Justice: What is Right? " is a representative work of contemporary philosopher Michael Sandel, published in China in 2011, has been sought after by a large number of domestic scholars and college students, reprinted many times, opened the upsurge of online open classes. In this book, Michael Sandel's discourse is deeply involved in important issues of modern life.
Recently, Michael Sandel's "Justice: What is Justification?" A new revision of the " is out. Does justice represent the pursuit of maximum utility, or respect for human dignity, or the promotion of virtue? What are our obligations to each other as citizens? The great philosophers of the past have debated these questions, but they persist.
Zhou Lian, a professor at the School of Philosophy at Chinese Min University, believes that the journey of free thought is long and tortuous. We, like Sandel, have the right to point to any of these landscapes and say, "This is where I stand!" But Sandel tells us that after saying this, we also have the responsibility to say the reasoning and reasoning behind this position. Maybe one day we will start again, because philosophy is not a noun, it is a verb.
The following is Zhou Lian's latest "Justice: What is Justification?" The recommended preface written in the (New Revised Edition) is published with the authorization of the publishing house.
Justice: What is Right? (New Revised Edition)", translated by Michael Sandel by Zhu Huiling. CITIC Publishing Group February 2022.
Philosophy is a verb
Written by | Zhou Lian
(Professor, School of Philosophy, Chinese University)
George Bernard Shaw once ridiculed the "educated Englishman": he knew nothing about the world except to grasp the difference between "right" and "wrong". Later, a cultured English philosopher laughed at himself by saying that this criticism was more appropriately applied to moral philosophers—that these guys who talked on university podiums often regarded their ignorance of the world as a virtue.
Thankfully, since michael Sandel, a tedious and grain-free moral philosopher, we have finally waited for the day when we "put things right." At Harvard's famous Sanders Theater, the well-dressed, personable philosopher has been teaching Justice for more than three decades, with hundreds of students attending it every year.
From what kind of injuries should be awarded the Pentagon's Purple Heart, to whether Clinton lied in the sex scandal, from the cannibals in Rothenburg, Germany, to the shooting of the security guards of the American Blackwater International Company in Baghdad Square... You can see how much Sandor knows about this changing world. Even better, Sandel was able to go up and down, pulling the daunting classical philosophers of Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, and Rawls off the dusty shelves, washing and brushing them, making them the most active participants in public thesis.
In the 1970s, male and female students at Oxford were divided into different colleges. Some of the older faculty members at St. Anne's College for Women opposed heterosexual stays based on traditional morality, but because times were changing, they could not directly support their views with "bad manners," so they came up with the following reason: "If men stay overnight, the cost of the college will increase." Because "they are going to take a bath, so they will use more hot water", "we will have to change the sheets more frequently". After a turn, the reformers and conservatives finally came to an agreement: each woman could have up to three nights of overnight visitors per week, and each visitor would have to pay the academy 50 pence per night. The next day, the Guardian headline read: "St. Anne's girl, 50 pence a night."
Michael Sandel is a renowned philosopher, professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, visiting professor at Sorbonne University, and Ph.D. from Oxford University. Sandel is a representative of communitarianism, and his books on the themes of justice, ethics, democracy, and the market have been translated into 30 languages, and his works have been sold worldwide and have aroused great discussion. The American Political Science Association awarded him a special achievement award, and Foreign Policy named him one of the "world's preeminent thinkers." Many of his works have been translated into Chinese published successively: "Justice", "Money Can't Buy Anything", "Against Perfection", "The Discontent of Democracy", "Public Philosophy", "The Limitations of Liberalism and Justice", "The Arrogance of the Elite", etc. Sandel is committed to the general idea of "civic education," and his open class, Justice, is a popular course in Harvard's history. Sandel has lectured in various countries, giving lectures at universities and public venues in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and other places.
Such nonsensical after-dinner talk, in Sandel's case, is deftly linked to the most tedious philosophical truths: the conservative old ladies are discouraged because "the language of virtue is not well transformed into the language of efficiency."
In the Theater of Sanders, Sandel's character is like Socrates in the Civic Square of the Athenian city-state, where he and the cheerful and enthusiastic young people go to experience, to see, to hear, to doubt, to hope, to dream.
Jaspers said that philosophy is a verb rather than a noun, and that the essence of philosophy is not to grasp the truth but to find it. In this regard, Sandel has merely restored the original ecology of philosophical thinking. He pulled philosophy back from heaven to earth, leading readers and listeners from public topics large and small, trivial or eccentric, all the way to the super-big concepts of efficiency, freedom, virtue, and justice.
Sandel argues that a society is judged by whether it is just "by how it distributes what we value—income and wealth, duties and rights, power and opportunity, public office and honor, and so on." But the problem is that not only do different people value different things, but the standards of distribution are also different. With efficiency, freedom, and virtue as the three key words, there are three different views of justice: efficiency, liberalism, and communitarianism. As a communitarian, Sandel firmly believed that the purpose of politics was to cultivate the virtues of citizens and reason for common goodness, and for this reason, to think about justice, we must think about what a "good life" means.
Efficiencists also think about the good life, but they want to reduce the vague words "good life" and "happiness" to quantitative criteria that can be justified, such as "efficiency." They argue that a society's justice depends on whether its policies and laws maximize benefits or welfare. Such a scientific and wonderful idea, in Sandel's view, has a fatal flaw.
First, it makes justice and rights a calculation, not a principle. This practice not only devalues moral values themselves, but also leads to absurd consequences, such as "St. Anne's girl 50 pence per night" is a good example.
Second, it attempts to look at all human goodness in equal measures by a single, uniform measure of value, without taking into account the qualitative differences between them. In the 1930s, a psychologist did a survey: How much do you pay to accept all kinds of unfortunate experiences? The conclusion is that the price of strangling a stray cat with bare hands is $10,000, the price of swallowing an earthworm raw is $100,000, and the price of spending the rest of your life on a farm in Kansas, 10 miles away from any town, is $300,000. Sandel asked rhetorically, "These experiences are so different, can we make meaningful comparisons?"
In a sense, contemporary communitarianism grew up with a debate with liberalism. Liberals argue that justice means respecting people's "freedom of choice"—whether that freedom is an actual choice made in a free market or an imaginary choice made in the primordial state of equality. One of the most widely circulated accounts of the protracted debate between liberalism and communitarianism is that liberalism emphasizes "individual rights" and communitarianism advocates "community values," and that the two values compete with each other and are either one or the other. Sandel sees this as an outdated and uninteresting misreading, and the point of contention that is truly valuable and more vital is: "Is it possible to define or defend the right to define or defend without presupposing any particular idea of a good life?"
Some of Sandel's Chinese translated into book covers.
Rawlsian liberals argue that it should and may be, on the grounds that in a reasonably pluralistic political society, people have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a good life, and that any introduction of moral and religious language into political and public discourse hinders the use of public reason and creates a "repressive fact" for others.
In response, Sandel countered: First, when adjudicating the question of justice and rights, we are not always able to fail to solve substantive moral problems; Second, even if it were possible, it would be undesirable. When ethical and political life is filled with clichés such as "don't be judgmental" and "don't lecture me," it not only creates aesthetic fatigue, but more importantly, this liberal discourse, free from all moral interference and judgment, leads to the impoverishment of public discourse and the extreme atrophy of civic virtue.
Sandel admired Aristotle and firmly believed that politics was about some kind of higher existence, about how to live a good life. The whole purpose of politics is: "to enable people to develop their own unique human faculties and virtues—to be able to deliberately discuss common good, to gain practical judgment, to share autonomy, to care for the fate of the community as a whole."
Saul Bellow said: "While the wisdom of timidity is still hesitating, the brave ignorance has already acted!" The implication of this sentence is that thinking and reading may allow us to understand some of the most basic things and truths, but it cannot directly enhance our integrity and courage, let alone directly stimulate action. I suspect that Sandel would agree with Saul Bellow's judgment, which is why he will emphasize the importance of participating in civic life, which may be the only way to turn "timid wisdom" into "wisdom of action". Just as no one can become a bodybuilder with chest muscles without lifting dumbbells in the gym, and no one can become a virtuous person just by reciting "Eight Glory and Eight Shames", all kinds of virtues and good character must be externalized into concrete behaviors and fixed by habit. That's why Sandel said, "Public discussion is not only a way for democratic societies to solve problems, it's also a form of civic education."
One of the most common strategies in philosophical debate is "reduction in fallacy." In Justice, Sandel applies this strategy to the fullest, allowing us to see time and again where the dead ends of the various schools of thought lies: the principle of efficiency maximization allows us to tolerate the envisioned "City of Eumera"—it is worth hiding an innocent child in a basement for a life of loneliness and misery for the sake of happiness and happiness for all citizens; The principle of "self-ownership" upheld by libertarians can allow two adults to cannibalize based on mutual consent; Even Kant, known for his rigor, could not escape a similar moral dilemma—Kant was adamantly opposed to lying, but when a murderer came to the door looking for good people hiding in your house, did you really have to tell the truth?
Sandel, the "modern Socrates", blows the magic flute all the way, leads us through one philosophical jungle after another, tells us where there are roses and where there are swamps, and finally stands before the concept of justice aimed at "cultivating virtue and reasoning for the common good", saying: Since all other directions say "this road is not passable", then this is our only choice.
Screenshot of Sandel's Harvard Open Class "Justice" video.
Slowly, doesn't it say that philosophy is a verb rather than a noun? Doesn't it say that the essence of philosophy is not to grasp the truth but to find it? Could Sandel really be able to give a point to the theme of "justice" and petrify it into a "communitarian view of justice"?
It is an indisputable fact that, in his discussion of "what a new politics of common good would look like," Sandel did not provide us with a clear picture, but only listed a number of possible themes, such as "citizenship, sacrifice and service," "the moral limitations of the market," "inequality, solidarity, and civic virtue," and "a politics of moral participation." But the problem is that Sandel did not fully develop his moral reasoning on these topics, but hastily ended his "justice" journey, making it inevitable that people would have "read, read, read, read below, it turns out... There is no sense of loss underneath."
In my opinion, the more fatal problem is that if Sandor had heard of Confucius and possessed the virtues of "reflexive self" and "my way consistently", then the fallacy should be carried out to the end. In this way, his beloved communitarian view of justice must face two fundamental questions: one is that it is exclusive, and the other is that it is coercive. To take an extreme example, the Kingdom of Bhutan, which is known worldwide for its National Happiness Index, has stripped 100,000 Bhutanese of citizenship and expelled them in order to preserve the integrity of its ethnicity and culture.
Of course, it may not be fair to criticize Sandel in this way, after all, in the American political context, the debate between communitarianism and liberalism is more like an intra-family debate. In the view of the political philosopher Kinricha, the two factions can agree on 95% of the practical problems facing American society, and only the remaining 5% of the differences are debated.
Sandel's "Justice" course belongs to harvard university's general education, which has an essential feature, that is, "when you are educated, and you forget what you learned, the last thing that is left." What's left of this last thing? I think it should be what Mr. Chen Yinke called "the spirit of independence, the thought of freedom." The journey to form free thought is long and tortuous. We, like Sandel, have the right to point to any of these landscapes and say: This is where I stand! But Sandel tells us that after saying this, we also have the responsibility to say the reasoning and reasoning behind this position.
Maybe one day we'll start again, because philosophy is not a noun, but a verb.