The lecture opens by telling students what this “Justice” course is really going to do: it won’t just talk about laws or politics in an abstract way—it will test the moral beliefs people already carry, often without realizing it. The professor sets the tone immediately with a warning and a promise at the same time: if you take moral philosophy seriously, you may end up challenging opinions you’ve held for years, because philosophy doesn’t let you hide behind habit, emotion, or slogans. It asks you to give reasons, then asks whether those reasons still hold when the pressure increases.
To prove that moral reasoning is unavoidable, the lecture starts with a famous thought experiment: the trolley problem. The first version is simple and almost mechanical. A trolley is speeding toward five workers who will die if nothing is done. The driver can turn the wheel to redirect the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one worker instead. Many people instinctively say the driver should turn—one life lost is tragic, but five lives lost feels worse. The professor uses this moment to show how quickly people start doing moral math: we count lives, we compare outcomes, we ask which action creates less harm.
But then the lecture complicates the picture. The next version (the bridge scenario) asks the same basic question—save five at the cost of one—but changes the method. Instead of turning a wheel, a bystander can push a large man off a bridge to stop the trolley. The outcome is still “one dies, five live,” yet many people refuse to push. This is the key teaching moment: if the outcomes are similar, why do our judgments flip? The lecture doesn’t treat the discomfort as irrational; it treats it as evidence that moral judgment contains more than results. People seem to care about the means—whether harm is caused directly, intentionally, and through personal force—rather than only the final numbers.
From there, the professor broadens the trolley logic into medical dilemmas, because hospitals create real-life versions of the same moral tension. If an emergency room doctor can save five moderately injured patients or one critically injured patient, most people lean toward saving the five. Again, outcomes dominate. But then comes the transplant scenario: if a surgeon could kill one healthy person to harvest organs that would save five dying patients, nearly everyone rejects it. The lecture emphasizes the pattern: many accept sacrificing one when it feels like redirecting harm, but reject sacrificing one when it requires using a person as a tool.
This is the first big pivot into moral philosophy. The professor introduces two broad styles of reasoning that will guide the entire course:
- A results-centered approach, where morality is judged by consequences—saving more lives, reducing suffering, maximizing overall good.
- A duty- or principle-centered approach, where certain actions are wrong in themselves—no matter how beneficial the outcome appears.
The lecture doesn’t fully name all the theories yet, but it begins to attach vocabulary. Consequences-based thinking will later connect to utilitarianism, especially the approach associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Principle-based thinking will connect to Kant’s idea that morality is grounded in duties and respect for persons, not in calculations of benefit.
Then the lecture takes a dramatic step: it leaves thought experiments and enters real history, using the case of The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. After a shipwreck, several sailors drift for days without food or water. In desperation, two of them kill and cannibalize the cabin boy, Richard Parker, claiming necessity: if they didn’t do it, everyone would die. The professor uses this case because it forces the class to confront the same moral conflict in a legal setting. If morality is about survival and outcomes, “necessity” might sound like a defense. But the law treats it as murder. The lecture makes the tension clear: the legal system often draws categorical lines, refusing to permit certain actions even when they might seem “useful” in extreme circumstances.
As students debate the shipwreck case, new moral issues appear. Some students wonder whether a lottery would have made it fairer—if someone must die, should chance decide? Others wonder about consent—if the boy had agreed, would it change the morality? The professor doesn’t provide an answer; instead he highlights why these questions matter. They show that justice isn’t only about outcomes; it’s also about procedure, fairness, coercion, and whether people’s rights can ever be traded away, even to prevent disaster.
By the end of Part 1, the lecture has done its main job: it has revealed that moral reasoning is unstable under pressure, and that our intuitions are structured by deeper principles we don’t always articulate. The trolley problem is not a puzzle for entertainment—it is a tool to expose what people believe about killing, responsibility, intention, and human dignity. And the shipwreck case signals what’s coming next: the course will use philosophy to examine how societies should decide what justice requires when our instincts collide—when saving the many conflicts with respecting the one, when fairness conflicts with survival, and when law must decide what no individual wants to decide alone.
Part 2
After the opening dilemmas, the lecture shifts from “what would you do?” to “what kind of moral reasoning are you using?” The professor makes it clear that the course is not about collecting opinions; it’s about understanding the logic behind them. When students say “turn the trolley,” many are implicitly endorsing a moral approach that evaluates actions by their consequences. When they say “don’t push the man,” they may be appealing to a different idea: that certain acts—especially intentional killing—cross a moral boundary that outcomes can’t erase.
This is where the lecture begins to build the bridge toward major theories of justice. It frames the consequence-based approach as powerful because it feels practical and impartial. If each life counts equally, then saving five rather than one seems like the morally serious choice. It also resembles how public policy often works: governments allocate resources, set safety rules, and design laws partly to reduce harm and increase well-being. In that sense, thinking about outcomes is not “cold”—it can be a form of fairness, because it refuses to privilege one person’s life over another’s just because of status or emotion.
But the professor immediately presses on the weakness of pure outcome thinking. The transplant case is the stress test: if your theory says it’s acceptable to kill one innocent person to save five, then your theory must explain why that doesn’t undermine the idea of justice. The class begins to see that justice involves something more than maximizing totals. Many people feel that individuals have a kind of moral protection—rights or dignity—that cannot be overridden simply because doing so would benefit others.
At this stage, the lecture highlights that the central conflict is not a technical detail; it’s a clash between two different pictures of the human person:
- In one picture, people are “units of welfare,” and justice is the distribution and maximization of well-being.
- In the other picture, people are “bearers of rights,” and justice is the refusal to treat someone as an instrument, even for a good cause.
To deepen the tension, the lecture returns to Dudley and Stephens and the idea of “necessity.” If necessity were accepted as a defense for murder, then law would be admitting that survival can erase moral limits. The professor points out why courts worry about that: once you allow exceptions, you create a rule that can be abused. “Necessity” can become a mask for power, where the strong decide that the weak must be sacrificed.
Then come the two “moral modifiers” that students naturally reach for:
1) Fair procedure (lottery).
A lottery feels different because it seems to respect equality: no one is chosen because they are weak, poor, or less valued. But the lecture challenges the class: does fairness in selection make killing morally permissible, or does it only make an otherwise wrong act feel less biased?
2) Consent.
Consent seems morally powerful because it relates to autonomy—people choosing for themselves. But the lecture highlights the problem: in extreme circumstances, “consent” can be coerced by desperation. A starving person agreeing to die isn’t the same as free choice under normal conditions.
Through these discussions, the professor is doing something subtle: he’s showing that moral reasoning is layered. Outcomes matter. Procedures matter. Autonomy matters. And yet none of these automatically solves the hardest cases. Justice is not a single principle; it is a set of competing principles that can collide in tragic ways.
Part 2 ends with the course’s main promise becoming clearer: the class will not stay at the level of gut instinct. It will study philosophers who try to justify these instincts—or overturn them. The trolley and shipwreck cases are the opening map, revealing where the deepest moral fault lines are: between welfare and rights, between consequences and duties, between what feels efficient and what feels humane.
Part 3
In the final portion of the introduction, the lecture zooms out to show why these dilemmas matter far beyond the classroom. The professor argues that moral philosophy is not optional because society constantly forces moral decisions—through law, public policy, and institutions. Whether we admit it or not, every political argument contains moral assumptions: about what people deserve, what equality means, what freedom requires, and what sacrifices can be demanded.
This is where the lecture formally sets up the intellectual journey ahead. The professor explains that the course will follow two powerful traditions and test them against real controversies:
Utilitarianism, associated with Bentham and Mill, will argue that justice should aim to maximize overall happiness or well-being. The lecture frames its appeal: it treats people equally by counting each person’s welfare, and it offers a method for making hard choices when resources are limited. It can also be a reformer’s tool—if the goal is to reduce suffering, then unjust traditions, cruel punishments, and wasteful policies can be challenged with evidence and argument.
But the professor also makes clear why utilitarianism is controversial. The objection isn’t only emotional; it’s structural. If justice is only about maximizing welfare, then the individual can become expendable. The healthy patient in the transplant case becomes a warning: a society that permits sacrificing innocents for greater totals risks sliding into brutality—especially when the powerless are always the ones “sacrificed.”
Then the lecture turns to Kantian / categorical moral reasoning, where justice is grounded in duties and respect for persons. The central idea is that people are not tools; they possess dignity. This view explains why many people reject pushing the man off the bridge: it feels like using his body as an instrument. In this tradition, justice draws hard lines—things you do not do to a human being, even for a good outcome.
But categorical reasoning has its own challenge: what happens when following a rule allows catastrophe? If you refuse to act because the act would be “wrong,” and five die, how do you justify that refusal? The professor uses this to show that every moral theory has costs. A serious theory of justice must be able to face its own hardest cases, not just its easiest victories.
Finally, the lecture addresses skepticism—the temptation to say, “There is no right answer, so moral debate is pointless.” The professor pushes back: even if we can’t reach mathematical certainty, we still have to choose. We still vote, judge, punish, forgive, distribute resources, and create laws. Avoiding moral reasoning doesn’t remove moral responsibility; it just makes our choices less examined and more likely to be driven by prejudice, fear, or habit.
The lecture closes by positioning the course as a training in moral clarity. The goal is not to make students agree, but to make them understand what they believe, why they believe it, and what their beliefs imply in the real world. The trolley problem begins the course because it exposes hidden principles. The shipwreck case grounds it because law must choose even when morality feels impossible. And the philosophers to come matter because they offer structured answers—or structured challenges—to the question at the heart of justice:
When human lives, rights, and society’s rules collide, what do we owe to each other—and how do we justify it?
