And Justice For All

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

Perhaps my biggest surprise about this book is that I had never heard of it before my father-in-law handed me his copy and told me I would like it.  He was right.  I liked it.  A lot.

Sandel teaches philosophy at Harvard to a packed house.  It's not hard to see why.  The first 8 (out of 10) chapters in this book are undoubtedly his lectures, and they are great.  He has a wonderful ability to get right to the heart of he matter by introducing the well-chosen example in a good manner to illustrate a philosophical problem. (Many of the philosophical problems he uses are commonly used--I have used several of them myself--but Sandel has a pitch-perfect way of introducing the problems.)  The chapter on Kant is easily the best introduction to Kant I have ever read.

The book goes off the rails a bit in the last two chapters when it moves from Dispassionate Lecture Mode into Advocacy Mode.  That switch could have been a disaster, but it (surprisingly) wasn't all that annoying--underneath the sudden change to a tone of "Let me tell you the Right way to think about it" there is still the foundation of the dispassionate lecture on the topic.

So, what is Justice?  After reading the book, I am now fully convinced there is not a good, universal answer to that.  Sandel identifies three main streams of thought: the utilitarian, the freedom advocate (both libertarian and Rawlsian variants), and the Aristotelian.  I'm an Aristotelian in this sense--Justice is doing the Right thing even if the Right thing does not make people happier (the utilitarian answer) or does not provide more "freedom" (however defined).  But, giving that answer does not solve the problem at all--which is a bigger problem than Sandel wants to admit.  He too fancies himself an Aristotelian, but his Aristotelianism and mine are quite different.  I have no hesitance in saying Justice is doing what God wants us to do.  Pleasing God is the ultimate aim to which all of our actions should aim--it is, to be technical, the telos of our lives.  Sandel has some sort of seemingly mushy communitarianism as his telos.  (He may actually have a less mushy view on the matter--this all comes up in the last two chapters of the book when the argument gets fuzzier.)

So, once I have a telos, I can answer the abstract questions of Justice.  Should I torture a terrorist's cute little 5 year old daughter to get him to reveal the location of a nuclear bomb in New York City?  Well, Justice is doing what God wants done in that situation.  Or, for Sandel,  Justice is doing whatever it is that communitarians want done in that situation.  See how easy that is?

When faced with actually making real decisions in real time, it is useful to have a starting place-- a view of Justice from which reasoning about the matter needs to start.  But, knowing your starting place is really not enough.  For a utilitarian to say the Just outcome is the one that maximizes the sum of human happiness is nice in the abstract, but not terribly useful in the concrete.  Rawls...well, I better not get started on Rawls...I never liked Rawlsian solutions.  At all.

This lack of  answers is what makes philosophical matters so ultimately intellectually fulfilling.  Sandel's book tries too hard to wrap up the discussion so that it looks like there is an answer to the question of Justice.  But, there is no answer.  And if there were an answer, then it wouldn't be nearly as fun to think about the question.  Nor would it be as fun to read Sandel's book.  Which, by the way, I highly recommend that you do.