Michael Sandel Quotes
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.
Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
This basic notion was actually quite radical in the sense that the reality at the time she wrote this article was that people had almost no control over the data about themselves including the fact that individuals in relatively few situations had a right to even see the data that was collected about them. They certainly had no power of ownership which would include the right to have it seen or stored anywhere or not. The largest offender at the time was not the government but the private companies—especially the so called credit agencies. They maintained, and at the time the law supported them is that they owned the data they collected about an individual and could do with it what they wanted regardless of the individual’s wishes.
Michael Joseph Sandel (/sænˈdɛl/; born 1953) is an American political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory at Harvard University Law School, where his course Justice was the university's first course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the "most influential foreign figure of the year" 2011 (China Newsweek). He is also known for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).
