Michael Sandel Quotes on Justice
Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) launched the communitarian critique of Rawlsian liberal justice. The Rawlsian original position, Sandel argues, presupposes an unencumbered self stripped of the constitutive attachments — to family, community, religious and ethnic tradition — through which actual moral agents come to have ends at all. Democracy's Discontent (1996), Justice (2009), and What Money Can't Buy (2012) develop the positive alternative: a republican civic philosophy that takes seriously the substantive moral disagreements of public life rather than bracketing them behind a veil of ignorance, and that distinguishes goods (love, civic honor, knowledge) whose proper allocation requires non-market reasoning from those that admit of straightforward economic exchange.
Quotes
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Attributed to Michael Sandel:
“We cannot reason our way to justice without reasoning together about the good.”
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Attributed to Michael Sandel:
“Some things money should not buy.”
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Attributed to Michael Sandel:
“A meritocracy that is not also humble is a tyranny.”
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Attributed to Michael Sandel:
“Justice is not just about the right way to distribute things; it is about the right way to value them.”
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“This liberalism says, in other words, that what makes the just society just is not the telos or purpose or end at which it aims, but precisely its refusal to choose in advance among competing purposes and ends. In its constitution and its laws, the just society seeks to provide a framework within which its citizens can pursue their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others”
Michael J. Sandel, "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self" (1984) -
“Conclusion: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice”
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice(1982; 1998)