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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights a widespread frustration with the lack of meaningful discussions on ethics and justice in public discourse.
Michael Sandel's quote reflects his observation of a global issue where vital conversations about justice, ethics, and values are often neglected in public discussions. He emphasizes the importance of addressing these fundamental questions in diverse societies around the world, suggesting that deeper engagement with moral and ethical issues is essential for the health of public discourse.
In practice
In a panel discussion on social justice, this quote could highlight the need for more ethical dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms.
It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.