Would you rather be diagnosed by a doctor or an algorithm? Would you trust a marriage prediction app to choose your life partner? Would you rather be judged by a person or by a machine? Join Professor Michael Sandel – BBC Radio 4’s “Public Philosopher” – to debate the ethics of AI, big data, and the future of human decision making.

Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His writings—on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets--have been translated into 27 languages. His course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world.

Sandel’s books relate enduring themes of political philosophy to the most vexing moral and civic questions of our time. They include What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets; Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?; The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering; Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics; Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy; and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.

Sandel has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, and delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford, the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and the Kellogg Lecture on Jurisprudence at the U.S. Library of Congress. In 2016, East China Normal University (Shanghai) convened an international conference to explore points of contact between Sandel’s work and the Confucian tradition.

Michael's past events with BBC Radio 4 can be found at The Public Philosopher.

Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at LSE. Paul joined the LSE in 1995 after teaching for five years at the University of Wales Swansea. Prior to that he held a visiting research fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Bentham Project, University College London. He graduated from York University with a First in Philosophy and an MA in Political Theory. His PhD is from the University of London, where he spent two years at LSE and a further year at UCL. He is currently editor of the Journal Utilitas.

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Podcast

This event was recorded and is now available on BBC Radio 4 at The Public Philosopher.