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Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

This book delves into the fundamental questions of justice, examining various ethical theories and their application to real-life scenarios. more

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Michael J. Sandel

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“History is full of incremental improvements and revolutionary convulsions - often these are followed by reactionary backlashes in which rights are revoked, inequalities re-established.”

“James Madison framed the constitutional order so that power would be in the hands of the Senate, which represents “the wealth of the nation,” the “more capable sett of men,” who have respect for property owners and their rights and understand the need for government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”—though it was not long before he came to deplore “the daring depravity of the times,” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government—at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations” (1792).”

“A more general conclusion is that markets may more or less work for a while, but unless sharply constrained they almost necessarily lead to disaster. And constraints are unlikely when major media are often adjuncts of business, the government is largely in its pocket, and the general public is marginalized in one way or another, and susceptible to manipulation.”

“The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds.”

“Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?”