It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.

Michael Sandel

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

Michael Sandel

good-life rights justice

Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.

Michael Sandel

limits want needs

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

Michael Sandel

innocence self lost

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

Michael Sandel

parent children thinking

The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be

Michael Sandel

determine doe way

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.

Michael Sandel

real people ideas

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.

Michael Sandel

democracy perfect doe

A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

Michael Sandel

politics tools way

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

Michael Sandel

motivation inspiration people

Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.

Michael Sandel

egalitarianism mean ideas

To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

Michael Sandel

moral spiritual justice

Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.

Michael Sandel

goal giving kids

There's no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives.

Michael Sandel

democracy together justice

They say the state should not impose on its citizens a preferred way of life, but should leave them as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.

Michael Sandel

citizens liberty way

My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society.

Michael Sandel

differences disease kids

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

Michael Sandel

what-matters perfect people

If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

Michael Sandel

humility ambition children

Over the past three decades, markets and market thinking have been reaching into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. As a result, we've drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society.

Michael Sandel

economy past thinking

The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches- - that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can't fully control and for which we aren't fully responsible.

Michael Sandel

humility teaching children

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.

Michael Sandel

expansion greed past