An Interview with Michael Sandel
Benjamin Balint
IRVING HOWE AND BERNARD ROSENBERG, writing in the pages of Dissent, once warned of a threat from those “pressing to undo Jewish positions and accomplishments — pressing, especially, to undermine the merit system that has made possible Jewish positions and accomplishments.”
Is the meritocracy in which American Jews have placed their faith — a faith attributing their own success solely to hard work — itself a myth, a self-deluding idea that fuels our divisiveness? Does the meritocratic ideal — and the attendant identity-based politics — threaten solidarity and shared ideals? And what does all this have to do with how we practice pluralism in liberal democratic societies today?
To reflect on these questions, Sources turned to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, the most popular political philosopher of his generation. Sandel not only discusses the value of public philosophy, he exemplifies it. His lectures on justice have been devoured by millions of students around the world. He has led debates with members of Parliament at Britain’s Palace of Westminster, and with viewers from around the world in the BBC series, “The Global Philosopher.” The New York Times reports that Sandel “has packed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Sydney Opera House in Australia, and a 14,000-seat outdoor stadium in Seoul, South Korea.”
A graduate of Brandeis University, Sandel received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He made his name with his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), a brilliant critique of the liberal theorist John Rawls’ conception of the individual. The essays he collected in Public Philosophy (2005) articulated a liberalism that is profoundly concerned with our responsibility to one another and scolded his fellow liberals for ignoring the values of social cohesion.
In his new book, The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel writes with exhilarating eloquence on meritocracy — a term pejoratively coined by socialist British scholar Michael Young — and on how our infatuation with individual autonomy has caused us to lose sight of the common good. “Even a fair meritocracy,” he argues, “one without cheating or bribery or special privileges for the wealthy, induces the mistaken impression that we have made it on our own.” The prevailing meritocratic and credentialist creed “diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate,” Sandel writes, and “leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes.”
During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed not only the dangers of that diminished capacity to see the common good in the midst of a pandemic (think of the phrases “social distancing” and “we’re all in this together”), but how best to bring big questions once more into the public square.
Before we come to meritocracy, let’s begin more generally with your practice of public philosophy. Who have been your models in extending the reach of philosophical deliberation beyond the academy?
SANDEL: There’s a long tradition of philosophy engaging with the world. In some ways it goes back to the origins of political philosophy in ancient Athens. Socrates didn’t publish anything; he wandered the streets of Athens and engaged a wide range of citizens and discussions about the city and about justice. So political philosophy from its very origins has always been connected with the city, with politics, with the real world. I see that not only as a way of bringing philosophy down to earth, I see that as integral to what philosophy — certainly political philosophy — consists in.
Other than your teacher Charles Taylor, were there examples of people who did philosophy in the style to which you aspired?
Michael Walzer is another example for me. His book Just and Unjust War was very much addressed to contemporary political debates in a very powerful way, as was his book Spheres of Justice. And the volumes that he edited on the Jewish political tradition, which grew out of the Shalom Hartman Institute philosophy conferences over the years, are a monument to the enduring relevance of philosophy — in this casevJewish philosophy and Talmudic learning — to contemporary issues.
As in the Talmudic tradition, it strikes me that storytelling is essential to your teaching, your writing, and your engagement with with bringing philosophy to the public sphere.
I find it difficult to separate philosophy altogether from narrative.
I find it difficult to separate philosophy altogether from narrative. While philosophy deals in abstractions, in concepts — justice, freedom, democracy, citizenship, community — it’s difficult, if not impossible, to elucidate those concepts without recourse to narrative, to stories, to illustrative examples. One view of philosophy holds that philosophers formulate principles and then applied philosophers fit those principles to this or that dilemma. But I think that’s too wooden a way of conceiving the relation of philosophy to political practice. I take a more interpretive view of the relation between philosophy and practice. Even to articulate a conception of justice or of freedom requires connecting competing philosophical conceptions to their embodiment in practice. So moving back and forth between philosophical principles and their concrete expression in practice is integral to philosophy itself. It’s not simply a way of fixing principles first and then asking how they fit the world. This interpretive way of proceeding is an important part of teaching philosophy, but it’s also constitutive of what it is to do philosophy. So this hermaneutic way of conceiving philosophy brings the world in from the start.
Perhaps the European model of philosophy has felt more comfortable with the narrative mode than the Anglo-American.
I think you’re right: the Anglo-American philosophical tradition tends to conceive philosophy and narrative as separate enterprises. But I think this misses something; I think this is a mistake. I see historical and literary interpretation as continuous with philosophical thinking, not as entirely separate disciplines. And that’s because I see philosophy as essentially an interpretive activity. And if that is true, it can’t be neatly separated from historical, political, and literary interpretation.
It’s exactly one of the situated virtues that I’d like to raise with you next: humility. In your book The Case Against Perfection (2007), you argue against the “Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires.” You note that human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and at the same time, that there are strictures against idolatry, against confusing human beings’ role with God’s. You notice a tension between these two impulses — between dominion and humility.
Not coincidentally, you end your new book The Tyranny of Merit on a similar note: “For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient.” I wonder whether you could speak to that theme that draws together so much of your writing from bioethics to meritocracy.
Viewing our success as our own doing forgets any sense of indebtedness for the gifts and talents that make our success possible.
Thank you for noticing that theme, which does indeed run through most of my work, going back to my first book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, which criticizes those versions of liberal, moral and political philosophy that conceive the self as given prior to and independent of its purposes and ends. I call this the “unencumbered self” of the liberalism one finds in Kant and John Rawls. Beginning with my first book, I’ve been wrestling with the conception of the self that predominates in much American moral and political philosophy, but that also informs much public discourse and political practice in the contemporary world. In The Case Against Perfection, just as you say, I identify those aspects of genetic engineering and enhancement that seem animated ultimately by a certain project of unbridled mastery and dominion. I’m very much in favor of uses of biotechnology to cure and prevent disease. But in that book I argue against nonmedical uses of biotechnology that would remake our nature, whether to enhance our athletic performance, as Lance Armstrong notoriously did with performance-enhancing drugs, to enhance our cognition, or to live forever as some now aspire to do. And it’s these uses of biotechnology that reflect the bid for unbridled mastery and dominion, and that are animated by a conception of ourselves as ultimately self-made and self-sufficient.
In The Case Against Perfection I argue against the self image that animates that ambition that we see being played out in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and that appears in the version of meritocracy I criticize in The Tyranny of Merit. Viewing our success (and for that matter our lot in life) as our own doing forgets the luck and good fortune that helps us on our way, forgets any sense of indebtedness for the gifts and talents that make our success possible. And it ultimately draws upon and reinforces the idea that to be a free human agent is to be ultimately self-made and self-sufficient. So I’ve been arguing against this picture of human freedom and of the human person throughout, in different guises, and trying to describe how it undermines moral, social, and civic goods worth caring about. I tried to show this in the case of biotechnology in The Case Against Perfection, in the case of the market triumphalist ideology in What Money Can’t Buy, and in conceptions of success in The Tyranny of Merit.
It’s also a theme that animates your contribution to the David Hartman festschrift (republished in your collection of essays, Public Philosophy). In noting how Hartman renovated Jewish thought, you speak of his “celebration of human finitude.” You compare Hartman and Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the Adam story, and use that distinction to address temptations of idolatry. I wonder whether you can share with us something about where you think such temptations have migrated to today? Have they migrated to the political?
Yes, I think these temptations have deeply informed politics today and impede a politics of the common good. That ultimately is the political consequence of embracing a conception of freedom or of human agency that intimates the idea of unqualified self-making and self-sufficiency. I think this is a mistaken idea of freedom, but one that is deeply present in modern politics. We see it in the tendency to conceive freedom in terms of individual choice. And this leads to a consumerist understanding of freedom at odds with a civic conception of freedom. The former conceives freedom to consist in the absence of obstacles to the realization of my desires — in short, the ability to get what I want. This is in tension with a civic conception of freedom, which conceives freedom as the capacity to share in self-rule and self-government, to participate in shaping the forces that govern our collective lives. Civic freedom requires a way of life that enables citizens to deliberate with one another about the conceptions of the good that our community should pursue. But the consumerist idea of freedom tends to crowd out the civic understanding of freedom. This would be another way in which this mistaken idea of freedom crowds out goods, ideals, and possibilities that would orient us toward a politics of the common good.
Asking citizens to leave their spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public square creates a moral void.
I think citizens in democracies around the world are frustrated with the terms of public discourse and with the way democratic governance is functioning. And much of the frustration, I think, is that politics is not for the most part oriented toward the common good, toward common purposes; hence the project of self-government is in question. And this has partly to do with the grip of an overly narrow conception of what freedom really means. The market triumphalist faith that has predominated over the last four decades has reinforced this narrow consumerist conception of freedom at the expense of the civic conception. But it also shows up in hubristic attitudes towards success that have deepened the divide between winners and losers, and generated such resentment, that we’ve seen a populist backlash against the so-called winners, against elites. So these are several ways in which I see this overly narrow conception of freedom and agency distorting our politics.
Let’s linger for a moment on this theme of the common good and the common life. In The Tyranny of Merit, you write: “If the common good can be arrived at only by deliberating with our fellow citizens about the purposes and ends worthy of our political community, then democracy cannot be indifferent to the character of the common life.” Is liberalism really neutral about the ultimate goods of life and the common values that promote those goods?
Contemporary liberalism has in large part defined itself as a public philosophy that seeks neutrality toward the good life. It’s this conception of liberalism as seeking governing principles that are neutral principles toward the good life that I’ve criticized going back to my book Democracy’s Discontent, where I tried to show how this aspiration to neutrality in the American political tradition gradually crowded out stronger civic, conceptions of freedom. It seems to me that liberalism as neutrality toward the good is not the only kind of liberalism, but it’s one that has become deeply influential in the last half century. And it has an understandable appeal: the appeal of seeking principles to govern ourselves that are neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good life seems to spare us messy contentious debates in pluralist societies, where we disagree about moral questions.
So liberalism as neutrality has a powerful appeal for pluralist societies. We disagree about the best way to live. We disagree about what counts as a virtuous life. We disagree about moral and religious questions. The aspiration to find principles of justice that are neutral with respect to these moral and religious disagreements is powerfully attractive. If we could find such principles, they would spare us the need to argue with one another about contested moral questions, the need to engage in controversial debates in the public square about morality and religion; they would seem to pave a way to a tolerant society.
But I’ve argued that liberalism as neutrality is a mistaken response to the pluralism in contemporary democratic societies. First, it’s not possible to define and defend principles of justice and rights that are truly neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good life. Second, the attempt to do so is undesirable. Asking citizens to leave their moral and spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public square creates a moral void, a vacuum of meaning in public life, that that will invariably be filled with narrow intolerant moralisms, usually in one of two forms: fundamentalism or strident nationalism. Both rush in to fill a public life that is emptied of substantive moral argument and engagement. I think this is what we’ve seen in recent decades: attempts to impose the strictures of liberal public reason (understood as neutrality toward the good) on democratic societies and public discourse have not succeeded in banishing moral judgment from politics, but have driven it underground. It’s not possible to define rights or to establish laws or to set policies in a way that is truly neutral on moral questions. And yet if our public discourse fails to acknowledge this and fails to welcome substantive moral argument into public discourse, people will sense the bad faith when decisions are made in the name of neutrality, but that actually embody certain unacknowledged moral assumptions.
In many ways, the embrace of markets in recent decades has had this superficial appeal. If we conceive market mechanisms to be the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good, that would seem to spare us these messy debates about moral questions. But outsourcing moral judgments to markets does not leave these questions undecided. It simply means they will be decided elsewhere, out of public view and without genuine public voice.
The same is true for technocratic expertise. Consigning more and more public questions to technocrats also seems to spare us the need to have citizens engage in controversial debates involving moral questions. But outsourcing policy and law to technocratic expertise is a similarly spurious neutrality.
People want public discourse to be about big things, including questions of values, questions about justice, about equality and inequality, about the role of markets, about what we owe one another. But if such questions are not being addressed and engaged and debated in a morally robust public sphere, people will reach for narrow bids for meaning, which we find with when either fundamentalism or strident nationalism fill that space.
If, as you say, fundamentalists or nationalists rush in where liberals fear to tread, then what can we do to fill that vacuum?
We need to do two things. One is to change the terms of public discourse to engage more directly with moral questions, to welcome people, whatever their moral and spiritual views — secular, religious, or otherwise — into a morally robust kind of public discourse. To make that possible, we have to create venues for a morally more robust kind of public discourse. This requires rebuilding the civic infrastructure of a shared common life. We have fewer and fewer common spaces and public places in which citizens from all walks of life come in the ordinary course of their lives to encounter one another. Part of what we’ve lost over the past four or five decades — as inequality has deepened, and as markets have come to a predominate as a way of organizing our social life — is that those who are affluent and those of modest means increasingly live separate lives. We send our children to different schools. We live and shop and play in different places. With the decline of trade unions, we’ve lost important venues for deliberation. As a condition of invigorating public discourse, we have to rejuvenate those settings within civil society that give people practice in reasoning together and arguing together about common purposes.
The media has reinforced this tendency of separation. There are fewer and fewer venues of reasoned argument about important questions because people have their own views echoed back to them. So the media — and social media — is another important space that needs to be reclaimed for civic dialogue across differences.
With all this in mind, I’d like to return finally to the question of liberalism and the Jews. It could be said the modern Jewish drive toward political, economic, and cultural integration into surrounding societies has been accompanied by a commitment on the part of the Jews to liberalism as a social and political philosophy; that is, to a view of society that puts the individual and his/her rights as both the point of departure and as the end of politics. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
Yes. I want to emphasize that by criticizing liberalism as neutrality I am by no means rejecting liberalism’s historic emphasis on respect for individual rights. What’s at issue in the philosophical debates about liberalism as neutrality is not whether respect for individual rights is of overriding moral and political importance. At issue, rather, is whether it’s possible to define our rights and to defend those rights in a way that is neutral with respect to conceptions of the good life and of human flourishing. The long tradition of respect for individual rights — which is broadly speaking, a liberal tradition — is a much broader and more expansive conception of liberalism than the one that I’ve criticized in my work.
With that qualification, I would agree with what you say about liberalism and the Jews. Jewish communities are especially alert to the importance of individual rights and civil liberties, for obvious historical reasons. I think that’s a very important part of liberalism, but I don’t think it’s a liberalism that can be secured in a way that is independent of conceptions of the good as we’ve discussed.
Thinking about Jewish life in North America, as the Jewish community has become more integrated and more affluent, the commitment to progressive or social-democratic policies may be subject to the same kinds of disagreements within the Jewish community as we find in the wider society. Whereas the traditional Jewish concern for individual rights and civil liberties continues to be quite strong. For example, when the Trump administration called in 2017 for a Muslim ban, the Jewish community had out special antennae that led us to perceive a violation of rights in ways that reflected a long-standing Jewish experience with prejudice and exclusion, notwithstanding the fact that North American Jews themselves feel quite integrated and comfortable in North America.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
