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Ethics book summary Justice: "What is the right thing to do?"
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Full book summary of the Business Ethics book by M. Sandel. Justice: "What is the right thing to do?"
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Book summary ethicsJustice: “What’s the right thing to do?”
CHAPTER 1 – DOING THE RIGHT THING
Debate about price gouging.
During the middle ages, philosophers and theologians believed that the exchange of goods
should be governed by a just price, determined by tradition or the intrinsic value of things.
However, in market societies prices are set by supply and demand, there is no such thing as
a just price.
However higher prices due to emergencies don’t reflect a truly free exchange: “This is not
the normal free market situation where willing buyers freely elect to enter into the
marketplace and meet willing sellers, where a price is agreed upon based on supply and
demand. In an emergency, buyers under duress have no freedom. Their purchases of
necessities like safe lodging are forced.”
This debate raises questions about morality and laws (questions about justice):
- Is it wrong to take advantage of natural disasters?
- What should the law do about it?
Welfare, freedom, and virtue
Explore the meaning of justice: each of these ideas’ points to a different way of thinking
about justice.
- Maximizing welfare.
- Respecting freedom.
- Promoting virtue.
Standard case for unfettered markets rests on two claims:
- Markets promote the welfare of society as a whole by providing incentives for people
to work hard supplying the goods that other people want.
- Markets respect individual freedom; rather than impose a certain value on goods and
services, markets let people choose for themselves what value to place on the things
they exchange.
,The virtue argument: “Greed is a vice, a bad way of being, especially when it makes people
oblivious to suffering of others. More than a personal vice, it is at odds with civic virtue. In
times of trouble, a good society pulls together. Rather than press for maximum advantage,
people look out or one another. A society in which people exploit their neighbors for financial
gain in times of crisis is not a good society. Excessive greed is therefore a vice that a good
society should discourage if it can. By punishing greedy behavior rather dan rewarding it,
society affirms the civic virtue of shared sacrifice for the common good.”
The virtue argument rests on a judgment that greed is a vice that the state should discourage.
But who is to judge and what is vice?
Many people hold that government should be neutral on matters of virtue and vice; it
should not try to cultivate good attitudes or discourage bad ones.
The debate about price-gouging laws is not simply about welfare and freedom. It is also about
virtue – about cultivating the attitudes and dispositions, the qualities of character, on which a
good society depends.
The virtue argument can be seen as discomfiting, because it seems more judgmental than
arguments that appeal to welfare and freedom.
Reactions to price gouging are in two directions:
- We are outraged when people get things they don’t deserve.
- We worry when judgments about virtue find their way into law.
Does a just society seek to promote virtue of its citizens? Or should law be neutral toward
competing conceptions of virtue, so that citizens can be free to choose for themselves?
Aristotle: teaches that justice means giving people what they deserve. And in order to
determine who deserves what, we have to determine what virtues are worthy of honor and
reward.
Modern political philosophers (Immanuel Kant, John Rawls): argue that the principles of
justice that define our rights should not rest on any particular conception of virtue, or of the
best way to live. Instead, a just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her
own conception of the good life.
,What wounds deserve the Purple Heart?
The debate over the Purple Heart is more than a medical or clinical dispute about how to
determine the veracity of injury. At the heart of the disagreement are rival conceptions of
moral character and military valor.
The dispute of the Purple Heart illustrates the moral logic of Aristotle’s theory of justice.
We can’t determine who deserves a military medal without asking what virtues the medal
properly honors.
Bailout outrage
The outrage was bout lavish rewards subsidized with taxpayer funds to members of the
division that had helped bring the global financial system to near meltdown.
At the heart of the bailout outrage was a sense of injustice. Americans were torn between
the need to prevent an economic meltdown that would hurt everyone and their belief that
funneling massive sums to failed banks and investment companies was deeply unfair.
Two sources of outrage:
- One source of outrage was that the bonuses seemed to reward greed.
- The real objection to the bonuses – and the bailout – is not that they reward greed but
that they reward failure. This was the deeper source of dissonance and outrage.
This debate raises far-reaching questions about failure, success, and justice. Who deserves
what when times are good?
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 due. The hard
questions begin when we ask what people are due, and why.
We’ve identified three ways of approaching the distribution of goods:
- Welfare.
- Freedom.
- Virtue.
, The runaway trolley
The trolley case: notice the pressure we feel to reason our way to convincing distinction
between them – and if we cannot, to reconsider our judgment about the right thing to do in
each case. It is about ways of sorting out our own moral convictions, of figuring out what we
believe and why.
- E.g.: “We should save as many lives as possible” or “it is wrong to kill an innocent
person, even for a good cause”.
- We face a moral quandary. We must try to figure out which principle has greater
weight or is more appropriate under the circumstances.
The Afghan goatherds
Option: kill two Afghans Goatherds to make sure they don’t inform the Taliban or taking the
risk by letting them free. This is an actual moral dilemma, complicated by uncertainty about
how things will turn out.
- Argument for killing = we are on active duty behind enemy lines, sent here by our
commanders. We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives.
- Argument for keeping them alive = it would be wrong to execute these unarmed men
in cold blood.
Part of what made the soldiers’ dilemma so difficult was uncertainty about what would
happen if they released the Afghans.
Moral dilemmas
Wrestling with previous dilemmas sheds light on the way moral argument can proceed, in our
personal lives and in the public square.
Life in democratic societies is rife with disagreement about right and wrong, justice and
injustice.
This book tries to answer the following question: “how can we reason our way through the
contested terrain of justice and injustice, equality and inequality, individual rights and the
common good?”
Begin with noticing how moral reflection emerges naturally from an encounter with a
hard-moral question. Start with an opinion about the right thing to do. Then reflect on the
reason for our conviction, then confront with a situation that confounds the principle, we are
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