The Polemics Over Freebies: Ethical Balancing between Politics and Economics Using Michael J. Sandel’s Concept of Justice

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Page: 178-182

Garima Mani Tripathi (Department of Philosophy, Mata Sundri College for Women, University of Delhi, Mata Sundri Lane, Delhi)

Freebies have always been a controversial public policy issue in India, more so after the 2013 judgement of the Supreme Court on the matter. Since then, the theme has been subject to more politics than economics. Despite the Supreme Court’s verdict restraining the misuse of freebies, electoral politics have encouraged political parties, cutting across ideological barriers, to compete in the game of freebies. From a philosophical perspective, we have a public policy dilemma of deciphering the right approach to the issue. Key ethical questions are being ignored. This paper, would, therefore, adopt a philosophical approach and throw some key philosophical questions that may help policymakers to do an ethical balancing between politics and economics of freebies. For methodological convenience within the domain of philosophy, this paper, would rely on the theory of justice as propagated by Sandel in his various books and would use his approach to ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ This is for the sake of convenience since Michael Sandel has not only critically evaluated all previous theories of justice duly identifying their contradictions, but he has also come out with a moral argument for contested issues like freebies where we may not have a quantitative answer.