<p>"Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? "</p>
<p>Great class. Great professor.</p>
<p>Ethics and morals.</p>
<p>Running on PBS.</p>
<p>Can watch the whole series on youtube.</p>
<p>By searching for this on youtube...</p>
<p>"Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do?"</p>
<p>I think it's a great idea to run some of these classes on tv and on the internet. Anyway...check it out if you haven't seen it...</p>
<p>That class has one of the biggest enrollments at Harvard in the 800-range. It shows that huge lectures need not be a bad thing!</p>
<p>I totally agree. The professor is fantastic…and obviously the students want to take this class.</p>
<p>I know many 50 year-olds who watch the show. :)</p>
<p>It’s a great course. Thank you!</p>
<p>herandhismom, I’m happy you like the course.</p>
<p>The class has dealt with cannibalism. When is it all right to eat another human being? The greater good theory… society should do what benefits the majority… the value of a human life…and the idea that everything can be measured.</p>
<p>There was a survey done…with 5 choices…and you would be paid for partaking in these 5 choices.</p>
<p>You had to strangle a cat.
You had to eat a 6 inch earthworm.
You had to live on a farm in Kansas for the rest of your life.
You had to have a front tooth pulled.
One of your pink toes had to be cut off.</p>
<p>How much would you have to be paid for each of these occurences? How would you rank these from least to desirable to less desirable?</p>
<p>Anyway…makes me want to go to Harvard. I did see a few older people in that class. Not that I’m old .:)</p>
<p>As bright as these students are…and I am sure they are very bright…there is an innocence…these students are still young.</p>
<p>My oldest is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at U. Chicago, and happened to be home last week when my husband put on the show. S looked at the professor and said, “Oh, that’s Michael Sandel. He is pre-eminent in this field. I have his books.” 
Looks like an incredibly interesting class.</p>
<p>100k each for any but living in Kansas. Hell, I’d do the cat and earthworm for 50.</p>
<p>“Hell, I’d do the cat and earthworm for 50.”</p>
<p>lol</p>
<p>So how much for living in Kansas?</p>
<p>I saw a clip on the Harvard website a while back. Does anyone know when it’s on (PBS)?</p>
<p>Where I live, in the SF bay area it’s on Tuesday nights.</p>
<p>If you go to pbs.org and enter your zip code you can get a schedule.</p>
<p>You can watch them at your leisure on youtube by entering “Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do?” in the search box on youtube.</p>
<p>Or…I think you can watch the here.</p>
<p>[Sending</a> to JusticeHarvard.org](<a href=“http://www.harvardjustice.org%5DSending”>http://www.harvardjustice.org)</p>
<p>What intrigues me is the interaction between Sandel and the students. Back in the old days (eg John Finley, Hum 3), lectures in Sanders tended to be the best on campus, regularly eliciting standing ovations from the audience but it was very much a one-way affair, the ‘sage on the stage.’ If one had questions, one raised them with the section leaders or went to office hours. Of course the great thing about this class is that the teacher isn’t answering the questions, he’s asking them - which is very much the Oxbridge tutorial mode. Sandel got his doctorate from Oxford and it seems to me that he’s managed to combine the best of both systems: the sheer thought provoking and entertainment value of large lectures with the probing, methodical questioning of the students in small tutorials.</p>
<p>Samuck…I agree with you.</p>
<p>I’m up to episode 5 now. Episode 3 was about redistribution of wealth and is it fair. Episode 5 was about the army and what is the fair way to recruit.</p>
<p>One of the things I like about the show is you see that there aren’t any definitive answers. There are many sides to the ethical and moral questions of the day. And there are inconsistencies with viewpoints.</p>
<p>I think one of the best things about education is you learn that life is very grey. And our own opinions are not facts.</p>
<p>Yes I have the same reason to like it. In social issues a lot of things are grey. He left space for the students to think. that’s really great. </p>
<p>For example - About Libertairianism, do we really own ourselves? Victoria made her point to challenge this basic libertarian premise. I can imagine Ayn Rand coming out of her grave…
It’s very interesting discussion. You challenge your own thoughts - thoughts you’ve taken for granted for a long time, and ask - is it really right?..</p>
<p>
Yes, provided the instructor is knowledgeable, eloquent, equipped with good sense of humor and strong teaching skill to stimulate students active thinking and discussion. Also his class period seems to be about 25 min. I wish I could teach like that. oh well that’s why I’m not teaching in Harvard.</p>
<p>“It’s very interesting discussion. You challenge your own thoughts - thoughts you’ve taken for granted for a long time, and ask - is it really right?..”</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>I think the show is edited. The class isn’t 25 minutes long.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/arts/television/26sandel.html?_r=2&ref=television[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/arts/television/26sandel.html?_r=2&ref=television</a></p>
<p>"“I’ve wanted to do Michael’s course for more than 20 years,” said Brigid Sullivan, vice president for educational programming at WGBH, which is co-producing the show. She learned of the famous class when she was a student at Harvard Business School.</p>
<p>This time the station was awarded a grant from POM Wonderful, the juice company, to put the course on the air, while Mr. Sandel raised the rest of the money — about $600,000 in all — much of it from former students. Each 50-minute class was edited down to 30 minutes; two are shown in each television episode.</p>
<p>Mr. Sandel, who regularly draws about 1,000 students to the course, doesn’t engage in flashy antics or use eye-catching props. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he is more Bob Newhart than Montgomery Burns. He has honed his arguments, classroom methods and delivery over the nearly 30 years he has taught this class.</p>
<p>“The difficulty in this course is in teaching what you already know,” he tells his students. “It works by taking what we know from familiar, unquestioned settings and making it strange.”</p>
<p>Would you switch a runaway trolley from one track to another if it meant killing one person instead of five? Would it be just as moral to push a person in front of the speeding trolley to stop it and save the five? What about a surgeon killing one healthy person and using his organs so that five people who needed organ transplants could live? Is that moral? Why not?</p>
<p>“In a way, the book and the course try to model what public discourse would be like if it were more morally ambitious than it is,” Mr. Sandel said. “The title is ‘Justice,’ but in a way its subject is citizenship.”</p>
<p>Mr. Sandel emphasizes that “the aim is not to try to persuade students, but to equip them to become politically minded citizens.”</p>
<p>He has apparently succeeded, at least with some. “The course changed how I think about politics,” Vivek Viswanathan, who graduated in June, wrote in an e-mail message. “Questions of politics, Professor Sandel suggested, are not simply a matter of governing the system of distribution but are connected to what it means to live a ‘good life.’ ”</p>
<p>"In class, affirmative action arouses the strongest feelings, Mr. Sandel said, because students, who have worked very hard to reach Harvard, believe their own merit is being rewarded. They are disquieted, he said, by the philosopher John Rawlss idea that many of their advantages have nothing to do with merit: American citizenship, fortunate family circumstances, a society that values what they are good at, whether it is telling jokes or having a great jump shot.</p>
<p>He tells the class that many psychologists think that birth order makes a lot of difference in ones work ethic and degree of striving, and then asks: How many here are first in birth order? There are gasps and laughter. About 80 percent in the auditorium raise their hands. Is it your doing that you are first in birth order?, he continues.</p>
<p>That moment, Mr. Sandel said, is often a turning point in getting students to question their own deeply held assumptions. New viewers and readers will undoubtedly find different moments when a light bulb suddenly turns on. There is a journeylike quality to the course and the book, he said, adding that he did not want to spoil the sense of suspense and exploration about where this journey leads."</p>
<p>dstark - I don’t always agree with you (ED?), but you are “spot on” with this class. My son took it last year and LOVED it. He said it really made you think about what you believe in. I remember him telling us about the “first born” question and his guess that about 90-95% of the class were “first born”. He said that when he left class he often thought that he was sure that he knew the answer to the hypothetical that had been posed in class, only to have Professor Sandel come to the next class and explain why he was wrong. A truly exceptional experience.</p>
<p>Hat… your son took that class…awesome.</p>
<p>I’m a first born.</p>
<p>Well, I’m not. Not even second-born. :)</p>