Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [127]
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama observed that the events of September 11, 2001, stirred in Americans a sense of patriotism and pride, and a new willingness to serve their country. And he criticized President George W. Bush for not summoning Americans to some form of shared sacrifice. “Instead of a call to service,” Obama said, “we were asked to go shopping. Instead of a call for shared sacrifice, we gave tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans in a time of war for the very first time in our history.”41
Obama proposed to encourage national service by offering students help with college tuition in exchange for one hundred hours of public service. “You invest in America, and America invests in you,” he told young people as he campaigned across the country. The proposal proved to be one of his most popular, and in April 2009, he signed legislation to expand the AmeriCorps public service program and provide college money for students who volunteered in their communities. Despite the resonance of Obama’s call to national service, however, more ambitious proposals for mandatory national service have not found their way onto the political agenda.
2. The moral limits of markets
One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and market-oriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. In earlier chapters, we consider the moral questions that arise, for example, when countries hire out military service and the interrogation of prisoners to mercenaries or private contractors; or when parents outsource pregnancy and child-bearing to paid laborers in the developing world; or when people buy and sell kidneys on the open market. Other instances abound: Should students in underperforming schools be offered cash payments for scoring well on standardized tests? Should teachers be given bonuses for improving the test results of their students? Should states hire for-profit prison companies to house their inmates? Should the United States simplify its immigration policy by adopting the proposal of a University of Chicago economist to sell U.S. citizenship for a $100,000 fee?42
These questions are not only about utility and consent. They are also about the right ways of valuing key social practices—military service, child-bearing, teaching and learning, criminal punishment, the admission of new citizens, and so on. Since marketizing social practices may corrupt or degrade the norms that define them, we need to ask what non-market norms we want to protect from market intrusion. This is a question that requires public debate about competing conceptions of the right way of valuing goods. Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.
3. Inequality, solidarity, and civic virtue
Within the United States, the gap between rich and poor has grown in recent decades, reaching levels not seen since the 1930s. Yet inequality has not loomed large as a political issue. Even Barack Obama’s modest proposal to return income tax rates to where they stood in the 1990s prompted his 2008 Republican opponents to call him a socialist who wanted to spread the wealth.
The dearth of attention to inequality in contemporary politics does not reflect any lack of attention to the topic among political philosophers. The just distribution of income and wealth has been a mainstay of debate within political philosophy from the 1970s to the present. But the tendency of philosophers to frame the question in terms of utility or consent leads them to overlook the argument against inequality most likely to receive a political hearing and most central to the project of moral and civic renewal.