Michael Sandel on Justice: Lecture III

Lec­ture 3 of Michael Sandel’s ever pop­u­lar course on Jus­tice is now online. Here’s the sum­ma­ry of mate­r­i­al cov­ered by the new­ly added lec­ture. It’s pro­vid­ed by Har­vard’s course web site:

Part 1 — FREE TO CHOOSE: With humor­ous ref­er­ences to Bill Gates and Michael Jor­dan, Sandel intro­duces the lib­er­tar­i­an notion that redis­trib­u­tive taxation—taxing the rich to give to the poor—is akin to forced labor.

PART 2 — WHO OWNS ME?: Stu­dents first dis­cuss the argu­ments behind redis­trib­u­tive tax­a­tion. If you live in a soci­ety that has a sys­tem of pro­gres­sive tax­a­tion, aren’t you oblig­at­ed to pay your tax­es? Don’t many rich peo­ple often acquire their wealth through sheer luck or fam­i­ly for­tune? A group of stu­dents dubbed “Team Lib­er­tar­i­an” vol­un­teers to defend the lib­er­tar­i­an phi­los­o­phy against these objec­tions.