About three years ago, Harvard created a new way for students to learn knowledge and exchange academic ideas that it uploaded many of its popular courses on the Internet, such as Professor Michael Sandel's philosophy class Justice and Professor Tal Ben Shahar's psychology class Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership. The university soon became the trailblazer of open courses that after that, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge and many other top universities successively uploaded their classes on iTunes in order to better and broader advertise their universities to the whole world.
Thus, that is how I got to know Michael Sandel and his great class: Justice.
Before I watched the whole 12-episode class, I held the impression of philosophy that it is boring and dry. People argue about it all the time from past till now, but no one is able to say who is right. To me, because when I was in high school we had to remember the theory which ancient people had come up with, philosophy used to be my least favorite subject to study.
However, in his first class of Justice, Professor Sandel asked the students several tricky questions which soon drew my attention and obsessed me. For example, suppose you're the driver of a broken trolley car, will you stir your wheel from your original l track which stand on five workers to avoid hitting them, and turn to another branch which stands only one person and kill him/her? Why or why not?
Those questions are all about morals. Yet because they trigger people to think in different perspectives with different but all justifiable reasons, they are not only about morals anymore. According to Professor Sandel, your answer determines the category you stand in, such as utilitarian and libertarian, and those categories therefore make the whole philosophy complicated but interesting.
Then we have one of the most interesting topics in philosophy, the moral correctness. When I was reading Les Miserable, I encountered so many scenes which readers cannot easily decide whether they are morally correct or not. For example, is stealing right? Definitely not. However, if someone steals foods only because he is extremely poor and cannot buy foods for his starving and dying daughter, is his stealing forgivable then? You might answer "probably". Then what if I tell you that the stealer steals an apple from another poor family, and the apple he steals is the only food the family have? Now suppose you're a judge, can you quickly and directly make decisions of this case? I kept asking myself what was right and what was wrong when I was reading the book, yet I would subvert all my initial opinions and hesitated between "true" and "false" all the time.
Then I made a conclusion: there's no absolute "correctness", no definite "right" and no certain "justice".
Aristotle says that when people argue about justice they usually are "speaking of a limited and partial justice." I totally agree. The first question I asked about Les Miserable indicates the limited and partial justice of the "stealee". When we turn into the second and third question, we obviously can't feel the confidence of the answer towards the first question. It is so difficult to talk about justice in the larger sense of the word rather than to discuss a limited aspect of justice, because we never know the future sequence of our decisions. In other words, we cannot include all the aspects of justice, and therefore we cannot make a perfect decision of justice.
When I was studying Economics, it seemed so reasonable for the government to tax the rich heavily to save the poor. However, in Economics there're two determinants of a market: equity and efficiency. The weights of the two determinants decide the mode of the economy of a country. Generally, capitalism encourages more efficiency while communism cares more about equity. Therefore, though taxing the rich heavily to save the poor is apparently people's preference and it seems so reasonable and justified, it's not correct. People who earn money will lose the incentive (which is another significant determinant in Economics) to work, and without enough labour force the market will gradually lose the efficiency and cannot function anymore.
So as a conclusion, I don't think there's a definition of the word "Justice". It's so complex that it's not something we could merely define with.
I really like Michael Sandel and his class about justice!
ReplyDeleteMe too!!!! I strongly recommend you the Harvard Psychology class: Happiness too! It's also very good!!!
DeleteCharissa, this is a great post! I'm really glad that you are familiar with Michael Sandel's class on justice and have watched all twelve lectures. I should do that too, when I have time, as the few episodes I have seen thus far seem so interesting. I'm also glad that you mentioned Tal Ben Shahar's psychology classes -- I will have to check those out too! Thank you for the recommendation.
ReplyDeleteI also really liked how you made connections in your writing to other, broader topics, such as the book Les Miserables and your economics classes. Being able to draw connections to broader subjects and have them relate back to your topic of discussion is an important skill as a writer. I can tell that you really pushed your writing in this post, so thank you. Another great thing was that you specifically gave a reason for why people speak of justice in such a limited and partial sense, when you stated, "It is so difficult to talk about justice in the larger sense of the word rather than to discuss a limited aspect of justice, because we never know the future sequence of our decisions." It is all too easy to simply regurgitate Aristotle's point that mankind tends to speak of justice in a limited and partial sense, without really addressing why this might be the case, or really even understanding his point. But you have really dug underneath to uncover what it is about humans and about justice that prompts us to do this.
Excellent post! You have many great ideas afloat.
Thx so much!
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