Michael Sandel

Spends most of his time with just close friends, with family, very humble.

Here's the philosopher Michael Sandel on getting a phone call from him when he started as an assistant professor at in Harvard in the 1980s.

So by this time, John Rawls is the towering figure in all of Western political philosophy.

And he gets a call from him in his own university.

Fast-forward, communitarian philosophers still talk about that.

So Michael Sandel's whole critique of John Rawls' theory of justice is based on the fact you can't have a theory of justice if we don't value each other.

But in economics, where even the public good, which sounds good, there's two word, one is good, is just correcting for a market failure, I say it's impossible to actually achieve good results 'cause you're always just filling the gap, correcting things after the fact.

Yeah.

Christopher Nolan, of all people, echoing Alex de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, argued that in a recent interview that democratic societies in general that believe in equality mean that people are disposed to have people have to apologize for greatness because otherwise they otherwise will reject it.

Similar ideas in Michael Sandel's Tyranny of Merit that proposes the values of meritocracy create hubris among winners and humiliation among the losers, which can cause resentment.

Edelman himself argues that elites are themselves to blame by creating real-life practical and moral institutional failures that lead people not to trust them.

Others argue the rise of the internet has made it easier to share information that real or fake runs counter to elite narratives, or that elites and non-elites increasingly lead very different lives and therefore increasingly can't relate to each other and their values, which fuels distrust.

I consume what I'm going to mention in the form of a podcast, but it's available in lots of different forms.

Michael Sandel's BBC series, The Public Philosopher, which I think is fantastic.

You know,

he...

That's a problem.

I read a book by Michael Sandel a number of years ago called The Tyranny of Merit.

Now, I ended up agreeing with the book then a few years later, disagreeing with the book.

Whatever you think of it, it's a brilliant read, The Tyranny of Merit.

And equity is burning a lot of people and it's burning them or it's raising up a lot of people who shouldn't be.

And it's cancelling a lot of people who shouldn't be cancelled, but it just doesn't align with how things work, and that's the problem.

David, if I can just jump in quickly to say, if Michael Sandel was on this call, I think the point he would make is that the students at Harvard, a disproportionately high percentage of them, it's not just that they're white, they come from wealthy families who are worth a lot of money and high-end jobs, Ivy League, you know, schools, colleges, well, not Ivy League because that's universities and colleges like Harvard, but they actually come and there's a sense of that's not particularly just.

And I think that's, if Michael Sandel would say, you know, the tyranny of merit is that we congratulate ourselves that we live in a country that functions off merit and he would say, well, actually, if you look at a lot of the figures, it may not be merit, it may be just the family you were born in.

But beyond that, you know how money pulls into the plan of the comic universe.

protagonist there are just references everywhere how people are being cheap or being greedy and and how they use money And at that time, while I was reading that, my side reading that was for pleasure reading was a book by Michael Sandel.

And I think it's called What Money Can't Buy.

And there's this analysis of how our societies have drifted from being market economies to being market societies.

Canadians should be very proud.

But you also have Michael Sandel, a Jewish

philosopher at Harvard, who really helped coin the term the unencumbered self, which really maps well onto Charles Taylor's like buffered self idea.

You know, and he has Sandel has the most probably the most popular philosophy.

Um, recorded lectures of all time, uh, his class on justice, great little book.

And I don't, I don't think he would call him.

That's the, uh, that's the quid pro quo.

But, you know, if, if, if, when, when this gentleman sat down, the president said, "Hey, if you give us, um, $150 million, then we'll name, uh, the, the program after you, and you can speak to, you know, Pinker and Michael Sandel and, um, uh, other Harvard faculty as often as you want," um, that would have put a kind of pall over the evening.

[laughs]

Uh, it would be-- you know, even though it would have cut out a lot of, uh, you know, time, these are busy individuals.