Michael J. Sandel wields philosophy like a musician’s baton. To tease and prod complex questions of moral reasoning. To deconstruct soaring concepts of justice, ethics, democracy, markets.
A political philosopher with celebrity status, Sandel is a Professor of government at Harvard who receives rockstar reception all over the world. In his class, leave certainty at the door. There are no easy answers. No right or wrong thoughts. Only a lively, Socratic back-and-forth with students.
Sandel, whose books have been translated into 30 languages, was always the revered academic. Wrestling with grand themes of law, society, crime, and punishment. Personal rights and collective action. Meritocracy and social mobility. Free markets and redistribution. But in 2009, his global profile skyrocketed after “Justice,” his popular Harvard lecture series, became the first college course to be televised and made available for free online. Since then, the series has been watched by millions everywhere and spawned imitations in other universities.
The focus of “Justice”, Sandel says, was what citizenship looks like. “It tries to model what public discourse would be like if it were more morally ambitious than it is.” Abstract schools of thought – utilitarianism, libertarianism – made simple. Difficult philosophers – Jeremy Bentham, Robert Nozick, Immanuel Kant – made accessible. Questions posing real stakes: Would you switch a trolley car’s direction if you could kill one instead of five? Should Michael Jordan or Bill Gates be making more money than a nurse? Did shipmates at sea who ate one of their own for survival have justifiable moral reason?
In 2024, Sandel returns with more philosophical provocations. This time, about ethics in the age of AI. In a new series of talks called “Versity”. In its teaser promo, the sharply suited professor asks, “Could it be that what really makes us uneasy about social media and algorithms, about chatbots and AI, is that they may lead us to confuse virtual community and connection with the real thing?”
While much of the present conversation around AI focuses on its political, economic, and strategic impact, Sandel wants to highlight its more intimate repercussions. Choosing future mates. Grading students. Deciding hires and fires. Resurrecting the dead. And adjudicating moral debates.
The latter, in particular, might create unpredictable complications. A few years ago, a Seattle tech firm created Delphi, a chatbot trained to make moral judgements about murder, infidelity, and even petty theft. Its answers to ethical puzzles ranged from intuitive to disconnected and disturbing. As the New York Times reported, “The question is: Who gets to teach ethics to the world’s machines? A.I. researchers? Product managers? Mark Zuckerberg? Trained philosophers and psychologists? Government regulators?”
Sandel believes that in a democracy, any such radical advancement should involve citizen input. AI, he says, cannot and should not estrange us from our authentic humanity. “What it means to be human depends on human presence; actually being with, caring for, communicating with, actual human beings in the here and now, rather than mediated through a virtual reality.”
It was tech that brought Sandel’s lectures to millions worldwide. At SYNAPSE, see the superstar philosopher in the flesh, unravelling the knotty ethical dilemmas surrounding AI and the human condition. Ancient philosophy in modern ethics. Codes of tech vs codes of justice. Will algorithms design norms? Will machines dispense moral wisdom? Is AI compatible with community? As the virtual and the real get hazier, can humanity resist the uncanny valley?