Michael Sandel and "Justice"

[gam197]

This is a 12 part series that I watched on philosophy.

I watched it because it was a real popular series on TV on PBS. Also he is a very popular Law professor and I wanted to see what they were teaching the law students. In episode 12, he sets up 2 catholic student (gets him off the Justice blog)and then these kids gets torn up pretty bad by fellow students - one tries to defend issues.

Never before in whole series does he ask for someone on the blog to defend a position in advance. He couldn’t have known how it would turn out?

youtube.com/watch?v=EzD9P-9sj4M

If you don’t want to watch whole thing, just watch a small section starting at 12 minutes in and for about 10 minutes.

 

[JoanREDirector]

Thanks for posting this. I listened to the whole thing.

Michael Sandel didn’t, of course, want to settle the issue of same sex marriage. He just wanted to use the debate to illustrate the point he was trying to make about how a society decides what is just and how this is reflected in the law and the courts.

The student debate was interesting and sad. If these students are a snapshot of our country I don’t see much hope that we can ever come together on this and other such issues.

Glad that there were two Catholic men who could state the Catholic position with such clarity and dignity. Interesting that the next student would answer with ridicule instead of a reasoned critique of their argument. In fact, the rest of the comments were appeals to emotion which the professor had to dress up to incorporate them into his lecture.

More than once the Catholic students were dismissed for trying to impose their “religion” on others. However, the dismissers didn’t go on to either point out any logical inconsistency on the part of the Catholics or present a reasoned case for their own point of view.

 

[gam197]

This was a very popular PBS series. of talks done by a well-spoken Harvard professor.

What bothered me most is that he set these two catholic students up, He contacted them in advance to take their position and then he proceeded to allow them to be torn apart making it look you said “He just wanted to use the debate to illustrate the point he was trying to make about how a society decides what is just and how this is reflected in the law and the courts.”