Harvard online class in morality

NYTimes

Many of the 14,000 or so students who have taken Harvard's wildly popular course "Justice" with Michael J. Sandel over the years have heard the rumor that their professor has a television avatar: Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson's soulless ghoul of a boss at Springfield's nuclear power plant.

The joke, of course, is that Mr. Sandel — who at one time or another taught several future writers for Fox's "Simpsons" and shares a receding hairline with the evil-minded cartoon character — is the anti-Burns, a moral philosopher who has devoted his life to pondering what is the right thing to do.

Now Mr. Sandal gets to play himself on television, not to mention online, as Harvard and public television stations across the country allow viewers to sit in on his classroom discussions about Wall Street bonuses and Aristotle, same-sex marriage and Kant, for the next 12 weeks. [,,,]

Justice - Michael Sandel