Episode #204 ... The importance of philosophy, justice and the common good. (Michael Sandel)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to everyone that makes this show a possibility in the world. So we've given quite a bit of time the last several episodes of the show to anti capitalism, post capitalism. It's been fun. But let's talk about some philosophers who think it's possible to move things into a better place, you know, without overthrowing the economic, political, religious dimension to most people's lives in capitalism. Let's talk about how to do something from within. Now there's one way to start talking about that, where this turns into a show where I just sit around talking about forward thinking economic policy. Oh, boy. You know, do an episode on reforming the tax code. I do a couple on subsidies and and common sense regulations. But there's a sense in which I'd be a bit too conservative. I'd have to change the name of the show to economize this, not philosophize this. But the good news is there's another level of change that's possible in capitalist economies, where it's not about reforming the existing way we're doing things with all the same tools we have right now. The other way to change things is to rethink the entire orientation of a capitalist society altogether, to think of capitalism as the engine, and what needs to change is the direction that it's moving us in. See, the other thinkers out there, regardless of the economic system that underlies the Western world right now, what's gonna change things for the better is gonna be a fundamental change in people's thinking. It's gonna be a change in the ways people think about what it means to be a part of a society and how they see the social relations that make their society what it is. And for that, we don't necessarily need to overthrow capitalism in a way that's no doubt gonna lead to a lot of collateral damage for people. But for many of these thinkers, what we're gonna need for this change is philosophy, or at least something that mirrors the value you get from practicing philosophy. And maybe a good place to start making a case for their point here is to talk about a common criticism of people that like to get together with their friends and talk about moral dilemmas. Trolley car problems, axe murderers coming to your doorstep. We've all done this sort of stuff before back in the eighties. There's a type of person out there that says, who really is sitting around thinking about this kind of stuff? I mean, what are you even doing? I I know what you think you're doing. You think you're running through these hypothetical scenarios where you're forced to explain your criteria for what the right thing to do is, and you think you're becoming a more moral person. But what I think this person might say is that you're just wasting your time. Because in real life, there's …