Quotes from Michael Sandel

I am fortunate to have enough money not to have to worry about the necessities of life. Beyond that, I try to think about money as little as possible.

If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.

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

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

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.

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.

Letting rich countries buy their way out of meaningful changes in their own wasteful habits reinforces a bad attitude—that nature is a dumping ground for those who can afford it.

we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: 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.

Fines register moral disapproval, whereas fees are simply prices that imply no moral judgment.

These two kinds of arguments reverberate through debates about what money should and should not buy. The fairness objection asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitudes and norms that market relations may damage or dissolve.

on cultivating virtue upon practice] Rousseau held a similar view. The more a country asks of its citizens, the greater their devotion to it. "In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies." Under a bad government, no one participates in public life "because no one is interested in what happens there" and "domestic cares are all-absorbing." Civic virtue is built up, not spent down, by strenuous citizenship.

on death pools] This attitude is an unwholesome mix of frivolity and obsession—toying with death even while fixating upon it.

Most of our political debates today are conducted in these terms—between those who favour unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a level playing field, only when the basic terms of social cooperation are fair.