Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [129]
The answer, I think, is yes. But we need a more robust and engaged civic life than the one to which we’ve become accustomed. In recent decades, we’ve come to assume that respecting our fellow citizens’ moral and religious convictions means ignoring them (for political purposes, at least), leaving them undisturbed, and conducting our public life—insofar as possible—without reference to them. But this stance of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it. This can provoke backlash and resentment. It can also make for an impoverished public discourse, lurching from one news cycle to the next, preoccupied with the scandalous, the sensational, and the trivial.
A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker, basis for mutual respect. Rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions that our fellow citizens bring to public life, we should attend to them more directly—sometimes by challenging and contesting them, sometimes by listening to and learning from them. There is no guarantee that public deliberation about hard moral questions will lead in any given situation to agreement—or even to appreciation for the moral and religious views of others. It’s always possible that learning more about a moral or religious doctrine will lead us to like it less. But we cannot know until we try.
A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Doing the Right Thing
1. Michael McCarthy, “After Storm Come the Vultures,” USA Today, August 20, 2004, p. 6B.
2. Joseph B. Treaster, “With Storm Gone, Floridians Are Hit with Price Gouging,” New York Times, August 18, 2004, p. A1; McCarthy, “After Storm Come the Vultures.”
3. McCarthy, “After Storm Come the Vultures”; Treaster, “With Storm Gone, Floridians Are Hit with Price Gouging”; Crist quoted in Jeff Jacoby, “Bring on the ‘Price Gougers,’ ” Boston Globe, August 22, 2004, p. F11.
4. McCarthy, “After Storm Come the Vultures”; Allison North Jones, “West Palm Days Inn Settles Storm Gouging Suit,” Tampa Tribune, October 6, 2004, p. 3.
5. Thomas Sowell, “How ‘Price Gouging’ Helps Floridians,” Tampa Tribune, September 15, 2004; also published as “‘Price Gouging’ in Florida,” Capitalism Magazine, September 14, 2004, at www.capmag.com/article.asp? ID=3918.
6. Ibid.
7. Jacoby, “Bring on the ‘Price Gougers.’ ”
8. Charlie Crist, “Storm Victims Need Protection,” Tampa Tribune, September 17, 2004, p. 17.
9. Ibid.
10. Jacoby, “Bring on the ‘Price Gougers.’ ”
11. Lizette Alvarez and Erik Eckholm, “Purple Heart Is Ruled Out for Traumatic Stress,” New York Times, January 8, 2009.
12. Ibid.
13. Tyler E. Boudreau, “Troubled Minds and Purple Hearts,” New York Times, January 26, 2009, p. A21.
14. Alvarez and Eckholm, “Purple Heart Is Ruled Out.”
15. Boudreau, “Troubled Minds and Purple Hearts.”
16. S. Mitra Kalita, “Americans See 18% of Wealth Vanish,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2009, p. Al.
17. Jackie Calmes and Louise Story, “418 Got A.I.G. Bonuses; Outcry Grows in Capital,” New York Times, March 18, 2009, p. A1; Bill Saporito, “How AIG Became Too Big to Fail,” Time, March 30, 2009, p. 16.
18. AIG CEO Edward M. Liddy quoted in Edmund L. Andrews and Peter Baker, “Bonus Money at Troubled A.I.G. Draws Heavy Criticism,” New York Times, March 16, 2009; see also Liam Pleven, Serena Ng, and Sudeep Reddy, “AIG Faces Growing Wrath Over Payments,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2009.
19. New York Post, March 18, 2009, p. 1.
20. Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane, “Senate Will Delay Action on Punitive Tax