what’s at stake

[masterding]

Quote from a Harvard open course:

Now in many ways Aristotle’s idea of justice is intuitively very powerful, in some ways it’s strange. I want to bring out both its power, its possibility and its strangeness so that we can see what’s at stake in this whole debate about justice and whether it’s tied to desert and virtue.

What is 'what’s at stake ' suppose to mean here?
Thanks.

 

[emsr2d2]

"What's" is an abbreviation of "what is". If you Google "at stake", this is what you get. Does that help?

 

[Barb_D]

Does anyone else find it odd that the passage uses "both" to refer to three things?

 

[emsr2d2]

I missed that.

 

[masterding]

"What's" is an abbreviation of "what is". If you Google "at stake", this is what you get. Does that help?

I guess I know the general meaning of "at sake", when we say lives are at stake ,it means the risk of losing lives, when we say jobs are at stake, it means the risk of losing jobs ,when something in the debate is at stake, does it mean the risk of losing the debate? that's what I was trying to say.
Thank you so much.