Michael Sandel Justice

In the book, Justice: What’s the Right thing to do? Michael Sandel discuss the different angles justice is taken and introduces different angles about justice and its role in politics. During this book review, I intend to introduce Sandel’s arguments while also giving my view of my opinions. In chapters one through four, the author discusses theories of justice based on utilitarianism and libertarianism. The book’s purpose is to confront the ideas and concepts that aren’t clear at the surface level. While reading the first five chapter, my mind has been challenged to understanding what I would kind ethical given different scenarios. Sandel does a great job of introducing both hypothetical and real life situations that would bring about very …show more content…
In a hypothetical scenario, if there was an Al-Qaeda terrorist that did not want to give up information, is it ok to inflict torture in order to get information out of him? For this approach, justice would be that torture should be practiced on the terrorist in order to maximize the welfare of the many lives we would be saving by torturing the terrorist. While this approach does have many hypothetical scenarios in which it would make sense to have one person harmed rather than the other, there are many time where the person being negatively affected does not obtain their human rights. One very shocking observations Sandel discusses some ways, through our current governmental structure, we aren’t obtaining our human …show more content…
Opponents believe that in all situations we must respect everyone’s human rights. Sandel says the common idea of justice that most people perceive is the idea that “ justice means respecting certain universal human rights”. In this approach Sandel concludes that it “wrongly reduces everything of moral importance to a single scale of pleasure and pain”.
Sandel uses John Stuart Mill in order to restore some of the criticism many ulatiliariams get about giving up someone else’s happiness for the majority’s happiness.
Interesting arguments brought up in chapter three discussed how governments are controlling the decision many human being should be able to freely make without government laws. This includes thing such as abortion, suicide and organ donations. Libertarians would defend human rights by claiming that we are owners of our own body and should be free to do what we’d like. Utilitarianism would discuss the many ways theses decisions can be hurting the rest of the population or blame people’s