Har­vard has rolled out Week 2 of Michael Sandel’s course on Jus­tice. Cour­tesy of the course web site, here’s a syn­op­sis of what you can expect from Episode 2. New lec­tures are get­ting rolled out week­ly. Check the Har­vard web site for new addi­tions.

Part 1 — PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE: Sandel presents some con­tem­po­rary cas­es in which cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis was used to put a dol­lar val­ue on human life. The cas­es give rise to sev­er­al objec­tions to the util­i­tar­i­an log­ic of seek­ing “the great­est good for the great­est num­ber.” Is it pos­si­ble to sum up and com­pare all val­ues using a com­mon mea­sure like mon­ey?

Part 2 — HOW TO MEASURE PLEASURE: Sandel intro­duces J. S. Mill, a util­i­tar­i­an philoso­pher who argues that seek­ing “the great­est good for the great­est num­ber” is com­pat­i­ble with pro­tect­ing indi­vid­ual rights, and that util­i­tar­i­an­ism can make room for a dis­tinc­tion between high­er and low­er plea­sures. Sandel tests this the­o­ry by play­ing video clips from three very dif­fer­ent forms of enter­tain­ment: Shakespeare’s Ham­let, the real­i­ty show Fear Fac­tor, and The Simp­sons.

Har­vard phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Michael Sandel appeared on the Today Show this morn­ing, and got four min­utes to make the case for phi­los­o­phy. If you’re not famil­iar with him, Sandel is a very pop­u­lar Har­vard pro­fes­sor. Some 15,000 stu­dents have tak­en his cours­es over 30 years, and to get a feel for his teach­ing, you can watch his 30-minute lec­ture online. It’s called Jus­tice: A Jour­ney into Moral Rea­son­ing, and it’s one of the very few open lec­tures that Har­vard has put online. (A dis­ap­point­ment, I must say.) The lec­ture also oth­er­wise appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es. Final­ly, I’d also encour­age you to lis­ten to the series of lec­tures that Sandel pre­sent­ed through the BBC. We fea­tured them here before, and we’re glad that Tamas, one of our read­ers, has remind­ed us of them.

Here we have philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett apply­ing Dar­win­ian thought to human think­ing, all of which gets him into the intrigu­ing con­cept of “memes,” infec­tious ideas that can sub­vert our sur­vival instincts and threat­en whole cul­tures. It’s anoth­er good bit of think­ing from TED Talks.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is a writer and musi­cian who hosts the pod­cast The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life and has just released this sleazy ver­sion of a Michael Jack­son tune.