The Moralist

Michael Sandel, whose Harvard course ‘Justice’ has a cult following, talks about philosophy and the building of good societies

“This is a course about justice and we begin with a story…”—and so Michael Sandel starts the first lecture of his course by asking students to imagine that they are driving a trolley car whose brakes have failed and it’s about to run over five people. But they have a choice of changing course and killing just one. “What would you do?” he asks. Would it be right to take one life if you can save five? In his second lecture, he makes it real by talking about The Queen vs Dudley & Stephens case in which someone did make such a choice. It is also known as The Lifeboat Case because the accused were in a lifeboat when they decided to eat a fellow crew member.

In July 1884, a yacht wreck had sent four seamen adrift on the high seas. Provisions ran out, and by the 19th day, they had had nothing to eat for a week. That was when Dudley, the captain, proposed a drawing of lots to decide on one person who would become food for the others so that they could survive. That idea was dropped because everyone didn’t consent to it. On the 20th day, seeing that Richard Parker, the cabin boy, was the weakest among them and close to death, Dudley, along with the first mate Stephens, killed him. The three survivors ate Parker for four days before being rescued, arrested and put on trial.

Sandel’s course fills an auditorium at Harvard University and is one of the most popular there. Some years ago, as an experiment, the university and Sandel decided to put the entire course online for anyone to access. It became an instant phenomenon. A book followed, called Justice: What’s The Right Thing to Do, which became a New York Times bestseller. In India, the lectures are being shown on NDTV 24/7 every week.

Sandel’s approach is Socratic. He does not lecture as much as foment debate among his students. On Dudley-Stephens, the class is usually divided—many think if the others had to survive, someone had to die. It bothers some that the cabin boy had no choice in the matter. Sandel prods on, “What if there was consent? Would it then have been alright?” A few say ‘no’, some disagree. It’s a rivetting, lively debate, and you can’t help being drawn in. What Sandel is illustrating using an extreme example is whether the morality of an action depends on its consequences or whether some things are inherently right or wrong. What does not exist is an answer.

Sandel was in India recently to give three back-to-back lectures in different cities at the invitation of the Infosys Science Foundation. I met him in Mumbai and immediately asked what the point was of teaching something that has no answer. Everyone will have a take on questions like Dudley-Stephens (for the record, the courts sentenced them to death), but it will only be a subjective opinion. His response: “There’s no single definitive answer. But most people find that as they read the book or follow the course, they change their minds as they go. Philosophical ideas such as justice, civic obligation, common good, rights, equality, inequality… these are big abstract ideas, but readers and students sense there is something at stake for them personally. And what’s at stake is: ‘What do I believe about these fundamental questions?’ and, ultimately, ‘What do I believe about the good life?’”

On the Dudley-Stephens case, his stand is that it was not justified, but he does not stop there. He thinks it wrong even if Parker had agreed to his own cannibalisation. “That seems to make the case stronger, but there are some things that are wrong to do even if everyone agrees to it.” As an example, he takes organ donations. “Suppose a person decides to sell his kidney to send his child to school. He needs the money. It’s by consent. Now suppose he has a second child. Should he be able to sell his second kidney, in effect giving up his life? Does that decide the question? There’s still a moral dilemma there. What would you say in that case?”

I say it’s that person’s life to do as he so chooses. He then gives an even more extreme example. In 2003, a German man named Armin Meiwes put out an advertisement asking for a person who would be willing to be eaten. “He interviewed people who wrote in. Some thought about it and decided it wasn’t for them. And then someone, after [some reflection], decided to do it. And the person was cannibalised by consent. Would you say that was justified?”

I think it is justified. He asks me whether it doesn’t give me any hesitation. It doesn’t. Once you hold a position that a man’s life is his to do as he wishes, I don’t see how you can back out just because the example is so extreme. It is, however, not as simple as that. Questions like these might seem an amusing mind game, but countries are governed in accordance with how societies answer them. For example, if you take the idea that governments have no business telling a man he cannot choose his death, then it cannot impose something as simple as seatbelts, and who can deny that seatbelts save lives? In his course and book, Sandel takes students through philosophical ideas by making them real. To draw a distinction between higher pleasures and lower pleasures, he shows videos of Shakespeare recitation, Fear Factor and The Simpsons. He then asks his students what they enjoyed (most say ‘Simpsons’) and what they thought was a higher pleasure (most say ‘Shakespeare’), and why the two often do not meet.

Sandel was always, in his words, a “political junkie”. As a 21-year-old college student, he interned at Houston Chronicle in Washington. The paper was understaffed, and by virtue of that quirk, he got to cover the biggest political story in the US of all time—Watergate. It was the season when President Richard Nixon was impeached. “The end of the summer, my boss, who was in his early fifties, was musing that maybe he should retire because there would never be a story like this. I said, ‘If you are saying this after a career, what am I supposed to think? That it would be all downhill from here?’” Sandel continued to be interested in political journalism, but, after graduating, went to Oxford and took up political philosophy. “I haven’t quite escaped since,” he says.

His political thinking refutes what he considers a dogma of contemporary Western political thought—that the State must be neutral on morality. “The period of market triumphalism, from roughly 1980 to the present, is coinciding with neo-liberalism, a way of thinking about politics and economics. Connected to that is the idea that governments should try to be neutral on moral questions so that each person can be free to choose his or her own values. But what that misses is the fact that most of the high political controversies we face, political debates that we have, are about values and underlying moral convictions.” If public discourse is not encouraged, he contends, it leaves a void that gets taken over by fundamentalist elements.

“We can’t decide any of the questions we argue about—whether it is tax policy or the gap between the rich and poor, the question of reservations, or even the question of corruption—without implicitly relying on certain ethical ideas, certain ideas of justice, certain ideas of common good. We can’t be neutral on those questions even if we pretend to be. The question is: ‘What’s the best way of creating a society based on mutual respect, where there are different religious communities, different moral convictions and traditions?’ One way is to be neutral and keep all of that out of the discourse. I think that’s a mistake. A better way is to welcome public discourse in all traditions. If everyone feels they are heard, even if they don’t get their way, they will be less resentful than if we pretend we are going to decide policy in a way that is neutral.”

Sandel is a critic of unhindered free markets, and his next book is on the end of market triumphalism with the 2008 finance bust. I ask him whether the alternative to markets wouldn’t be more government… and we all know what happens when government gets into anything. “I don’t think it’s either market or government. By market triumphalism, what I mean is the tendency in the last three decades for markets and market thinking to reach into spheres of life governed by non-markets.” For instance, he says, the US has more private paid contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than military troops, and the country has never had a public debate about this. It was taken for granted that it’s alright for markets to enter this sphere.

Or surrogacy, where infertile couples in the West contract their pregnancy to wombs in China and India. “It just happens, so to speak,” he says, “What I am trying to do is encourage a public debate on where markets belong and where they don’t, where other values should govern. It doesn’t mean government should control those other areas, it might mean other norms and other values do.”

What Sandel advocates is almost a philosophical utopia: by discussion and debate, he believes, it is possible to rein in conflict and arrive at better societies. He says it is achieveable. “That’s part of my goal,” he declares, “To bring philosophy from the abstractions of academic discussions and scholarly texts into contact with the lives we actually lead.”

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