• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1053 0

of social networks has a counterintuitive consequence for the notion of individual freedom. Whatever we might like to think, we are never entirely free, nor would we want to be. The very ties that give our lives meaning also constrain us, and it is precisely by constraining us that they give us meaning. From Sandel’s perspective, it makes no more sense to reason about fairness or justice exclusively from the perspective of individual freedom than it does to reason about what is fair exclusively by analogy with some imaginary state of nature. Neither is an accurate representation of the world in which we actually live. Like it or not, our notions of justice must deal with this tension between the individual and society as a whole. Yet this can be easier said than done. For example, Sandel argues that one ought not to feel proud of one’s heritage as an American without also feeling shame about the country’s history of slavery. Libertarians might argue that it was their ancestors, not them, who carried out such reprehensible deeds and therefore they have nothing to apologize for. But surely these same people are also proud of their ancestry, and would rather live in this country than in any other. In Sandel’s view, one cannot simply decide at one’s convenience when to identify with one’s ancestors and when to absolve oneself of them. Either you’re a part of that extended community, in which case you must share the costs as well as the benefits, or you’re not, in which case you get neither.

Sandel’s argument that our individual actions are inextricably embedded in networks of social relations has consequences not only for arguments about fairness and justice, but also for morality and virtue. In fact, Sandel argues that one cannot determine what is fair without also evaluating the moral status of competing claims. And that in turn requires us to resolve the moral purpose of social institutions. We cannot decide whether gay marriage is right or just, for example, without first deciding what the point of marriage is. We cannot determine whether a particular university’s admission criteria are fair or unfair until we have first determined what the purpose of a university is. And we cannot decide if the way bankers are compensated is appropriate without first establishing what it is that banking should accomplish for society. In this respect, Sandel’s view harks back to the ancient philosophy of Aristotle, who also believed that questions of justice require reasoning about the purpose of things. Unlike Aristotle, however, Sandel does not espouse a view of purpose that is determined outside of the social system itself—say by divine decree. Rather, purpose is something that the members of a society must decide collectively. Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.

What’s particularly interesting about Sandel’s arguments—at least to a sociologist—is how sociological they are. Sociologists, for example, have long believed that the meaning of individual action can only be properly understood in the context of interlocking networks of relationships—a concept that is called embeddedness.32 Even more so, Sandel’s claim that the values by which we judge fairness are necessarily the product of society reflects the idea, first advanced by sociologists in the 1960s, that social reality is a construction of society itself—not something that is handed to us by some external world.33 An important implication of Sandel’s argument, therefore, is that the fundamental questions of political philosophy are sociological questions as well.

How are we to answer these questions then? Certainly thinking about them in the way that Sandel does is one approach, and that has generally been the way that sociologists have approached them