I can’t believe it’s May 28th and I’ve only read one book this month! I blame it on the slightly textbook-y feeling of this book, my family trip, and mayyybe just that I didn’t really feel like reading this month.
What I mean by the slightly textbook-y feeling of this book:
I think Michael J. Sandel does a great job of introducing the foundations of moral philosophy and providing entertaining and relevant examples that help illustrate the concepts. With that said, reading this book felt like reading the lecture slides or notes from an introductory course to justice. Almost all the philosophers he introduces in this book — Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Rawls, etc. — are philosophers I learned about in high school and Stanford. Obviously, that does not mean I’m an expert in these philosophers’ arguments (not even close!) but this book touches on just the basics/foundations, so reading this book felt like when my middle school French teacher taught us the passé composé for the fourth time.
There were, however, some issues/ concepts that Sandel introduces here that made me think, like:
- military conscription (more broadly, the meaning of citizenship in/for a just society, as well as as it relates to free will)
- surrogacy (free market; free will)
- casual sex (Kant would disapprove lol)
- meritocracy’s flaws (even effort may be the product of a favorable upbringing; insert entitled Stanford student saying, “No, I deserve to be here!”)
- the absurdity of patriotism (the moral significance of national boundaries and the accident of birth as a basis for entitlement)
- the rhetoric of welfare (“When FDR launched Social Security in 1935, he did not represent it as expressing the mutual obligation of citizens to one another. Instead, he designed it to resemble a private insurance scheme, funded by payroll “contributions” rather than general tax revenues. And when, in 1944, he laid out an agenda for the American welfare state, he called it an “economic bill of rights.” Rather than offer a communal rationale, FDR argued that such rights were essential to “true individual freedom,” adding, “necessitous men are not free men.”
Reading this book made me slightly worried that taking a course literally with the same name next year (PUBPOL 103C : Justice) for my major would be just like reading this book again but having to write actual essays instead of one Medium reflection that took me less than 30 minutes to write. That’s okay though because I love course planning and I love justice! Yay justice!
