Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Michael J. Sandel
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.”
“philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know; there's an irony: the difficulty consisted in this course is that it teaches what you already know; it works by taking what we know from familiar and unquestioned settings and making it strange. that's how the examples work. ... philosophy estranges us, not by providing us with new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. The risk is once the familiar turns strange it is never quiet the same again. Self-knowledge is like a lost innocence, however unsettling, you find it; it can never be unthought or unknown.”
“The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be”
“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 more we regard our success as our own doing, the less responsibility we feel for those who fall behind.”
“The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just.”
“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.”
“Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what’s just without arguing about the nature of the good life.”
“Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things.”
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Book Keywords:
inspiring, pain, language, justice, pleasure
