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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.

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
Way
Goes
People
Justice
Aristotle
Understanding
Figuring
Idea
Deserves
Back
Simplest
Ideas
Begins
Giving
Difficulty
Real
Deserve

More quotes by Michael Sandel

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My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society.
Michael Sandel
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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.
Michael Sandel
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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.
Michael Sandel
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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.
Michael Sandel
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In some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys - and it's usually for boys - reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances - in China, in Korea, in India - in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls.
Michael Sandel
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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 too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.
Michael Sandel
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Aiming at health, restoring health - that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing.
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.
Michael Sandel
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I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.
Michael Sandel
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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.
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.
Michael Sandel
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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.
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.
Michael Sandel
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Self-knowledge is like lost innocence however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael Sandel
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The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.
Michael Sandel
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If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.
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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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.
Michael Sandel
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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.
Michael Sandel