Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [138]
1. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1961), pp. 295–98.
2. Address of Senator John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Asso-ciation, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1960, at Click here.
3. White, The Making of the President 1960, p. 298.
4. Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address,” Washington, D.C., June 28, 2006, at Click Here
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. For elaboration of this theme, see Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 278–85.
10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
11. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Charles Taylor, “The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice,” in Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 289.
12. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 31.
13. Ibid., pp. 29–31.
14. Ibid., p. 58.
15. Ibid., pp. xx, xxviii.
16. Ibid., p. 215.
17. Ibid., p. 254.
18. Ibid., p. 236.
19. The phrase is from Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1984).
20. See Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 2–3.
21. Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address.”
22. I take up the question of the moral status of the embryo in Michael J. Sandel, The Case Against Perfection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.102–28.
23. Connecticut (2008) and Iowa (2009) legalized same-sex marriage through rulings of their state supreme courts.
24. See Tamara Metz, “Why We Should Disestablish Marriage,” in Mary Lyndon Shan-ley, Just Marriage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 99–108.
25. Michael Kinsley, “Abolish Marriage,” Washington Post, July 3, 2003, p. A23.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Hillary Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 440 Mass. 309 (2003).
29. Ibid., p. 312. The sentence quoted in the court’s opinion (“Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code”) is from Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned a Texas law banning homosexual practices. The Lawrence opinion, in turn, had quoted this sentence from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), a U.S. Supreme Court decision that dealt with abortion rights.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 329.
32. Ibid., p. 320.
33. Ibid., p. 313.
34. Ibid., p. 342.
35. Ibid., p. 321.
36. Ibid., p. 322.
37. Ibid., p. 331.
38. Ibid., p. 333.
39. Robert F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the University of Kansas,” March 18, 1968, at Click here.
40. Ibid.
41. Barack Obama, “A New Era of Service,” University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, July 2, 2008, in Rocky Mountain News, July 2, 2008.
42. Gary Becker, “Sell the Right to Immigrate,” The Becker-Posner Blog, February 21, 2005, at Click here.
43. See Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 249–315.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began life as a course. For almost three decades, I’ve had the privilege of teaching political philosophy to Harvard undergraduates. And in many of those years, I’ve taught a course called “Justice.” The course exposes students to some of the great philosophical writings about justice, and also takes up contemporary legal and political controversies that raise philosophical questions.
Political philosophy is an argumentative subject, and part of the fun of the Justice course is that the students get to argue back—with the philosophers, with one another, and with me. So I would like, first