Sandel opens with a price-gouging controversy after a hurricane to show that everyday disputes raise hard moral questions about justice.

Sandel presents three frameworks for thinking about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

The trolley problem is introduced to show how hypotheticals isolate moral principles and reveal competing intuitions about right and wrong.

Bentham's utilitarianism is presented: the right action maximizes overall happiness by calculating pleasure and pain across all affected people.

Mill defends utilitarianism against critics by arguing individual liberty produces the greatest long-term happiness and that some pleasures are nobler than others.

Libertarianism is introduced as a freedom-based theory opposing government redistribution, paternalistic laws, and moralistic regulations.

Nozick argues that taxing earned income violates individual rights and is morally equivalent to forced labor.

Sandel examines the morality of paid military service, questioning whether a volunteer army differs morally from conscription or hired substitutes.

Kant's categorical imperative is presented: act only on universalizable principles and always treat persons as ends, never merely as means.

Rawls's veil of ignorance thought experiment yields two principles: equal basic liberties and the difference principle favoring the least well-off.

Sandel applies the major theories of justice to the affirmative action debate, examining arguments for diversity, compensation, and bias correction.

Aristotle's teleological theory is presented: justice requires distributing goods to those who best fulfill the purpose of the practice in question.

Sandel argues that present generations bear obligations of solidarity for past wrongs, challenging the moral individualist framework of Kant and Rawls.

Sandel argues that same-sex marriage debates cannot be resolved through liberal neutrality but require moral judgment about the purpose of marriage.

Sandel concludes by calling for a new politics of the common good that brings moral reasoning into all civic and economic debates.

Sandel opens by using a hurricane price-gouging controversy to show that everyday disputes raise hard questions about justice, then presents three frameworks for answering them: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue. He examines utilitarianism and libertarianism as the book's primary welfare- and freedom-based theories, using Bentham, Mill, and Nozick to illustrate their strengths and limits. Moving deeper into freedom-based philosophy, Sandel presents Kant's categorical imperative and Rawls's veil of ignorance, showing how each grounds justice in reason and fairness rather than outcomes. He applies these theories to contested issues like affirmative action and paid military service before introducing Aristotle's teleological approach as the book's third and final framework. Sandel then argues that present generations bear obligations of solidarity for historical wrongs, challenging the moral individualism of Kant and Rawls. The book concludes with Sandel's call for a new politics of the common good that brings moral reasoning into all civic and economic debates.

The headline philosophical journey from price gouging to the common good.

The Pentagon's refusal to award PTSD veterans the Purple Heart reveals that justice requires judging which virtues are worthy of honor.

A special forces commander spares unarmed goatherds on moral grounds, and the goatherds later alert the Taliban, leading to nineteen soldiers' deaths.

Bentham's Panopticon prison and workhouse proposals are examined as real-world applications of utilitarian cost-benefit thinking about social welfare.

Sandel's students rank The Simpsons as most enjoyable and Hamlet as most worthy, illustrating Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures.

Hayek and Friedman argue that the welfare state is coercive and anti-freedom, establishing the intellectual foundations of modern libertarianism.

The Michael Jordan ticket-and-tax hypothetical illustrates Nozick's claim that redistributing voluntary earnings violates individual liberty and overturns legitimate transactions.

Sandel examines the Civil War practice of allowing wealthy draftees to pay substitutes, questioning how it differs morally from today's volunteer army.

A New Jersey appeals court overturns a surrogacy contract, ruling that true consent cannot be given before a birth mother holds her child.

Kant argues it is immoral to lie to a murderer seeking a friend hidden in your home, because the duty to tell the truth holds regardless of consequences.

Sandel uses Bill Clinton's technically-true-but-misleading statement to illustrate how a carefully crafted evasion differs morally from an outright lie.

Rawls criticizes feudal aristocracy, formal equal opportunity, and meritocracy as each distributing wealth through morally arbitrary factors beyond anyone's control.

Sandel surveys students and finds first-born children dominate the class, supporting Rawls's claim that even personal effort reflects unchosen circumstances.

The Casey Martin golf cart case reaches the Supreme Court, which must rule on the essential nature of golf to decide the outcome.

Israel rescues Ethiopian Jews during a famine rather than holding a fair lottery, illustrating how solidarity creates special obligations beyond impartial duty.

Kennedy pledges to keep his Catholic faith separate from policy, while Obama later challenges strict neutrality by invoking religion in political argument.

While the main argument unfolds through abstract theory, Sandel constantly grounds it in vivid real-world examples and specific philosophical figures. He opens with the goatherds story and the Purple Heart debate to show justice's deep connection to virtue, then traces how Bentham's utilitarian schemes played out in real institutions and how Mill's ideas were tested in a lively classroom exercise. Libertarian ideas are traced through Hayek, Friedman, and the Michael Jordan hypothetical, while Chapter 4's market morality arguments are illustrated by the Civil War substitute system and a landmark New Jersey surrogacy court ruling. Kant's philosophy is explored through his hard line on lying and a famous misleading statement by Bill Clinton, while Rawls's theory is tested by his critique of meritocracy and a classroom survey about birth order. The pool concludes with the Casey Martin golf cart case, Israel's rescue of Ethiopian Jews, and the contrasting approaches of Kennedy and Obama to religion in public life.

The stories, thinkers, and case studies behind the arguments.

Sandel reveals that both sides of the price-gouging debate use welfare and freedom arguments, showing theories of justice do not split along party lines.

Sandel shows that moral reasoning is a cycle: starting with a dilemma, moving to principle, then philosophy, and back again through public engagement.

Sandel exposes that Mill's utilitarian defense of individual rights leaves those rights hostage to whatever calculation a society finds most beneficial.

Sandel reveals that Mill's concept of nobler pleasures undermines utilitarianism by ranking desires according to something other than individual preference.

Sandel pushes libertarian self-ownership logic to its extremes, revealing it could justify selling organs and consenting to voluntary cannibalism.

Sandel reveals that enlisting in a volunteer army may reflect economic desperation rather than genuine free choice, undermining the libertarian defense of the market military.

Sandel argues that treating surrogate pregnancy as a market commodity fails to value human life appropriately, a problem that consent alone cannot resolve.

Kant rejects both utilitarianism and religious authority as moral foundations, grounding rights instead in human reason and the dignity of rational beings.

Kant distinguishes acting from duty versus acting from inclination, arguing that only duty-driven action has genuine moral worth regardless of its outcome.

Sandel explains that Kant left his imaginary social contract's contents unspecified, a gap that John Rawls later attempts to fill with his own theory.

Rawls's difference principle establishes that social and economic inequalities are just only when they improve the position of the least advantaged members of society.

Ronald Dworkin defends affirmative action by denying there is any right to evaluation on academic merit alone, undermining the standard objection to it.

Sandel reveals that Aristotle's own arguments against coercion internally contradict his defense of slavery, exposing a flaw within Aristotle's own framework.

Sandel argues that the moral individualism of Kant and Rawls cannot explain the fraternal predicaments of loyalty that clearly carry genuine moral weight.

Sandel reveals that defending abortion rights on neutrality grounds implicitly assumes the Catholic position on fetal personhood is false, making true neutrality impossible.

This pool tracks the moments when Sandel pulls back the curtain to expose hidden tensions and surprising implications lurking inside each theory of justice. The price-gouging debate reveals that neither major political party owns any single theory, and the nature of moral reasoning itself is shown to be a cycle rather than a straight line toward an answer. Mill's two defenses of utilitarianism are each revealed to contain internal contradictions, while libertarian self-ownership logic is pushed to unsettling extremes involving organ markets and cannibalism. Kant's rejection of utilitarianism and religion is revealed as a turn toward pure reason, and his unfinished social contract is shown to be the gap that Rawls later fills with the difference principle. Aristotle's internal contradiction on slavery and Dworkin's challenge to merit-based admissions mark key turning points in the justice debate. The pool ends with Sandel's sharpest conclusions: that moral individualism cannot account for genuine obligations of loyalty, and that resolving debates like abortion requires direct moral engagement rather than a false claim of neutrality.

The hidden tensions, internal contradictions, and key philosophical revelations.