that's another of the features that sets it apart from medical intervention.

Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.

Aiming at health, restoring health - that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing.

I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.

The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease - these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine.

The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide.

What intrigued me most was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don't choose the kind of child that we have.

It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.

There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.

The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don't pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good.

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.

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.

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.

Very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college.

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.

A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

I think part of being a parent, to love one's child, is to accept them as they come - not to see them as instruments of our ambition or as creatures to be molded, as if they were themselves commodities.

[T]he state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

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

I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.

If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

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.

My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society.

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.