Morality in the 21st Century: Michael Sandel

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 15: Michael Sandel

"‘I think that we've lost the ability to reason together in public about big moral questions. And by moral questions, I mean, what makes for a just society, how to live a good life, what we owe one another as citizens. These are the big questions that people care about. That animate passions and moral and spiritual disagreement.

And yet our public life seems to leave little space for public discussion of these questions. There's a kind of emptiness, a moral hollowness in the terms of public discourse. And I think this goes a long way toward explaining the mounting frustration that citizens in democracies throughout the world have toward politics’

‘You mean that they're looking for or they're listening for moral ideals, and they're just not hearing them.’

‘They're listening for them and not hearing them. But also, I think there's a yearning, a great yearning, for democratic citizens to be able to bring their moral and even spiritual convictions to bear in debating big questions about justice, equality and inequality, the nature of rights. And yet so much of what passes for public discourse these days consists either of narrow technocratic, managerial talk, which inspires no one.

Or where passion does enter, we have shouting matches. In which politicians and citizens shout at one another on cable television and talk radio and the floors of Parliament without really listening. And I think this is why people have so tuned away from established political parties and, and politicians.

It's happened at the same time over the past several decades, when markets and market thinking have come to dominate increasing swaths of, of social and civic life. And I think there's a connection between moral hollowing out of public discourse and the increasing reliance on market thinking and market values to decide important public questions…

The great danger of this is it encourages us to think of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens. And when we think of ourselves as consumers, we bring to politics, our interests, our preferences, and the question how best can we advance them. But to think of ourselves as citizens, is to seek opportunities to deliberate with our fellow citizens about how to shape the collective destiny.

And when we can't do that, when our civic identities become withered and impoverished and have little scope for exercise, we feel disempowered and we are disempowered, which I think explains much of the backlash we're seeing in the protest against established politics and and political parties'...

‘When you started writing about these things, way back now, actually, in almost I think your first book about liberalism, and the limits of justice, your main worry was what you call the unsituated self. You felt that politics didn't make enough room for the reality in most people's lives, of families, communities, traditions, and so on and so forth. That what you call constitutive attachments. But aren't we seeing today, an opposite kind of danger, which has got the name of identity politics? Too much groupishness and not enough abstract individuals?’

‘Well, that is one way, Jonathan of diagnosing what afflicts us today. To, that instead of being atomized or abstract, reasoning selves, we identify too closely or too insistently with the particular groups or tribes, or identities that claim us. But I would describe our predicament in a slightly different way.

I think the most damaging or deadening aspects of what often goes into the name identity politics reflects a reaction against the demand, that we separate ourselves. From communities and tradition and family and loyalties and solidarities. I think part of the difficulty we have today is that our self understandings, especially in the last several decades, have so been made over in the image of what I've called the unencumbered self, that we are hungry for a public life of larger meaning. We are seeking ways of giving collective and public expression to shared histories and cultures and communities’


One example of how libertarianism hollows out public life