Justice

“…resists the temptation to repeat himself for the sake of the ungenerous or slow-witted reader”

That’s off my list, then. I can’t read books like that. I need to have the point made and remade. I never get it the first time. Constant repetition is the only way for the likes of me. Eventually I’ll get there, but it takes time.

I missed Russell’s comment in responding to mollymooly. Well, I do understand the choice, Russell, and especially in the context of your course I think his is a better introduction to moral thinking in general (you might want to hang on to chapter 2 of my book, though, which would fit reasonably well with his. I think it is kosher to pdf it and supply it to the students…).

“A question occurred to me while I was watching it: will the fact that we can all watch Sandel doing this now, on TV, radically improve the quality of moral philosophy teaching at American universities in the coming year or so?”

Or does it herald a massive downsizing of the academy?

A few thoughts:

Watching one of these videos was quite a trip, since they’re from my sophomore year, when I and many friends took Sandel’s course. It’s startling to see the camera zoom in on our faces.

Note that the videos do not include the full content of the lectures, but have been edited down. In particular, I think a fair amount of the student commentary has been condensed, and awkward pauses and slow transitions eliminated. Clipping some student questions and answers probably serves the videos, but might leave a misleading impression of how the lectures flowed originally.

I’m of somewhat mixed minds about students “teaching each-other” during a large lecture. I think it was useful for Sandel, rhetorically, but many, myself often included, were frustrated by the amount of time spent on it. Sometimes the questions were fantastic, to be sure, but just as often they were inane or redundant. I do think you’re right though that most of the students who showed up to lectures were awake and paying attention most of the time.

Sandel’s “office hours” were worth even more than the lectures, I think, or than the weekly hour-long discussion sections, and I regret only going to them a handful of times. Instead of 50 minutes in a giant lecture (over 1k students were enrolled; at least many hundreds showed up regularly to lecture), they were conducted as a sort of seminar, a couple hours long, with about 15 or 20 students. For all that Sandel is an excellent lecturer, he’s even better in smaller conversation.

Whatever anyone says about large courses, it’s fantastic to have a conversation-provoking courses like this include nearly a sixth of the student body. Everywhere on campus arguments about moral philosophy could be overheard at mealtimes.

(Just for clarification, the awkward pauses and slow transitions I mentioned were in student comments and the back-and-forth. Sandel’s speaking is pretty much like it seems. :-)

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with the class, Harry; I just know that after this year, I’m going to rework it extensively. I’ve like your book very much–and it’s gone over with the students quite well–because it lays down, in dense but accessible technical language, the bare specifics of many of the central secular perspectives on justice which I want my students to be aware of, before we go on to examine the Biblical and Christian traditions of justice themselves. The thing is, I feel like the students may need more than just your clear, concise descriptions; they may need a greater appreciation of how these ideas play out historically, and with real-world examples. Hence, Sandel’s approach. Even if I do choose his book, I probably won’t assign all of it: maybe chapters 2 (utilitarianism), 3 (libertarianism), 5 (Kant), 6 (Rawls), and 8 (Aristotle) would be it. We’ll see.

I’ve watched several of the lectures online (though sometimes in pieces and not in chronological order).
I thought the most interesting of those I saw was the session devoted partly to the case of conscription (the draft), pro and con. This is obviously a question in which many of the students have potentially a very direct stake, and one on which I thought Sandel made his own position — namely, that it is unjust to rely on an all-volunteer army, especially in wartime — fairly clear. He didn’t say that verbatim, but I thought it was clear anyway. (I haven’t read the book so I don’t know how Sandel handles the draft issue there.) Perhaps Jacob Rus, who was sitting in Sanders Theater at the time, can tell me whether my impression of this class on the draft vs. volunteer army tallies with his own.

I spent some time with Sandel’s critique of Rawls, trying to figure it out. ASIR he leaned heavily on an argument that Rawls pays too little attention to issues of as-it-were personal integrity, almost as if talents themselves (and even perhaps needs and desires) could be redistributed throughout society as the rulers might wish, rather than each talent, bit of knowledge or skill, and so forth being quite tightly tied to its individual holder. I find it difficult and indeed basically impossible to believe Rawls could possibly have believed that, and it seems like an exaggeration of a basically libertarian point that also applies for example to taxation. If it’s correct, though, I’ll have to give Sandel another chance, and maybe should move this book farther up my list.

As support for my probable misreading not being quite as bizarre as it admittedly appears, I’ll offer a character in Infinite Jest who’s said to believe his celibacy contributes to the virility of other men.

Leaving the question of German archaisms to one side for a second, infantilizers, please to consider the wisdom of Edmund White’s observation “for the aged, pornography is a substitute for eroticism” and its consequences for didonai diken non Holbo.

It’s a great course. And Sandel has been teaching it for decades to packed lecture theatres of 1000 or more Harvard students. The kinds of people who will go on, later in their lives (or indeed sooner in their lives), to top positions in American government, finance and industry. And yet looking around these kinds of circles today you could be forgiven to thinking that whatever ideas or forces have been shaping the way in which they have been run, a concern for Justice has not really been among them. I can’t help thinking that something has gone badly wrong…

engels@24: If a course like this has any concrete, lasting impact at all on the future behavior of the majority of students (and I think such an assumption is questionable), then I’d suggest it’s the sort of impact that will appear more on the margins, in the context of smallish decisions, rather than in terms of changing the basic character of “American government, finance, and industry.”
Moreover, how many of these students will end up in “top positions” in government and business? Some will, of course, but probably a lot fewer than you think. Even if you define “top positions” quite broadly, there are not that many of them, and the people who end up filling them have gone to a fairly wide variety of schools — even if, as is no doubt the case, the Ivy League and certain other elite institutions continue to be over-represented.

This is an apt time to be discussing Sandel—isn’t the Swiss move to ban minarets just the kind of thing communitarians favor?

I would rather say it’s the kind of predictable consequence of communitarianism that Sandel pretends to be unable to foresee, while claiming that he just wants to reinvigorate liberalism.

Also, wrt the “fantasy” thread, on a strict deontological view, Ender’s actions can presumably be read as, if not quite moral, then not strictly immoral. He didn’t believe he was killing actual people. And though (going on the summary posted on the thread) he did show willingness to kill real people in the real world, perhaps he also showed during his training period that he was a good person, not a murderer, someone who would actually never therefore kill people in the real world. (?)

#31: but there’s a crucial difference, in my opinion. The things you cite are unintended consequences (and, moreover, a rather trivial one in the case of unattractive speech by individuals who don’t have state power behind them.) The exclusion (or worse) of “others”, on any honest account of human psychology, is an integral and inevitable part of exalting communal solidarity as the ideal basis of morality.

_The things you cite are unintended consequences_

You think Sandel _intends_ minaret banning?

The US/UK have killed a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis in the past couple of years – I don’t know what “the right thing to do” is in such a case, but have a hunch that it might be overthrowing the governments that do such things, rather than giving young people the false impression that they can affect major change by adjusting their personal behaviour.

I think Barbar has it. Sandel is, in the course and the book, asking us to make judgments based on a weighing of reasons, which reasons will include the value of connection and attachment, but also many others. I agree, very much, that a book he wrote 30 years ago contains several statements and passages which, if you took them seriously as the basis of a political philosophy, would have pretty awful consequences. And if someone had said (as no-one has) that that book has had some pretty lamentable effects on the thinking of scholars in other disciplines who simply jumped on Sandel’s critique of Rawlsian liberalism uncritically, I’d agree with that too. I was pointing to this book, and (without watching them all) this set of lectures. I thought Moyn’s review was marred by the imputation to Sandel of things that he knows Sandel has said in the past (and by a kind of indirectness and erudition that makes it hard for a simpleton like me to follow)

_perhaps even worse than that in a way_

So a political philosopher who underplays the possibly bad implications of his views is “possibly even worse” than someone who intends an actual bit of minority oppression?

With the Swiss vote, the communitarian chickens have come home to roost, but what about Sandel’s Mark 2 communitarianism to which he has added some epicycles ? Its not clear how the new Sandel would answer this question because its not clear whether his new position is coherent. It seems to me that as long as Sandel continues to hold on to the old communitarian guiding idea of his that shared values , community attachments and ‘situatedness’ are crucial he has no way to salvage the idea that in conflict cases ( where attachments to culture will conflict with what justice requires as it does in the Swiss case ) there is some notion of justice that is independent of these community attachments. Why should those who voted ‘yes’ feel that their obligation to the Swiss constitution trumps their obligation to what their community says is the right thing to so with which they identify and feel solidarity with ? As is clear from episode 11 Michael Sandel recognizes this type of problem but he has no working solution to these types of conflicts and he seems to be faced with a dilemma : embrace the old communitarian solution and go with the community or go with reason which is able to detach itself from community . The thing is that if he adopts the first solution then he has not added anything new to his old position , whereas if he opts for the second he has completely abandoned communitarian project.

“…what to do in cases of conflict between two genuine and irreducible values,…”

Oh I see , those Swiss who voted ‘yes’ because they felt the pull of a genuine value rooted in their community, were right to vote ‘yes’ …. Thank you for clarifying that one for us Chris.

What, you don’t think a review can be excellent while saying things that you disagree with? I’d hate everything if I had that view.

#44 Ah yes, because that’s what I said, wasn’t it?

Actually, you said that Sandel has no “working solution” to the general problem of adjudicating between universal and associative values and then (falsely) implied that this would leave him paralysed in the Swiss case. I merely pointed out that wrt the general problem, we are all in same boat.

Kant’s TI is very much alive and kicking.

To cut a long story very short, Kant’s problem was: if everything is governed by the laws of nature, we have determinism, if we have determinism we cannot have free will and if we don’t have free will we cannot have morality.

You can find variations on Kant’s TI in numerous contemporary responses to this problem, and while his TI might not provide “the answer” to the problem, it remains unsolved and Kant’s approach a valid one.

Also, Habermas relies heavily on Kantian TI and while one is of course free to reject his approach, nobody can deny that he is an influential major player in these debates.

When you talk about “full-blooded kantian ethics” you are simply setting an impossibly high bar and your usage of “dead in the water” doesn’t conform to our ordinary language understanding of the expression.

Kant’s moral philosophy was very much bound up in the architectonic of his system. The second Critique, after all, was meant to repair the gaps left by the first Critique. The paradox of the thing is that practical reason for Kant was basically pure reason made practical or construed from the practical standpoint, but, in some sense, practical reason, as “will”, from the outset subtended the whole system, (as Fichte was to make explicit), as if, in order for something to be true, we must will it so. But then, from one side, Kant was a sheer skeptic about “free will”, as the phenomenal world had, by assumption, to be construed and organized in terms of a strict linear determinism a la Newton, such that the only “evidence” for the “free will” was the painful sense of constraint one experiences, when one “freely” imposes upon oneself the moral law, “Ehrfurcht”, reverence, “honor-dread”. Only the compulsive “necessity” of the moral law, (conflated with the bindingness of norms), permits one to surmount phenomenal determinism. If TI is an empirical realism, (and thus encodes a notion of the knowledge as product, of the productivity of knowledge), it is nonetheless rooted in a purely noumenal will. Add on the strange solipsism, with the ego equivalent only to itself, such that it imposes the very law to which it is subjected, and strives to render itself “identical” with itself, and with the other only an intellectual posit, who is accorded respect only as equally an autonomous “author” of the moral law, which a forteriori can in no wise be phenomenally apparent, and the very rigorism and purism of Kantian morality, as concerned only with intentions, comes to seem “grounded” in sheer skepticism. It’s hard to see how any of this could be “saved” in its original conception and form. But the placelessness, the non-situatedness of the “autonomous”, self-chosing individual in Kantian-type moral thought does seem to carry on the imprint of its “origin”.

But then the strict Laplacean determinism has long since be supplanted by more stochastic accounts of natural causality. And reflection on selfhood and agency has since become far more socialized. Habermas’ kind of neo-neo-Kantianism, by which he waters down, if not jettisons, the more Hegelian and Marxian aspects of his heritage (Adorno), is emphatically materialist and doesn’t make appeal to TI. And it’s precisely designed to try to reconcile the situated socialized “nature” of selves/agents and their differing ways of life with the “unconditional” demands of universal justice. How successful his attempted mediation is and whether an hermeneutically thicker conception of the life-world, a more Hegelian sense of the “contradictoriness” of the dynamics of such mediation and a more Marxian sense of its material conditioning might not be preferable as more realistic is another matter.

geo, I know where you’re coming from, but please just take a look at almost any legal system: the supposition of free will is essential and has significant consequences for people standing trial. I’d say that the supposition of free will is also of great importance to our relationships with other people and to our sense of self. Also, you would have to discard quite a bit of our everyday discourse as nonsense, if free will is not assumed. And even when tackled with the means of cogsci etc. it remains an incredibly difficult and central problem.

Novakant: Yes, I suppose I sounded pretty cavalier. I know we’ve got to have some working notion of personal responsibility, for everyday legal and moral purposes, and the traditional concept of “free will” serves that purpose well enough. In my own upbringing (and for most of Western history), it served another, less benign purpose as well: ie, as the rationale for eternal punishment, which could hardly be justified if our behavior were caused rather than uncaused (ie, “free,” in the theological sense). So once humanity is free of the awful incubus of eternal damnation, radical pragmatists will no longer fuss about “free will.”

Well, maybe a little. “Free will” also makes some mischief in the realm of social policy. It lets the rest of us off too easily from helping lazy, foolish, or even depraved people, who are said to be “responsible” for their own bad behavior and its consequences. Yes, they are responsible — in the sense that we shouldn’t give them a free pass for that behavior; but no, they’re not responsible — in the sense that we mustn’t ignore the probably large and intricate web of causes that produced it, almost always including inadequate material, social, and intellectual resources in early life. Of course, ignoring those causes is exactly what conservatives want to do, since addressing them would cost money, which said conservatives have of course earned through their own free and responsible behavior and are not going to part with for the sake of some damn deadbeats.

JoB: How exactly does Davidson’s existence entail the existence of free will?

I live in Ireland, and I am currently studying for a Master’s Degree in International Human Rights Law. I have watched these lectures with interest, and I have been amazed with the quality of the lectures. Sandel has such command over the attentions of the students, all the more impressive given the size of the theatre and the number of students in attendance.

I must say, however, that I was shocked at how unintelligent the average students seemed to be. This is Harvard, after all, and all of these students are at least 18 years old (many are older still). Am I being unfair? I would certainly concede that isolated comments are hardly reliable portents into the students’ respective capabilities, yet I was still surprised.

In Ireland, where I am from, students of this age really would be much more well informed. Aside from knowledge (one may believe that, before the age of 18, people would be better served developing aspects of their lives other than knowledge of political philosophy, and I would wholeheartedly agree) two more concerning perceptions forced their way continually into my mind…
1. The average level of innate intelligence and thoughtfulness was much lower than I would have expected from Sophomore students at Harvard…
2. The relatively inarticulate way many of the commenting students phrased their contributions was disappointing (all the more so if Jacob Rus is right about the extent of the post-lecture editing)…

I am sorry if this seems unreasonable. It is just that, from my experience in Ireland (and in other places in Europe) students here – on the whole – seem to be much more advanced in their intellectual development by this age. Here, this would be especially true for those especially who have had every possible opportunity in life (such as nearly all of the students in Sandel’s class).

sandel’s a neo-con pedazo de mierda.

no wonder the EotAW skank approve of him