Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
by Michael J. Sandel

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

Justice is something everybody claims to want even though nobody can really agree on what it means. That’s where Michael Sandel comes in.

The Harvard philosophy professor has turned the concept into an extremely popular undergraduate course, a book, and a television series. His take: Justice is the proper distribution of the goods we value, like “income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors.” Justice should, depending on your perspective, maximize society’s aggregate welfare, freedom or virtue.

For Sandel, a just society is one that promotes virtue. Americans, he argues, have mistakenly abandoned that goal because of a general discomfort with couching arguments in moral terms – nobody wants to sound judgmental, and legislating morality is “anathema to many citizens of liberal societies.” Instead, when we talk about political and economic justice, we tend to focus on creating wealth. Whether we’re utilitarians seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number or libertarians pursuing individual freedom, we tend to think free markets, insofar as they facilitate wealth creation, are just. But Sandel argues that focusing on wealth while claiming moral neutrality – instead of acknowledging the moral imperatives behind the policies we advocate – only creates resentment and debases political argument.

Justice uses diverse and divisive political issues to show why focusing on virtue is most amenable to the realization of justice. Sandel frames the abortion debate, for example, between two moral points of view – one holding that life begins at conception, and another holding that it does not. He rejects the conventional assumption that to be pro-choice is to avoid moral questions by insisting that the state take no position and that women should decide for themselves. (Of course, the argument that women have autonomy over their bodies is often couched in deeply moral terms as well.) Sandel’s key point here is an important one: the “keep religion out of politics” mantra isn’t a sufficient response to those who are influenced by religious conceptions of morality.

Overall, however, Sandel’s call for a return to virtue would be much more compelling if Justice did not depict the free market as a moral wasteland. Sandel starts his book with an example of price-gouging, moves on to the huge Wall Street bailouts, and then to the claim that libertarians consider taxation unjust because it violates people’s rights to “do with their money whatever they please.” While there are certainly objections to high tax rates, nobody takes seriously – nor makes a serious argument – that there should be no government, and therefore no taxes. Sandel provides a caricature of a small-wing of free market thinking but presents it as much of the basis for considering the free market a virtuous ideal.

Beyond mischaracterization, Sandel sometimes seems to misunderstand what exactly a market is. Take, for instance, his claim that because the United States does not have universal conscription, the military fills its ranks “through the use of the labor market,” just like employees in any other profession are hired. Volunteer soldiers without better options are therefore victims of the market since they “may be conscripted, in effect, by economic necessity.” However, there is not an actual market for military service. If there were, we would have many armies competing for soldiers – and probably driving down salaries.

Furthermore, Sandel’s argument that the volunteer army makes Americans careless about military affairs or casualties (and thus that soldiers are victims) contradicts the single largest trend in our military strategy over the past several decades. The American public’s aversion to casualties has made for a military reliant on highly complex technology – and the huge sums of taxpayer money that pay for it – to reduce the risk to individual troops. We are arguably better off with a volunteer army in large part because of this technology – soldiers must be extensively trained and prepared to use it. In a conscript army, with more troops and shorter tours of duty, we would not be able to exploit our huge technological edge. And in fact, with a greater supply of troops, the fates of individual troops may seem less significant to Americans. To put it in market terms, when labor is scarce, there’s more of an incentive to invest in capital.

Justice is at times illuminating and encouraging. A clarion call for honest moral debate in politics is refreshing, and obviously compelling. But under the guise of challenging students, readers, and viewers to confront their assumptions and grapple seriously with policy debates today, Sandel at times merely reinforces prejudices about the way the world is and how it works.

Excerpt: “[W]e need a more robust and engaged civic life than the one to which we’ve become accustomed. In recent decades, we’ve come to assume that respecting our fellow citizens’ moral and religious convictions means ignoring them (for political purposes, at least), leaving them undisturbed, and conducting our public life – insofar as possible – without reference to them. But this stance of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it. This can provoke backlash and resentment. It can also make for an impoverished public discourse, lurching from one news cycle to the next, preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensational, and the trivial.”

Further Reading: Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide and The Case for God

*Photo courtesy stevec77.