“Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing, but, and here’s the risk: once the familiar turns strange, its never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be unthought, or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that moral and political philosophy is a story, and you don’t know where the story will lead, but what you do know is that the story is about you.

Those are the presonal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public poilicy, you will hone your political judgement, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise. Political philosophy for the most part hasn’t worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility, that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And thats because philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating activity, and you see this going back to Socrates. There's a dialogue, the Gorgias in which one of Socrates’ friends Calicles tries to talk him out of philosophising. Calicles tells Socrates “philosophy is a pretty toy, if one indulges in it with moderation at the right time of life, but if one pursues it further than one should it is absolute ruin. Take my advice,” Calicles says “abandon argument. Learn the accomplishments of active life. Take for your models not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles, but those who have a good livelihood and reputation and many other blessings.” So Calicles is really saying to Socrates, “Quit philosophising. Get real. Go to business school.”And Calicles did have a point. He had a point because philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs.

Those are the risks; personal and political. And in the face of these risks there is a characteristic evasion. The name of the evasion is scepticism, it's the idea… well it goes something like this: we didn’t resolve once and for all, either the cases of the principles we were arguing when we began, and if Aristotle and Locke and Kant and Mill haven’t solved these questions after all of these years, who are we to think that we here in Sanders Theatre over the course of a semester can resolve them. And so maybe its just a matter of each person having his or her own principles and theres nothing more to be said about it, no way of reasoning. Thats the evasion, the evasion of scepticism. To which I would offer the following reply: It's true, these questions have been debated for a very long time, but the very fact that they have recurred and persisted, may suggest that though they’re impossible in one sense, they’re unavoidable in another. And the reason they’re unavoidable, the reason they’re inescapable is that we live some answer to these questions everyday.

So scepticism, just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution. Immanuel Kant described very well the problem with scepticism when he wrote “scepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings. But it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. Simply to acquiesce in scepticism,” Kant wrote, “can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.""

Michael Sandel