Michael Sandel: Reith Lectures
I thought I’d blogged about this last year when it happened, but Harvard Professor Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures 2009 was an inspiration to me. While only an introduction to his ideas, I went looking for a quote today and found it.
Through four lectures Sandel encourages civil discourse about ethics to guide humanity in solving the problems of our times. He laments the primacy of scientific positivism and the market metaphor that have distorted our capacity to make ethical decisions for the common good. (Unfortunately, the audio has been removed from the BBC site, but the ABC Big Idea site —do a search for Sandel to get all the lectures.)
Unlike market-driven politics, a politics of the common good invites us to think of ourselves less as consumers, and more as citizens. Here’s why this matters. Market-mimicking governance takes people’s preferences as given and fixed. But when we deliberate as citizens, when we engage in democratic argument, the whole point of the activity is critically to reflect on our preferences, to question them, to challenge them, to enlarge them, to improve them.
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