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When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

Michael Sandel

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Michael Sandel
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 3
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Political Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Michael J. Sandel
Michael Joseph Sandel
Political
Standard
Didn
Standards
Back
Interested
Wanted
Design
Way
Theory
Things
Started
Would
Courses
Harvard
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Arrived

More quotes by Michael Sandel

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I think the reason we might hesitate to pay cash to students for doing well on tests or getting good grades or reading books is that we sense that the monetary payment is an extrinsic reward.
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It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.
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Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
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I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.
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Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.
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A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.
Michael Sandel
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I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed.
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Parenthood is a school for humility. We can't choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls an openness to the unbidden.
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The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide.
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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.
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There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.
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It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.
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You can't go wrong with fish and chips.
Michael Sandel
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To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Michael Sandel
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The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
Michael Sandel
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I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.
Michael Sandel
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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.
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Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's.
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I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.
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It's ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake.
Michael Sandel