Ideas and Consequences: Michael Sandel on the Supreme Court [Archive.org URL]

Tocqueville noticed this back in the 1830s … almost every political question is turned into a question about rights, because the idea of rights and of individual rights [is] so deeply ingrained, not only in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights, but also in American public culture, in the political culture.

We cannot argue so much in the name of the good society, or the good life, or even the common good. It is a more natural reflex to think about every dispute and argument and political controversy … [as] a debate about rights, sometimes competing rights, and how they should be resolved … It is the Court’s business to interpret the Constitution and to define rights. And I think that is one of the reasons that so many of our public political questions are turned into questions first about rights, and therefore they wind up in court.

I am not sure that is an altogether desirable thing … because sometimes what happens is that by pushing everything into the language of rights, and therefore into a legal question, we fail as a society—as a political community, really—to address and to thrash out among ourselves the competing conceptions of the good life and of the good society that underlie a lot of our debates about rights.