Justice: The Questions Michael Sandel Asks Before You Answer

I remember Michael Sandel’s Justice becoming a subject of conversation in Korea in the early 2010s. EBS brought the Harvard course to Korean television. A book was also in circulation, and suddenly it was possible to talk about a dilemma from a university lecture with someone who had never studied philosophy.

One Track, Then a Bridge

A trolley is about to run down five people. If you can divert it to a track where it would kill one person, would you? Many people say they would. Change the scene so that the only way to save five is to push a person from a bridge, and some of the same people hesitate. The number saved is the same. What would you have to do in the second case that you did not have to do in the first?

The course does not use these questions to find out who is good at guessing the lecturer’s opinion. Sandel asks students to put a reason into words, then tries the reason on another case. A judgment that seemed obvious in one setting may be difficult to carry over.

Three Ways of Thinking About Justice

One approach asks what will increase welfare, as in the utilitarian traditions of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Another asks what respect for freedom requires. The book follows different answers to that question, including Kant’s emphasis on moral autonomy and Rawls’s way of testing the fairness of institutions. An Aristotelian approach asks what qualities a practice ought to honor and what its purpose is.

The approaches can point to different answers. Their value for me was in making the disagreement clearer. When I ask whether a decision is fair, am I thinking about the result, a right someone has or the kind of shared life a rule encourages?

Putting a Reason Where Another Person Can Hear It

Before reading the book I associated these philosophers with material I might have to remember for a test. Sandel made their arguments feel like things I could use to check what I was saying. That is part of why the course found a wider audience. A society can use the same word, fairness, while people have very different ideas of what it would take to live by it.

Justice · Michael Sandel’s Harvard course