Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

Citation

Sandel, M. J. (2010). Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Penguin Books.

Chapter Summary

The book grew out of Sandel's long-running Harvard undergraduate course "Justice" and was published alongside a companion anthology of primary texts, Justice: A Reader. It has ten chapters (about 300 pages in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 320 in the Penguin paperback), followed by notes and an index. Its organising idea is that there are three ways of thinking about justice: as maximising welfare, as respecting freedom, and as promoting virtue. Reviewers describe the sequence as deliberately staged: each approach is given a fair hearing, the first two are found wanting, and the third, Sandel's own, is left standing at the end. Throughout, theory is introduced through cases drawn from news stories, law and history. Among those named in the publisher's and reviewers' descriptions are whether a veteran with post-traumatic stress deserves the Purple Heart, executive bonuses at A.I.G. after the taxpayer bailout, whether it is wrong to lie to a murderer, a golfer with a circulatory condition asking to use a cart, the duty to turn in a criminal brother, apologies and reparations for slavery, and debates over abortion, same-sex marriage and affirmative action.

Chapter 1: Doing the Right Thing

The opening chapter sets out the method: start from concrete moral and political controversies, notice the principles that our judgements rely on, and move back and forth between cases and principles. It introduces the three approaches (welfare, freedom, virtue) that structure the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: The Greatest Happiness Principle / Utilitarianism

Sandel begins with Bentham's principle of maximising happiness and presses two objections reported by reviewers: that it can justify sacrificing innocent people for the greater good, and that it assumes a single measure for goods as different as love and money. He then considers Mill's attempts to refine the theory.

Chapter 3: Do We Own Ourselves? / Libertarianism

The libertarian view, centred on Robert Nozick, rests on self-ownership: no one may be used as a means to another's ends, and distributions arising from fair beginnings and voluntary exchange may not be redistributed. Sandel tests this against cases such as the earnings of a star athlete and a consensual killing in Germany, and against duties like jury service that seem to limit self-ownership.

Chapter 4: Hired Help? / Markets and Morals

As its title indicates, this chapter turns from libertarian theory to the moral limits of markets: whether paying people to do things, and buying and selling certain goods, is compatible with freedom and fairness. Sandel later devoted a separate book, What Money Can't Buy, to this theme.

Chapter 5: What Matters Is the Motive / Immanuel Kant

Kant represents the freedom-based approach in its most demanding form: morality depends on acting from duty on principles one could universalise, never treating persons merely as means. The question of lying to a murderer at the door is among the cases connected with Kant's view.

Chapter 6: The Case for Equality / John Rawls

Rawls's argument from the "veil of ignorance" and his difference principle are presented as an egalitarian account of freedom. Reviewers note Sandel's emphasis on Rawls's claim that natural talents are morally arbitrary and therefore do not ground desert.

Chapter 7: Arguing Affirmative Action

A chapter-length case study applies the preceding theories to affirmative action, one of the controversies named in the publisher's description, before the book turns to the virtue-based approach.

Chapter 8: Who Deserves What? / Aristotle

Aristotle's teleological reasoning, that justice means fitting goods and offices to their purpose and honouring the virtues they reward, introduces the virtue-based approach. Sandel distances himself from Aristotle's defence of a hierarchical society while drawing on his link between justice and the good life.

Chapter 9: What Do We Owe One Another? / Dilemmas of Loyalty

Sandel argues that Kantian and Rawlsian theories cannot account for obligations of solidarity and membership. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's picture of human beings as storytelling creatures, he discusses collective responsibility for historical wrongs and conflicts between loyalty to family or community and impartial principle.

Chapter 10: Justice and the Common Good

The conclusion argues that justice cannot be neutral about the good life and calls for a "politics of the common good" that engages moral and religious convictions in public debate, including on economic inequality and civic life.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Doing the Right Thing; Utilitarianism

• Three approaches to justice: maximising welfare, respecting freedom and promoting virtue, the framework of the whole book.
• Moral reflection: moving between judgements about particular cases and the principles behind them until the two fit together.
• Greatest happiness principle: Bentham's standard that right action maximises overall happiness.

Chapters 3–6: Libertarianism; Markets and Morals; Kant; Rawls

• Self-ownership: the libertarian claim that each person owns herself and her powers and cannot be used for others' purposes.
• Categorical imperative: Kant's test of acting only on principles one could will as universal law and of treating persons as ends.
• Veil of ignorance: Rawls's device of choosing principles without knowing one's own position in society.
• Difference principle: inequalities are just only if they benefit the least advantaged.

Chapters 7–10: Affirmative Action; Aristotle; Loyalty; the Common Good

• Teleological reasoning: deciding who deserves a good by asking what the good or the practice is for.
• Narrative conception of the self: MacIntyre's view, adopted by Sandel, that identity and obligation are shaped by the stories and communities we belong to.
• Obligations of solidarity: duties owed because of membership, not consent.
• Politics of the common good: public deliberation about the good life rather than neutrality towards it.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Clear exposition of major theories. Reviewers in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Philosophy Now praise the clarity with which Bentham, Mill, Nozick, Kant, Rawls and Aristotle are explained, making ideas such as the categorical imperative and the difference principle accessible without simplifying them away.
• Theory through cases. Each position is introduced and tested through vivid cases from law, politics and current events, which shows readers how abstract principles bear on real disputes and trains them to look for the principle behind a judgement.
• Fair hearing for opponents. Samuel Moyn in The Nation notes that each theory is given its due before being criticised, and Phil Badger in Philosophy Now, while disagreeing with the conclusions, describes the analysis of each position's limits as careful and serious.
• A clear argument of its own. Unlike a neutral survey, the book argues for a position, so students see how a philosopher builds a case across several chapters.

Limitations

• A survey with a destination. The order of chapters is designed to clear the ground for Sandel's virtue-based view, so utilitarianism and liberal neutrality are presented largely from the angle of their weaknesses. Badger argues that the liberal response to Sandel's communitarianism is stronger than the book allows.
• The common good stays vague. Moyn argues that, despite rejecting neutrality, Sandel says little about which conception of the good life or of collective virtue he favours, or how to choose among rival ones.
• Selective canon. Moyn points out that traditions treating justice as collective freedom (Rousseau, Hegel and their successors) and questions of global justice receive little attention.
• American examples. The cases come mostly from American law and politics around 2000–2010, so some need context for readers elsewhere or later.

Where It Fits in the Course

In a political philosophy course this is the most case-driven and argumentative of the introductions. David Miller's Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction is a brief, even-handed overview organised by topics such as authority, democracy, freedom and social justice, and Jonathan Wolff's An Introduction to Political Philosophy is a fuller textbook built around a sequence of central questions about the state and its limits. Students who read Sandel first get motivation and memorable examples; Wolff then supplies a more balanced and systematic treatment, and Miller works as a quick review.

Sandel's account of Rawls is a useful bridge to Rawls's own Political Liberalism, the course's demanding primary text. His critique of liberal neutrality can be read against Rawls's defence of public reason. Philip Pettit's Republicanism offers a further conception of freedom, as non-domination, to set beside the libertarian, Kantian and Rawlsian conceptions Sandel discusses, and Zoopolis by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka extends questions of membership and citizenship to animals.

How to Use This Book

No background is needed, and the book reads well cover to cover. A practical plan is to take one chapter per week alongside the corresponding primary texts from the course reading list (Sandel's companion anthology, Justice: A Reader, collects classic readings): Bentham and Mill with Chapter 2, Nozick with Chapter 3, Kant's Groundwork with Chapter 5, Rawls with Chapter 6, Aristotle's Politics with Chapter 8. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 form the core; Chapters 4 and 7 are case studies that can be read selectively; Chapters 9 and 10 carry Sandel's own argument and should not be skipped if the course is assessing communitarianism.

For each case, write down your first judgement, then the principle it seems to rely on, and see whether Sandel's discussion changes either. Keep the three approaches as headings in your notes and file each argument under one of them. Finally, read the last two chapters critically: state Sandel's objection to neutrality in your own words and try answering it from Rawls's point of view, as reviewers such as Badger do. Harvard's filmed version of the course covers much of the same ground and can be used for revision.