"Sandel's discussion of welfare begins with Bentham's famous definition of justice as 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number.' This formulation could justify a commitment to market distribution, if it were shown to be the best means for promoting the general welfare. But pleasure is not the only good, and there is no common measurement for things as different as love and money. In any case, the quest for aggregate happiness also risks running afoul of personal rights. It is absolutely true that personal freedom matters, whether in a libertarian version that insists on noninterference and contract, or more egalitarian schemes--like those of Kant and Rawls--that square individual freedom with equal freedom for all others. Libertarianism, however, is compromised by the mistaken assumptions of self-ownership."
Samuel Moyn in The Nation reviews Michael J. Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice.
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