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Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, and for 30 years has been exploring the concept of ‘Justice’ and how to balance the rights of the individual against the needs of the community. His intention is to teach his students the thoughts of dead philosophers but also to challenge received ideas about the common good and how to achieve it. In his first lecture for the BBC he talked about ‘Markets and Morality’, questioning the assumptions of the last 30 years that market incentives can solve social problems.
The lecture itself was so refreshingly common-sensical; like a breath of fresh air amid the sulphurous fumes of the last few weeks of expense accounts and political skulduggery. Take, for instance, differing policies regarding blood donorship. In the US, it’s a commercial operation, but in the UK blood is given freely as a donation, a service to the community. Sandel argues that in America this has changed the norms; the operating rules by which society functions. What was a gift has become a commodity. This might explain why the American bloodbank experiences shortages, inefficiencies and a greater incidence of contamination. It’s a reminder, he says, that markets leave their mark.
It was such a relief to hear such a potent exposition of what’s been going wrong; this inability to balance the view that markets are not necessarily a bad thing with the awareness that you must at all times be aware of consequences. But the lecture really took off when a hedge-fund manager in the audience at Broadcasting House suggested in the question-and-answer session afterwards that the bankers who are now so reviled for breaking the system were actually trying to do good. They ‘showed no prejudice’ when they doled out mortgages to those who previously would never have qualified for them. It was like being talked at by a ‘religious’ fundamentalist, when nothing you can say will divert them from their rigid train of thought.
This week’s Worldplay on the World Service (Saturday) also took us into the realm of ethics as a young woman in need of a heart transplant finds a donor in a far-off place. Tim Crouch’s hour-long play England (directed by Marion Nancarrow) was an inventive and surprisingly gripping auditory experience, taking us from the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the East End to a hotel room 8,000 miles away where the young woman and her boyfriend encounter problems of translation and interpretation. There were clunky moments but I had to keep on listening to find out where Crouch was taking us.
Much of the dialogue was shared interchangeably between the two actors, Tim Crouch and Hannah Ringham, so that Tim sometimes played his girlfriend and vice versa. You might think this would lead to confusion but it took the play right inside the mind, as their thoughts about what was happening to them criss-crossed with what was actually being said — just as in life.
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Also by Kate Chisholm
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