Price Gouging In Justice By Michel J. Sandel

Justice
What is justice? How and where should the notion of justice be reflected? These are permanently essential questions in a society. In book Justice, Michel J. Sandel uses the example of price gouging In the midst of the disaster caused by Hurricane Charley, the standard of granting the Purple Heart medal and the financial bailout for the economic crisis to take these questions and the reflections on them in front of the readers.

In Michel’s view, the case of price gouging concerns about two approaches towards justice, namely, the welfare approach and the freedom approach. Another approach, which is brought out by using the story of the purple heart, is the virtue. According to him, these three approaches
As its name demonstrates, it focuses on the distribution of welfare within the society and it aims at maximizing the welfare. In the real world, some governments primarily treat the welfare achievements as economic achievements. However, the word ‘welfare’ does not only mean the economic prosperity, but also happiness, health, and social well-being are included. In this way, the disagreements about which aspect inside the welfare approaches should we focus could be a latent problem. Besides, it is hard to value the compensation between the losses and benefits under the different subcategories of welfare. For example, if the government wants to implement a law which would extend the maximum working hours, then a lower level of happiness and health could be predictable, in other words, how could we integrate the very different aspects of welfare into one convincing standard? Yet difficulty not only rises from inside, this approach may be very against the virtue approach in some circumstances. If utilitarianism is adopted, where the gross happiness is the indicator of welfare, the information of who gains and who losses will still be missing. This is in huge contradiction with the notion that justice means the people get what they deserve, which is believed by
In the book justice Michel points out that there are two rival camps of freedom, one is laissez-faire camp and the other is fairness camp. The former one prefers more liberal ideas that stand firmly with free market and the avoidance of government intervention of economic affairs. While the other camp favors more equality and fairness. This camp requires the government to use legislative and administrative methods to reduce the inequality in the society and ensure the equal opportunity of success. In this way the appearance of fairness and justice may be very different for the two sides. In the case of price gouging, the laissez-faire groups may criticize on authorities’ intention to intervene the market, saying that this kind of price gouging is fair. While the fairness camp would argue that render the poor people in shortage of critically important necessities, and at the same time the rich people could enjoy them is an injustice. It is hard to say which justice is the ultimately ideal one, the choice between the two lays on the preference of the citizens, government traditions and could be influenced by the persistently changing relevant