Tags
autobiography, Harvard University, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Rawls, justice, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, trolley problem, utilitarianism
I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.
I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.
In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).
And the course was popular for very good reason. Sandel’s performance on the lecture stage was a performance, polished and sharp – and, importantly, interactive, despite the thousand-plus number of students in the room. Obviously he could only interact directly with a small fraction of those students in any given course session – but he would interact with them in Socratic fashion, asking for their opinions on moral and political questions and then quizzing them about the implications of those opinions. The back-and-forth was instructive to everyone watching and thinking it all through.
So too, the design of the course was very intentional. In both of the iterations I saw Sandel teach, before he introduced himself or the syllabus, he opened directly to the action, by presenting the trolley problem – at a time before the trolley problem was cool. Especially to students who’d never encountered it, the trolley problem vividly illustrated why moral philosophy is necessary: the principles by which we decide right action are not obvious.
The remainder of the course was just as carefully structured. In a TF meeting, in my fancy grad-student vocabulary, I asked Sandel, “Would you describe the organization of this course as a phenomenology in the Hegelian sense?” He replied, “Tell me what you mean by that.” I said, “It starts off with the most obvious and common-sense approaches to a question and then reveals their inadequacies to progress to more adequate—” and he cut me off and said, “Yes.”
Thus the course began with utilitarianism – a mode of ethical thinking that’s in the air in English-speaking societies. The common-sense appeal of utilitarianism is attested today by the popularity of the Effective Altruism movement, which tries to put it into practice – and which Sandel rightly incorporates in the course’s new iteration. But using a variety of trolley-like cases, Sandel would lead students to consider whether there might be intrinsic rights not reducible to utility, and suggest libertarianism and John Locke as alternative views based on those rights. But like utilitarianism, libertarianism and Locke are both heavily market-oriented philosophies, which would then raise the question of whether there are things – like voting – that money shouldn’t be able to buy. That was the segue into Kant’s more absolutist view, and the course proceeded from there until, at the end, it finally got to the communitarianism that Sandel himself advocated.
I had my disagreements with the course’s approach then, of course, and I’m sure I’d still have them now. At the time I thought it could have used a perspective from Marx or Nietzsche, throwing suspicion on the concepts of justice and the way it is deployed. Now I would probably recommend including Confucius, whose role ethics would fit well with Aristotle and communitarianism in the later part of the course, showing a non-Western way of reasoning that would nevertheless be clearly applicable to the questions. (Any of these could come at the expense of Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government – the work read in the class – always seemed to me extraordinarily badly argued.) Maybe a bigger disagreement is that I think ethical and political questions are distinct from each other: Kant and Rawls are talking about entirely different things, one about individual conduct and one about the organization of social institutions. But then that is a deeper substantive difference between my and Sandel’s philosophical approaches: he thinks the questions overlap significantly more than I do.
Such differences are to be expected between philosophers. They don’t diminish my overall admiration for the course. At a time where each political side is deeply convinced of its own rightness and sees little need to examine it, philosophy’s questioning of assumptions is desperately needed. It is tremendously gratifying to see Sandel now bringing that questioning back to the leaders of tomorrow.
Welcome back, Justice.
Lloyd said:
With some difficulty, ‘paralysis by analysis’ can be overcome; But for the sake of humanity’s evolution, it must be done.
Asa Henderson said:
Just signed up for the recorded version on edX. I’m also enjoying Seth Zuiho Segall’s 7 Universal Virtues course. Thanks for the recommendations!
I’ve been reading your blog for years, though I comment only occasionally. I get a lot out of the cross-cultural virtue ethics approach.
Another major interest of mine is environmental ethics. I’m always on the lookout for perspectives from the world’s philosophical traditions that can help us think through how to relate ethically with the rest of the biosphere.
Amod Lele said:
Good to hear, thank you!
I haven’t thought as much about environmental ethics, but that may change in the years to come – now that I’m working in an institute that focuses on applied ethics and my supervisor is an environmental ethicist.