Reviews and Comments

I started the audiobook on a long drive but decided not to continue listening afterward. The trajectory set by the introduction seemed to be a pop-philosophy introduction to ethics (discussion of utilitarianism vs. deontological ethics) which might be useful to others but is not something I need to hear again.

The introduction also left a rather poor taste in my mouth, thanks to one of the example real-world "dilemmas" that is rather egregiously awful.

The historical example is of Operation Red Wings (of Lone Survivor fame). Afghan goat herders stumble upon a US military recon team. Should the team allow the sheepherders to go free and risk that they are reported to the Taliban, or murder the sheepherders in order to keep their mission secret? The soldiers vote to let the sheepherders go, and are reported to and ambushed by the Taliban. Of the original team, only one soldier survives. A rescue helicopter is also shot down, killing dozens more.

Sandel gives this example directly following the discussion of the classical trolley problem, presenting the historical event as homologous with the thought experiment. He treats seriously the dichotomous choice of either murdering civilians or suffering a deadly combat defeat. No serious consideration is given to alternative courses of action (the ability to retreat is not discussed at all, whether or not it was possible) and there is no discussion of the ethical rights of civilians in warfare.

It is impossible to take this "dilemma" seriously, as the supposed choice between civilian lives or military losses exists only if the military objective is assumed to have greatest moral value. Sandel's under-analysis of this example is not a simplification, but an actively omission of serious ethical concerns in a way that presents a bias viewing overseas US military action as being of great moral import—greater than any civilians that might have to be killed to accomplish it.

Cherry on top, as I dug around for more information on the incident, I have found that Sandel's recounting is based entirely on the Lone Survivor novel. There is an article by Ed Darack on misinformation about Operation Red Wings that reveals the novel was (a) ghost written and (b) uses details in conflict with military reports generated at the time. Ed Darack has his own book (which, to be fair, was published after Justice) that is cited by Wikipedia as saying that the rules of engagement did not allow engagement with civilians. So not only is Sandel performing incomplete analysis of the "dilemma", he is analyzing a dilemma that simply did not exist at all.

It seems that the correctness of details of Lone Survivor were already being called into question as early as 2008, so Sandel should have known better. I don't know why such a factually questionable situation is included uncritically and then subsequently under-analyzed, but it soured me to this book altogether.

Maybe the discussions later in the book are of higher quality, but I'm not willing to spend the time to find out. The introduction gives the impression of a bias of nationalistic interventionism and a lack of thoroughness in analysis, and I'd rather not spend hours more of my time to determine the quality of a 15 year old pop-philosophy novel.