The videos of ‘Justice’, Michael Sandel’s legendary course in ethics and politics, attended by over 15,000 students at Harvard University and filmed by a Boston television station, have been viewed by millions on the Internet, as their compilation has become a publishing phenomenon.

“Justice, what’s the right thing to do?” explores all the possible ways we think about justice, and hence ethics and politics, starting with concrete cases such as Hurricane Charley, conscription, Supreme Court rulings, surrogate mothers, cheerleaders and the salary of a schoolteacher compared with that of a television presenter. Michael Sandel paints a portrait of the major currents of thought on justice in our modern age of individualism and value relativism – Betham and Mill’s utilitarianism, Kant’s categorical imperative and Rawls’s theory of justice – interspersing theoretical points with practical questions that everyone asks about equality of opportunity and income. “Justice, what’s the right thing to do?” has sold over a million copies in South East Asia. In 2011, Michael Sandel was named “Foreign Personality of the Year” in the Chinese edition of Newsweek.

Michael Sandel is known for his criticism of John Rawls’ theory of justice. For him, the context of liberalism does not allow property and community to be judged on the basis of attributes intrinsic to the individual, but on the basis of extrinsic attributes.
Sandel acknowledges that theories of justice also need to make us think outside of the box. Yes, we need debate in other circles, whether in the non-profit, trade union or professional community, to deliberate and position the law’s cursors in a balanced way.