Michael Sandel Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, College, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  7 Copy quote

• One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don't choose the kind of child that we have.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Opportunity, Moral Growth

  Source: www.pbs.org

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Humility, Ambition

  Source: www.pbs.org

  13 Copy quote

• I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.

  Michael Sandel

  Frustration, Japan, Europe

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion.

  Michael Sandel

  Motivation, Inspiration, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Engineering, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• One of the appeals of markets, as a public philosophy, is they seem to spare us the need to engage in public arguments about the meaning of goods. So markets seem to enable us to be non-judgmental about values. But I think that's a mistake.

  Michael Sandel

  Philosophy, Mistake, Thinking

  "Michael Sandel: 'We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning'". Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. May 27, 2012.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.

  Michael Sandel

  Religious, Jewish Tradition, Views

  Source: www.pbs.org

  9 Copy quote

• I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Good Life, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  9 Copy quote

• Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an “openness to the unbidden.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Love Is, Parent

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• I would include non-medical sex selection as one of those practices that I think is morally questionable and that can carry adverse social consequences.

  Michael Sandel

  Sex, Thinking, Practice

  Source: www.pbs.org

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed.

  Michael Sandel

  Appreciation, Children, Grateful

  Source: www.pbs.org

  7 Copy quote

• Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's.

  Michael Sandel

  Exercise, Confusing, Roles

  Source: www.pbs.org

  8 Copy quote

• In some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys - and it's usually for boys - reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances - in China, in Korea, in India - in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls.

  Michael Sandel

  Girl, Sex, Attitude

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material.

  Michael Sandel

  Children, Jewish Tradition, Giving

  "Michael Sandel: This much I know". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. April 27, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

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