Interview: Michael Sandel on justice

Should we torture one person to save many? What is fairness? To accompany BBC4's justice season, philosopher Michael Sandel explains why justice is at the heart of contemporary political debate

by Nigel Warburton / January 21, 2011 / Leave a comment

Nigel Warburton: For me the word justice seems to imply that there is some injustice in the world—it seems to be something like a legal term almost, that you want to set things to rights. Is that how you understand the word?

Michael Sandel: Well 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.

Broadly speaking I think there are three answers to the question ‘What is justice?’ There’s the utilitarian answer which says justice means maximising happiness. Answer number two, given by Immanuel Kant, which says that justice is a matter of respecting human dignity, certain categorical duties and rights. And the third answer is the answer that Aristotle gave: justice means giving people what they deserve, where what they deserve depends on their virtue and depends on sorting out hard questions about the good life.

NW: Let’s take Bentham and utilitarianism first. Jeremy Bentham is famous as a major proponent of perhaps the most straightforward kind of utilitarianism.

MS: Bentham said we are governed by two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain. So he thought that morality and legislation should all be about maximising the balance of pleasure over pain.

NW: Why is that relevant to questions of justice?

MS: Take this example. Suppose the majority has a very intense dislike of a minority religion and wants to ban it. In principle, follow Bentham. If the majority is big enough and if their hatred of the religious group is strong enough, then the “happiness principle” says the right thing to do is to ban the religion. Or, to take a contemporary example, to ban the wearing of burqas.

If huge majorities dislike seeing women wearing burqas on the street, does that justify banning the wearing of the burqa? It’s true that those who would like to wear it would suffer some unhappiness according to the utilitarian calculus, but it’s outweighed by the greater happiness of the majority. I think that’s an example of what goes wrong with the utilitarian calculus. The problem is precisely its failure to judge the quality and the moral significance of the preferences.

NW: Now going back a bit, Immanuel Kant, writing in the 18th century, had a very different approach to ethics, and presumably to justice too…

MS: Kant rejects the…

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Paul Gibbons
January 21, 2011 at 15:02
I wish, living in the US, we heard the word justice half as often as we hear the word freedom. Justice here almost always means retributive justice - and that ain't all there is to it. Sandel is a very fine and readable philosopher. (comment via facebook)
Robin Ridge
January 24, 2011 at 23:36
Recent BBC program. For there to be justice there needs to be emphathy. The example of the child and the shop keeper giving the correct change is emphathy in respect of the child by the shop keeper. The murderer asking after a friend example, requires a lie to the murderer through emphathy for the friend. Would you shoot down a airliner if you new it to be another 9/11. No, but I may attack it, the hi-jackers would be under no illussion that the goal is hopeless. My emphathy is with the people on the aircraft which face certain death at the desired end of the hijackers. An aircraft incapable of meeting the hijackers aims may do better - it couldn't do worse. Torture cannot be excused, but the threat of it on a guilty party to save the inocent represents no problem. The guilty expect punishment according to the crime. Deceit to meet a nobal end represents no problem at all. Its empathy in respect to the guilty. An inocent partly on the receiving end of such deceit could accept such a disception and excuse the mistake. Dog fighting is wrong, not because it sanctions violent behaviour but because it is an offence against the dogs. Emphathy for the dogs is no less valid than for the person, when it is clearly avoidable to do harm to the dog. To kill to protect yourself from mortal danger is quite different from murder in the more traditional sense, the murderer would quite understand the risk he was taking. As it is different to kill animals for food as opposed to sport. Emphathy for the quarry. My view on Justice which I do not think fits any I have heard in this debate.
Ben Toombs
January 25, 2011 at 13:34
Amartya Sen takes Aristotle's example of flutes a step further. In The Idea of Justice, he poses a neat question. Three children sit down in front of a flute made from silver. Who should own it - the one who plays the flute exceptionally well (and presumably already has at least one), the one who lives in poverty and has few toys, or the one who made it but cannot play it and has lots of toys already? The first child equates to Aristotle's virtuosos flautist; the third perhaps to the rich collector. But what about the second child? Doesn't the existence of welfare states and other redistributive systems acknowledge that she has some moral claim to the flute as well? It just goes to show what a broad term justice is, and how it can mean different things in different contexts.
David Llewellyn Foster
February 1, 2011 at 23:37
On the subject of justice: what about Dr Aafia Siddiqui? Or for that matter, what about Leonard Peltier? Justice is less about what people should receive from whomever, or whatever, presently serves as the ruling "authority" (ie the prevalent system) as what they are unequivocally entitled to as a fundamental human right. Fine words are always impressive, but actions reveal who we really are. There can be no justice in any state where raw power and material privilege over-ride the virtue and integrity of the sovereign individual.