Ethics summary Justice by Sandel, VU Business Administration
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Course
Ethics
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
Book
Justice
Summary of the book 'Justice' by Sandel for the Ethics course at VU. Given in the 3rd year of studying Business Administration. The summary contains all relevant information from the book for the Ethics exam.
Samenvatting: Justice
What is the right thing to do?
Michael J. Sandel
Chapter 1- Ethical Dillemas
There are 3 main ideas with respect to thinking about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting
freedom, and promoting virtue.
Three approaches to justice
To ask whether a society is just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize—income and wealth,
duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors. A just society distributes these
goods in the right way; it gives each person his or her. But what are people due, and why?
Idea of maximizing welfare. Why? We think prosperity makes us better off than we would otherwise
be—as individuals and as a society. Prosperity matters, in other words, because it contributes to our
welfare. Idea of utilitarian has to do with this.
Idea of respecting freedom. Most of these theories emphasize respect for individual rights, though
they disagree among themselves about which rights are most important. The idea is that justice
means respecting freedom and individual rights. Also, about respecting certain universal human
rights. There is tension about freedom in the field of the ‘free market’. Leading the laissez-faire camp
are free-market libertarians who believe that justice consists in respecting and upholding the
voluntary choices made by consenting adults. The fairness camp contains theorists of a more
egalitarian bent. They argue that unfettered markets are neither just nor free. In their view, justice
requires policies that remedy social and economic disadvantages and give everyone a fair chance at
success.
Idea of promoting virtue. These are theories that see justice as bound up with virtue and the good
life.
Moral reflection consists in revising our judgment about the right thing to do or rethink the principle
we initially espoused. As we encounter new situations, we move back and forth between our
judgments and our principles, revising each in light of the other. This turning of mind, from the world
of action to the realm of reasons and back again.
Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism
The highest principle of morality is to maximize happiness, the overall balance of pleasure over pain.
According to Bentham, the right thing to do is whatever will maximize utility. By “utility,” he means
whatever produces pleasure or happiness, and whatever prevents pain or suffering. We all have
dislike pain and like pleasure, they are our sovereign masters. The utilitarian philosophy recognizes
this fact and makes it the basis of moral and political life. This is a principle also for legislators, not
only individuals. In deciding what laws or policies to enact, a government should do whatever will
maximize the happiness of the community as a whole. According to Bentham, it is “a fictitious body,”
composed of the sum of the individuals who comprise it.
Objection 1: Individual Rights
The most glaring weakness of utilitarianism, many argue, is that it fails to respect individual rights.
By caring only about the sum of satisfactions, it can run roughshod over individual people. For the
utilitarian, individuals matter, but only in the sense that each person’s preferences should be
, counted along with everyone else’s. But this means that the utilitarian logic, if consistently applied,
could sanction ways of treating persons that violate what we think of as fundamental norms of
decency and respect, as the following cases illustrate.
Objection 2: A Common Currency of Value
Utilitarianism claims to offer a science of morality, based on measuring, aggregating, and calculating
happiness. It weighs preferences without judging them. Everyone’s preferences count equally. This
nonjudgmental spirit is the source of much of its appeal. And its promise to make moral choice a
science informs much contemporary economic reasoning. But in order to aggregate preferences, it is
necessary to measure them on a single scale. Bentham’s idea of utility offers one such common
currency. But is it possible to translate all moral goods into a single currency of value without losing
something in the translation? The second objection to utilitarianism doubts that it is. According to
this objection, all values can’t be captured by a common currency of value.
In summary, the objections are that t does not give adequate weight to human dignity and individual
rights, and that it wrongly reduces everything of moral importance to a single scale of pleasure and
pain.
John Stuart Mill
Mill tried to save utilitarianism by recasting it as a more humane, less calculating doctrine. Its central
principle is that people should be free to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm to
others. Government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person from
himself, or to impose the majority’s beliefs about how best to live. The only actions for which an
individual is accountable to society, are those that affect others.
Mill has a response to the 1st objection to utilitarianism: Mill thinks we should maximize utility, not
case by case, but in the long run. And over time, he argues, respecting individual liberty will lead to
the greatest human happiness.
Mill has a response to the 2nd objection to utilitarianism: Unlike Bentham, Mill believes it is possible
to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures—to assess the quality, not just the quantity or
intensity, of our desires. And he thinks he can make this distinction without relying on any moral
ideas other than utility itself.
Mill was the more humane philosopher, Benthan the more consistent one.
Chapter 3- Do we own ourselves?/Libertarianism
Libertarians favor unfettered markets and oppose government regulation, not in the name of
economic efficiency but in the name of human freedom. Their central claim is that each of us has a
fundamental right to liberty—the right to do whatever we want with the things we own, provided we
respect other people’s rights to do the same. The libertarian rejects three types of policies and laws
that modern states commonly enact:
1. No Paternalism. Libertarians oppose laws to protect people from harming themselves (like
seatbelts). Libertarians argue that such laws violate the right of the individual to decide what
risks to assume.
2. No Morals Legislation. Libertarians oppose using the coercive force of law to promote
notions of virtue or to express the moral convictions of the majority.
3. No Redistribution of Income or Wealth. The libertarian theory of rights rules out any law that
requires some people to help others, including taxation for redistribution of wealth. Taxes for
health care are a form of coercion, even theft. No mandating by the state, individuals should
be left up to undertake such help.
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