Top 73 Michael J Sandel Quotes
#1. 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.
Michael Sandel
#2. The descent of sport into spectacle is not unique to the age of genetic engineering. But it illustrates how performance-enhancing technologies, genetic or otherwise, can erode the part of athletic and artistic performance that celebrates natural talents and gifts.
Michael J. Sandel
#3. If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth?
Michael J. Sandel
#4. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities
Michael J. Sandel
#5. 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.
Michael Sandel
#6. There are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don't have the same moral weight as medicine or health.
Michael Sandel
#7. 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.
Michael Sandel
#8. 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.
Michael Sandel
#9. 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.
Michael Sandel
#10. And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Michael J. Sandel
#11. 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.
Michael Sandel
#12. Call center technology enables companies to "score" incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from affluent places.
Michael J. Sandel
#13. 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
#14. 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.
Michael Sandel
#15. There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.
Michael Sandel
#16. A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.
Michael J. Sandel
#17. 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.
Michael Sandel
#18. 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.
Michael Sandel
#19. To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Michael Sandel
#20. Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm ... that all values are merely subjective.
Michael J. Sandel
#21. 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.
Michael Sandel
#23. 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.
Michael Sandel
#24. 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.
Michael Sandel
#25. What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life.
Michael Sandel
#26. 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.
Michael Sandel
#27. 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.
Michael Sandel
#28. Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
Michael Sandel
#29. 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.
Michael Sandel
#30. 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.
Michael Sandel
#31. 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.
Michael Sandel
#33. 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.
Michael Sandel
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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.
Michael Sandel
#37. 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.
Michael Sandel
#38. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
Michael Sandel
#39. 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
#40. 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.
Michael Sandel
#42. 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.
Michael Sandel
#43. 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.
Michael Sandel
#44. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael J. Sandel
#45. As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall.
Michael J. Sandel
#46. I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.
Michael Sandel
#47. The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
Michael J. Sandel
#48. In 1945, the president of Dartmouth justified limits on Jewish enrollment by invoking the mission of the school: Dartmouth is a Christian College founded for the Christianization of its students.
Michael J. Sandel
#49. 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.
Michael Sandel
#50. Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.
Michael J. Sandel
#51. 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.
Michael Sandel
#52. The idea that the right way of valuing goods and social practices depends on the purposes and ends those practices serve.
Michael J. Sandel
#54. 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.
Michael Sandel
#55. The responsibility of political philosophy that tries to engage with practice is to be clear, or at least accessible.
Michael Sandel
#56. Ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom. And
Michael J. Sandel
#57. 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.
Michael Sandel
#58. 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.
Michael Sandel
#59. 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.
Michael Sandel
#60. 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.
Michael Sandel
#61. 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.
Michael Sandel
#62. 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.
Michael Sandel
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Michael Sandel
#65. 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.
Michael Sandel
#66. 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.
Michael Sandel
#67. 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."
Michael Sandel
#68. Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea.
Michael J. Sandel
#69. 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.
Michael Sandel
#70. 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
#71. [T]he commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value [ ... ] but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good.
Michael J. Sandel
#72. 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.
Michael Sandel
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