Latest Michael Sandel Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• My goal is first of all to promote a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong. That's my first goal.

  Michael Sandel

  Goal, Debate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Justice, Democracy, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think the reason we might hesitate to pay cash to students for doing well on tests or getting good grades or reading books is that we sense that the monetary payment is an extrinsic reward.

  Michael Sandel

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake.

  Michael Sandel

  Purpose, Love Of Learning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you go back to Adam Smith, you find the idea that markets and market forces operate as an invisible hand. This is the traditional laissez-faire market idea. But today, when economics is increasingly defined as the science of incentive, it becomes clear that the use of incentives involves quite active intervention, either by an economist or a policy maker, in using financial inducements to motivate behavior. In fact, so much though that we now almost take for granted that incentives are central to the subject of economics.

  Michael Sandel

  Today, Financial, Invisible

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it's all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free - and, in fact, it isn't. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

  Michael Sandel

  Thinking, Assumption, Behavior

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Today if you look at most economic textbooks, economics is not defined by subject matter. It's presented as a science of social choice that applies not only to material goods - not only to flat-screen televisions - but to every decision we make, whether it's to get married, or to stay married, whether to have children and how to educate those children, or how to look after our health.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Choices, Decision

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Past, Thinking, Economy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Most economics that is taught in college and universities today projects itself as a value-neutral science. This claim has always been open to question, but I think it's especially in doubt today.

  Michael Sandel

  College, Thinking, Doubt

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I do think it is very important that the religious communities do try to bring their teachings and their insights to bear on the stem cell debate and on the debate about genetic engineering.

  Michael Sandel

  Religious, Teaching, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.

  Michael Sandel

  Jewish Tradition, Views, Catholic

  Source: www.pbs.org

• In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality.

  Michael Sandel

  Pregnancy, Eggs, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I've tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings.

  Michael Sandel

  Teaching, Jewish Tradition, Childhood

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

  Michael Sandel

  Religious, Thinking, Cells

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.

  Michael Sandel

  Thinking, Medicine, Tragedy

  Source: www.pbs.org

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

  Michael Sandel

  Kids, Giving, Goal

  Source: www.pbs.org

• One can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race or genetic arms race, whether it's to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future. So it's limitless, and that's another of the features that sets it apart from medical intervention.

  Michael Sandel

  Race, Arms, Height

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  Kids, Differences, Disease

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Aiming at health, restoring health - that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing.

  Michael Sandel

  Goal, Important, Restoration

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease - these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine.

  Michael Sandel

  Medicine, Suffering, Relief

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.

  Michael Sandel

  Mean, Thinking, Medicine

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide.

  Michael Sandel

  Law, People, Majority

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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

  Children, Teaching, Humility

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable.

  Michael Sandel

  Basketball, Children, Disappointment

  Source: www.pbs.org

• The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don't pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Thinking, Order

  Source: www.pbs.org