公正：该如何做是好?

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哈佛大学迈克尔•桑德尔（Michael J. Sandel）教授法学系列课程《公正：该如何做是好？》

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We're going to explore in the days and weeks to come the contrast between
consequentialist and categorical moral principles. The most influential example of
consequential moral reasoning is utilitarianism, a doctrine invented by Jeremy Bentham,
the 18th century English political philosopher. The most important philosopher of
categorical moral reasoning is the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. So
we will look at those two different modes of moral reasoning, assess them, and also
consider others. If you look at the syllabus, you'll notice that we read a number of great
and famous books, books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stewart Mill,
and others. You'll notice too from the syllabus that we don't only read these books; we
also take up contemporary, political, and legal controversies that raise philosophical
questions. We will debate equality and inequality, affirmative action, free speech versus
hate speech, same sex marriage, military conscription, a range of practical questions.
Why? Not just to enliven these abstract and distant books but to make clear, to bring out
what's at stake in our everyday lives, including our political lives, for philosophy. And so
we will read these books and we will debate these issues, and we'll see how each informs
and illuminates the other.
This may sound appealing enough, but here I have to issue a warning.
And the warning is this, to read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge,
to read them in this way carries certain risks, risks that are both personal and political,
risks that every student of political philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact
that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we
already know. There's an irony. The difficulty of this course consists in
the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know
from familiar unquestioned settings and  making it strange. That's how those examples worked,
the hypotheticals with which we began, with their mix of playfulness and sobriety.
It's also how these philosophical books work.  Philosophy estranges us from
the familiar, not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking
a new way of seeing but, and here's the risk, once the familiar
turns strange, it's never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence,
however unsettling you find it; it can never be un-thought or un-known. What makes this
enterprise difficult but also riveting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and
you don't know where the story will lead. But what you do know is that the story is about
you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing
a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and debating
these issues, you will become a better, more responsible citizen; you will examine the
presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become
a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading
promise. Political philosophy, for the most part, hasn't worked that way. You have to
allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather
than a better one or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one, and that's
because philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating, activity.
And you see this, going back to Socrates, there's a dialogue, the Gorgias, in which one of
Socrates' friends, Callicles, tries to talk him out of philosophizing. Callicles tells Socrates
"Philosophy is a pretty toy if one indulges in it with moderation at the right time of life.
But if one pursues it further than one should, it is absolute ruin." "Take my advice,"
Callicles says, "abandon argument. Learn the accomplishments of active life, take for
your models not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles but those
who have a good livelihood and reputation and many other blessings." So Callicles is
really saying to Socrates "Quit philosophizing, get real, go to business school." And
Callicles did have a point. He had a point because philosophy distances us from
conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs.
Those are the risks, personal and political.