Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

A book for general readers based on Sandel's popular Harvard course, Justice. It introduces the main theories of justice through hard cases. Sandel starts with price gouging after a hurricane and with runaway-trolley dilemmas, then sets out three ways of thinking about justice: maximising welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue. Utilitarianism is tested against cases such as the shipwrecked sailors of the Mignonette, who killed and ate a cabin boy. Libertarianism, with Nozick and Milton Friedman, raises the question of whether we own ourselves, and markets in military service and surrogacy test the limits of consent. Kant's emphasis on motive and Rawls's veil of ignorance follow, with a chapter on affirmative action. Sandel then returns to Aristotle, arguing that questions of justice often depend on the purpose of a practice and on what virtues it honours, and closes with loyalty, community and a politics of the common good. Liberal critics find this communitarian conclusion vague.

It is one of the clearest introductions to political philosophy, showing how Bentham, Kant, Rawls and Aristotle bear on real controversies.