Great Throughts Treasury

"A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter."

"A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or crowding out their intrinsic interest or commitment."

"A polis is not an association for residence on a common site, or for the sake of preventing mutual injustice and easing exchange.' While these conditions are necessary to a polis, they are not sufficient. 'The end and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to that end."

"And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?"

"Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life."

"First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others."

"I am fortunate to have enough money not to have to worry about the necessities of life. Beyond that, I try to think about money as little as possible."

"I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate."

"If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent."

"If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community."

"Libertarians argue that any distribution of income that results from a free market is fair. But market outcomes reflect morally arbitrary contingencies, of two kinds. First, some people start out with opportunities and skills that others lack?a supportive family, a good education, certain natural gifts. This lucky starting point is not their own doing."

"I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values."

"I grew up in a Jewish family, and we have raised our children in a Jewish tradition. Religion gives a framework for moral enquiry in young minds and points us to questions beyond the material."

"Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets."

"My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life."

"It can often be clarifying to think about real-life dilemmas that lack obvious practical solutions, in order to examine the moral principles at stake. Think of the debates we have about the ethics of torture. Former Vice President Cheney argues that torturing terrorist suspects is justified because it saves innocent lives. Some opponents of torture reply that torture never produces reliable information. But to reach the issue of principle (is torture morally impermissible?), we need to set aside this empirical claim and ask whether torture would be justified even if it did sometimes yield valuable information."

"One of the appeals of markets, as a public philosophy, is they seem to spare us the need to engage in public arguments about the meaning of goods. So markets seem to enable us to be non-judgmental about values. But I think that's a mistake."

"Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn?t just for registering pleasure and pain. It?s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don?t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good."

"One of the great costs of setting aside RFK?s moral and civic critique of consumerism is that it made progressives more accepting than they should have been of the market mania of recent decades. After Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, liberals and progressives moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. The financial crisis may have called that faith into question. But we haven?t yet found our way to a new politics of the common good."

"Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents cannot be held wholly responsible for the kind of child they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what the theologian William F. May calls an openness to the unbidden."

"Philosophy is a distancing, if not debilitating, activity."

"The commitment to a framework neutral among ends can be seen as a kind of value... but its value consists precisely in its refusal to affirm a preferred way of life or conception of the good."

"Some people draw a sharp distinction between the moral issues we confront in our personal lives and the questions of justice that arise in politics. I don?t. It?s true that deciding questions of justice involves a political process. In a democracy, this usually means deliberating and then voting. But deliberation (at its best) requires reasoned moral argument. Otherwise, political argument descends into the shouting matches that abound these days on talk radio and cable television. To be a citizen is to be something of a philosopher."

"Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'."

"The responsibility of political philosophy that tries to engage with practice is to be clear, or at least accessible."

"The descent of sport into spectacle is not unique to the age of genetic engineering. But it illustrates how performance-enhancing technologies, genetic or otherwise, can erode the part of athletic and artistic performance that celebrates natural talents and gifts."

"The state should not impose a preferred way of life, but should leave its citizens as free as possible to choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others."

"The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be"

"The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why."

"Time, Political, Philosophy"

"There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that?s a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion."

"We learned philosophy and flustered when force us to confront what we know already. Therein lies the irony. They take what is familiar and is disproved posed to us in a strange new. Philosophy takes us away from the usual not to provide us with new information, but provoked a different vision. And here the risk, when it becomes familiar strange, things will not return to its former condition. Knowledge we gain ourselves of our thinking is lost and cannot be undone."

"To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions."

"We have a responsibility to preserve the earth?s resources and natural wonders in and of themselves? because they constitute the very web of life on which all living creatures on this planet depend."

"When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't."

"Whether you're a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life."