Justice and the lost art of political debate
For twenty years, a political philosopher named Michael Sandel has taught a course at Harvard simply called “Justice.” It’s been so wildly popular that it became the first Harvard course to be aired on public television and available for free online. I just read the bestseller he wrote, Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?, which takes some of the key themes of the course and, presumably, puts the proverbial cookies on a shelf low enough for folks like me to reach them.
Drawing on philosophers both ancient and modern, he wrestles through real life dilemmas that happen all around us, and shows that there are three main ways of thinking about justice: justice as maximizing welfare, justice as respecting freedom, and justice as promoting virtue. We hold our views, in many cases, with unexamined and unarticulated assumptions, which goes a long way in explaining why political and social debates often turn so nasty, even among people who generally like each other.
Of today’s most divisive issues, Sandel says: “Lying just beneath the surface, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.”
Sandel says that most political discourse -- in mass media especially -- pits the welfare camp against the freedom camp. You probably know with which of the two camps you generally align. But he proposes a version of the third view of justice, that of promoting virtue. I won’t go into detail explaining what he means by that; you’ll need to read the book. Or better yet, take the course!
Here Sandel introduces some of the themes he covers in the book, using a fascinating golf quandary as his case study.
Going down to Cuba
I’m not sure how I missed it, but a month ago the US Treasury Department issued new guidelines on travel to Cuba. These long-overdue changes will ease restrictions on: (1) religious travel, (2) academic travel, (3) people-to-people travel and (4) journalist travel. The Latin American Working Group explains how the changes apply to each of these four types here.
I worked with Cuban refugees in Lancaster a few years ago, and having familiarized myself somewhat with US policy towards Cuba, I've found the logic behind it quite puzzling. In my opinion, these new travel guidelines are pretty sensible (unlike the travel ban), and hopefully we’ll see even more changes made in the near future.
To be clear, I’m no fan of the Castros and their regime; they abuse human rights, silence the press, stifle economic opportunity (with recent small exceptions), and generally I think they’ve done their country a tremendous disservice all these years. But the US embargo against Cuba and its people hasn’t helped matters either, and I'm glad for these small steps in the right direction.
Favelas, Rio’s guilty conscience
In anticipation of playing host to both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil has rolled out a “Favela Pacification Program” in Rio de Janeiro in a desperate attempt to curb rampant violence in its sprawling, gang-controlled hillside slums. When President Obama visited Rio in March, he made a point of stopping by and celebrating one of the slums under police control, called Cidade de Deus (or “City of God”). There he kicked around a soccer ball with neighborhood kids, albeit in a walled school compound with tight security.
The pacification program has its advocates and its critics, and it remains to be seen what kind of effect it will have on Rio’s favela-dwellers in these years leading up to the two big sporting events, and even more crucially, in the years following. ESPN's Wright Thompson has a really well-written piece for "Outside The Lines" on the complicated impact on the favelas even now. It’s lengthy but worth every word. Here’s a blurb:
The favelas, Rio's guilty conscience, almost a thousand of them, overlook paradise but never, ever partake. Dense, urban slums with wretched educational opportunities, no social services, no police protection, they exist outside civilized society. Residents who live in the city don't go up the hill. It's possible to live a middle-class life without the violence of the slums affecting one's daily existence. But the violence is always there. In 2010, there were 4,798 murders in Rio. That's about a fourth the number of murders annually in the entire United States. (The U.S. population is about 300 million people. Rio has 6 million.) Favelas are desperate places, and they've been ignored since the first one popped up in 1897. Only now, some of them are close to venues for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Rio has less than three years to fix a crisis a century in the making.
The clock is ticking.
Read the whole thing here.
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