Part 1
“Would you pull the lever?”
Professor Adrian Keller didn’t raise his voice, but the question landed like a stone in the lecture hall. It was the first week of the semester at Westbridge University, and the new course—Justice—had drawn students from business, engineering, pre-law, and even a few skeptical seniors who claimed they were “just filling a requirement.”
On the screen, a simple diagram: a trolley racing down a track toward five workers. A lever could divert it to a side track where one worker stood. Five or one. The room shifted as if the air itself had to make a choice.
A hand shot up. Maya Chen, pre-med, answered quickly. “Yes. One death is better than five.”
Another voice followed, slower. Ethan Morales, philosophy minor, frowned. “But you’d be choosing to kill someone. That’s not the same as letting something happen.”
Keller smiled slightly, like he’d been waiting for that exact split. “Good,” he said. “Now let’s complicate it.”
He clicked to the next slide: a footbridge over the track. A large man stood beside you; pushing him would stop the trolley, saving five. The cost: his life.
A laugh bubbled, nervous. “That’s different,” someone muttered. Keller pointed. “Different how? Outcome is the same.”
The debate caught fire. Some argued consequences—save more lives, end of story. Others argued principle—don’t use a person as a tool. Keller didn’t settle it. He stretched it until students felt their own logic strain.
Then he dimmed the lights further and changed the slide again—no diagram now, just a black-and-white photo of a lifeboat on an empty ocean.
“Here’s where the classroom stops being a game,” Keller said.
He told them a true case, carefully, without sensationalism: four shipwreck survivors adrift without food or water, a teenage cabin boy weakened by starvation, and a choice made in desperation that ended in death and a murder trial. The law didn’t accept necessity as a defense for killing. The court’s reasoning was cold and clear: you cannot justify murder by claiming it serves survival.
The hall fell quiet. Consequences sounded neat when they were stick figures. Not when they were human.
Keller walked away from the podium and down the aisle, as if he wanted to remove the protection of distance. “If you believe in maximizing welfare,” he said, “you might think the desperate choice was right. If you believe some acts are wrong no matter what,” he continued, “you might say the law was right.”
He stopped beside the front row. “But notice,” he said, “both sides claim moral seriousness. Both think they’re defending justice.”
A student in a hoodie raised a hand halfway. “So… which one is correct?”
Keller looked at the class, then at the door, as if the answer might be waiting in the hallway. “That,” he said, “is what we’re studying.”
He wrote two names on the board in large letters: BENTHAM and KANT.
“Over the next weeks,” he continued, “you’ll learn two rival ways to think about right and wrong. One measures outcomes. The other measures principles. And both will feel convincing—until life forces you into the corner.”
The room stayed still. Then Keller added, almost casually, “Next lecture, I’m going to ask you to defend your choice publicly—on record—like a lawyer arguing before a judge.”
A ripple of discomfort ran through the hall.
“Because,” Keller said, “if you can’t explain your moral reasoning under pressure, you don’t really own it.”
He clicked off the projector. The lights rose. Students began packing up, but slowly, as if leaving meant escaping something they weren’t sure they could put down.
Maya lingered, staring at the words on the board. Ethan stared too, jaw tight.
And Keller watched them both, knowing the real lever hadn’t been the trolley diagram.
It was the moment they realized that justice isn’t just an opinion—it’s a burden.
So when you’re the one who has to decide, what will you choose: the greatest good… or the act you refuse to commit?
Part 2
The next lecture began with no slides, no photos—just a chalkboard and Keller’s handwriting. He drew two columns. On the left: “Consequences.” On the right: “Principles.”
“Let’s stop pretending these are abstract,” he said. “You make these choices every day. You just don’t label them.”
He asked students to write one moral rule they believed in. A few volunteered: Don’t lie. Protect the vulnerable. Don’t steal. Keller nodded and then did what good professors do—he tested the edges.
“If lying would save a life,” he asked, “is it still wrong?” A third of the room immediately softened. Another third stiffened. The last third looked like they wished the question had never been asked.
Then he introduced Jeremy Bentham not as a statue in a textbook but as a radical who wanted morality to be measurable. “Bentham asks: what produces the most happiness and least suffering?” Keller explained. “He treats pain and pleasure like moral currency.”
A business major, Jordan Pike, liked that. “That’s practical,” he said. “You can calculate it.”
Keller raised an eyebrow. “Can you?” He offered a scenario: a city can spend its budget on either a rare disease treatment for ten people or basic vaccinations for ten thousand. “Maximizing welfare might mean leaving the ten behind,” Keller said. “Are you comfortable with that?”
The room shifted again—comfort replaced by weight.
Then Keller turned to Immanuel Kant, who insisted that some things cannot be traded away. “Kant says people aren’t instruments,” Keller told them. “A person has dignity. You can’t use them like a tool, even for a good outcome.”
Ethan Morales nodded hard. Maya Chen frowned. “But in medicine,” she said, “we do triage. We choose who gets treatment first.”
Keller didn’t dismiss her. “Exactly,” he said. “Your future work will force you to live inside these tensions.”
At the end of class, Keller assigned something that made students groan out loud: a short written defense of their answer to the trolley problem—plus a defense of the opposite answer. “Steelman your opponent,” he said. “If you can’t argue the other side fairly, you’re not thinking. You’re performing.”
That night, Maya sat in the library staring at her laptop. Her father had spent years in a hospital bed with failing kidneys before a donor match came through. She remembered the quiet cruelty of waiting lists, the arithmetic of scarcity. Consequences weren’t theoretical to her. They were the reason her father was alive.
Ethan, meanwhile, wrote his paper at a coffee shop, thinking about his little brother who had been bullied. “People aren’t tools,” he typed. “When you treat someone as a means, you train yourself to justify anything.”
On Friday, Keller held a mock hearing. Students were assigned roles: defense, prosecution, judge, public observers. The case wasn’t the trolley now—it was the shipwreck scenario. The question was blunt: can necessity excuse killing?
Maya argued the desperate reality. Ethan argued the line the law refused to cross. The “judge,” a quiet student named Nora Patel, listened with folded hands, then asked the question that made both sides freeze.
“If necessity excuses murder once,” Nora said, “how do we stop people from calling every selfish choice ‘necessary’?”
The room went still. Keller didn’t smile. He only watched, because the class had reached the point where philosophy stopped being clever.
It became personal.
Part 3
By mid-semester, the lecture hall felt different. Students no longer raised their hands just to be heard. They spoke like they were building something that might have to hold weight later—like they were learning how to think without hiding behind certainty.
Professor Keller brought the class out of the shipwreck and into modern controversies: self-defense, punishment, inequality, freedom of speech, and the question that made even confident students hesitate—what do we owe one another as citizens?
He didn’t offer tidy answers. Instead, he gave them tools: Bentham’s calculus, Kant’s dignity, the idea that “rights” and “utility” often pull against each other like two hands on the same rope.
Maya noticed something in herself changing. When she spoke, she stopped trying to win. She tried to be honest. She admitted, in one discussion, “I used to think outcomes were all that mattered. But now I’m scared of what I’d justify if I only cared about outcomes.”
Ethan admitted something too: “I thought principles were enough. But sometimes principles can become an excuse to ignore suffering.”
Those admissions weren’t defeats. They were progress.
Near the end of the term, Keller gave them a final assignment: write a “Justice Memo” to a fictional governor facing a crisis. The governor had to choose between harsh policies that reduced crime quickly and slower reforms that protected rights but took years to work. Students had to recommend a path and defend it under questioning.
The memos were good—some brilliant—but the real test came in the final class. Keller asked for volunteers to read one paragraph aloud: the sentence they would stand by even if it made them unpopular.
A student who barely spoke all semester, Caleb Ross, read his line with a trembling voice: “If we trade away dignity for safety, we won’t recognize what we’ve become.”
Another student, Sienna Alvarez, followed: “If we protect principles but ignore pain, we’re choosing comfort over compassion.”
Keller looked at them with something like pride but without sentimentality. “That’s the point,” he said. “Justice is not a slogan. It’s a practice. And practices are hard.”
After the final exam, Maya and Ethan walked out together into cold sunlight. They weren’t friends exactly, but they had argued enough to respect each other. Maya said, half-smiling, “So… would you pull the lever?”
Ethan paused. “I still don’t know,” he admitted. “But now I know why I don’t know.”
Maya nodded. “Same.”
And that was the quiet twist of Keller’s course: it didn’t give them the “right” answers. It gave them responsibility for their answers.
If you’ve ever faced a hard moral choice, share it below—your story might help someone think better when their moment comes.
