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.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the most significant change in recent decades is the infiltration of market values into areas of life that shouldn't be governed by them.
Michael Sandel emphasizes that the critical transformation over the last thirty years is not merely an escalation of greed, but rather the pervasive spread of market values into facets of human life where they are inappropriate. This phenomenon has profound implications for how we understand relationships, ethics, and the very fabric of society, urging us to consider the consequences of allowing economic principles to dictate personal and social interactions.
In practice
In a speech about the ethical implications of capitalism.
First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
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.
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.
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.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.
What did I know best that I had not written about_x000D_ and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.
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