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Michael Sandel’s Thanksgiving Meal Ends in Open-Ended Questions, Ethical Dilemmas

Sandel reportedly stood up from the dining room table, got the old family lectern out of the closet, and began to pace back and forth as a PBS cameraman followed his every move.

On Thursday, the Sandel family’s Thanksgiving meal ended in heated arguments and hard feelings after Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, brought up a number of philosophical quandaries at the dinner table.

The celebration began to go off the rails when the family went around the table to say what they were thankful for this year. When his turn arrived, the political philosopher mused, “Maybe there are some things we shouldn’t be thankful for.”

“Consider the turkey here in front of us,” he explained. “What if turkeys were endangered in the wild—a foreseeable possibility, given their limited ability to fly and the high demand for wild turkey in the marketplace. Most people would still surely want turkeys for their Thanksgiving meal. Should they be able to pay the government for the privilege of hunting turkeys in November? Explain.”

“Dad, can’t we just eat?” replied his son. “I don’t want to get into this discussion.”

“Okay, so what I’m hearing from Adam is that conversation is more important than turkey lives,” Sandel reportedly said. “That’s one perspective. Any other ones?”

“Michael, please,” said his wife, Social Studies lecturer Kiku Adatto. “Do we have to do this now?”

“Let’s do another example,” the author of Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? continued. “Say that there were only one turkey left in the world. However, it was in an isolated village filled with starving people, who valued it as a symbol of community and friendship. You arrive in the outskirts of the village holding a gun with one bullet, and the turkey crosses your path. Does that change anything for you, Adam?”

At this point, the other nine people around the table began serving themselves sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce, and his cousins at the other end of the table started discussing the new James Bond film.

As this article went to press, Sandel had turned to his granddaughter sitting next to him, saying, “Imagine that there is a train heading straight toward a flock of a hundred turkeys. If the train continues down the tracks, it will kill a hundred turkeys. However, you are on a bridge above the tracks next to a very fat turkey, and if you push the turkey off the bridge the train will hit it and stop. Do you push the fat turkey off the bridge?”

 

Image credit: HarvardEthics/Flickr

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