Skip to Content
You may be using an older version of the Adobe Flash Player. To enjoy multimedia content on WGBH.org, please click here to upgrade to the latest version of the free Flash player.

Arguing Affirmative Action / What’s the Purpose?

November 8, 2009
Michael Sandel professor, philosophy, Harvard

Lecture Seventeen: "Arguing Affirmative Action"
Students discuss the issue of affirmative action and college admissions. Is it "just" for schools to consider race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions? Does it violate individual rights? Or is it as equal, and as arbitrary, as favoring a star athlete? Is the argument in favor of promoting diversity a valid one? How does it size up against the argument that a student's efforts and achievements should carry more weight?

Lecture Eighteen: "What's the Purpose?"
Sandel introduces Aristotle's theory of justice, which, simply put, is giving people what they are due, what they deserve. Aristotle argues that when considering issues of distribution, one must consider the goal, the end, the purpose of what is being distributed. For him, it's a matter of fitting a person's virtues with their appropriate roles.

WGBH
Image of Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009)
Binding: Hardcover, 320 pages
Image of Justice: A Reader
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (2007)
Binding: Paperback, 432 pages
Image of Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press (2006)
Binding: Paperback, 304 pages
Image of Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
Binding: Paperback, 432 pages
Image of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1998)
Binding: Paperback, 252 pages
Image of The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2009)
Binding: Paperback, 176 pages

this is good