The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the most significant change in recent decades is the infiltration of market values into areas of life that shouldn't be governed by them.
Michael Sandel emphasizes that the critical transformation over the last thirty years is not merely an escalation of greed, but rather the pervasive spread of market values into facets of human life where they are inappropriate. This phenomenon has profound implications for how we understand relationships, ethics, and the very fabric of society, urging us to consider the consequences of allowing economic principles to dictate personal and social interactions.
In practice
In a speech about the ethical implications of capitalism.
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.
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
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.
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.
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.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
what cannot be saved when fate takes, patience her injury a mockery makes
Clearly if a hypnotist could make someone to steal £100k just by telling them to, the world would be a different place, and I suspect that hypnotists wouldn't bother doing shows in pubs or dodgy Spanish holiday resorts.
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows – it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
We won't figure out what's sacred in life if we settle for what's safe.
Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
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