The lecture opens the Justice course by doing something uncomfortable on purpose: it refuses to start with definitions. Instead, it begins with decisions—life-and-death decisions—because moral philosophy isn’t just about what sounds good in theory, it’s about what you’re willing to do when the stakes are real. The instructor frames the class as a place where everyday instincts will be tested, not protected, and where students will discover that their own beliefs often collide with each other the moment they’re put under pressure.
The first pressure test is the trolley problem in its “driver” version. A trolley is speeding toward five workers. You can pull a lever and divert it to another track where it will kill one worker instead. Most people say they would pull the lever. The point isn’t to congratulate anyone; the point is to reveal a pattern in our moral reflexes: many of us immediately start counting outcomes. One death feels tragic, but five deaths feel worse—so the “right” action seems like the one that reduces total harm. This is the doorway into consequentialist thinking: the idea that the morality of an action depends largely on what it produces.
Then the lecture repeats the exact same numbers in a different form—the “bridge” version—and the class suddenly flips. Now you’re not a driver pulling a lever. You’re a bystander on a bridge, next to a very heavy man. The only way to stop the trolley and save five workers is to push him off the bridge, killing him so his body blocks the trolley. Mathematically, it’s still one life for five. Yet most people refuse. The lecture uses this reversal like a spotlight: if the numbers didn’t change, something else must be doing the moral work. People aren’t only reacting to outcomes—they’re reacting to the method, the intention, and the directness of the harm.
To deepen the tension, the instructor moves into medical dilemmas. In an emergency room, a doctor can save either one severely injured patient or five moderately injured ones. Many people choose saving the five, again showing an outcome-based instinct. But when the scenario becomes organ transplantation—killing one healthy person to harvest organs that could save five sick patients—nearly everyone rejects it. That reaction reveals another powerful moral intuition: there are certain acts (like intentionally killing an innocent person) that many people treat as wrong no matter how beneficial the results appear. This introduces the second major moral language of the course: categorical moral reasoning, where some actions are forbidden because they violate duties, rights, or human dignity, not because they produce “bad math.”
By the end of Part 1, the lecture has already achieved its mission: it has made students unsure of their own consistency. Many people approve of sacrificing one to save five in one scenario, but condemn it in another scenario that appears morally “equivalent” by the numbers. The lecture doesn’t solve the contradiction yet—it sharpens it—because the whole course is built around that friction.
Part 2
Part 2 turns the class’s gut reactions into actual philosophical problems. The instructor pushes students past “it feels different” and demands a deeper explanation: what exactly is the morally relevant difference between pulling a lever and pushing a person? If you think morality is mainly about outcomes, you now owe a reason why the bridge case isn’t just as acceptable as the track-switch case. And if you think morality is about rules and rights, you owe a reason why letting five die when you could save them doesn’t count as a serious moral failure.
The lecture begins separating key moral ideas that get blurred in everyday thinking. One is the difference between harming someone as a side effect versus using someone as a means. In the driver version, the one person’s death can feel like a tragic consequence of rerouting danger. In the bridge version, the person’s death is not just a consequence—it is the mechanism. You aren’t merely redirecting harm; you’re turning a human being into a tool. The instructor uses this to show why people’s instincts shift: many moral intuitions treat “using a person” as a special kind of violation, even if the outcome is “better.”
Another moral distinction the lecture surfaces is the difference between choosing who dies and allowing death to occur. The transplant case triggers near-universal rejection because it involves selecting an innocent person and actively killing them. Even people who like “save the most” logic often recoil at the idea of planning a murder, because it feels like crossing a line that moral life cannot permit. The lecture isn’t saying the intuition is automatically correct; it’s saying the intuition is philosophically significant. It shows that human moral judgment often contains built-in constraints—limits on what we’re allowed to do to others—especially when those others are innocent, vulnerable, or being treated as disposable.
This is where the course’s big conflict becomes explicit: consequentialism (and its most famous form, utilitarianism) offers a clean logic—maximize overall good, reduce overall suffering—but it risks justifying actions many people experience as monstrous. Meanwhile, categorical approaches protect human dignity and rights, but can feel morally rigid when they require you to “keep your hands clean” while preventable tragedy unfolds. Part 2 sets up the tension as unavoidable: whichever moral framework you prefer, it will eventually demand that you defend something uncomfortable.
Part 3
Part 3 slams the abstract dilemmas into real history with the case of Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, forcing the class to confront a question that is no longer hypothetical: can necessity ever justify killing? After a shipwreck, four sailors drift without food or water. Eventually, two of them kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and eat him to survive. They argue they had no choice—that if they didn’t do it, everyone would have died. The class is now asked to judge an act that is both understandable in human desperation and horrifying in moral meaning.
The debate opens multiple moral fault lines at once. Some students are pulled toward a survival-based justification: if death was otherwise certain, killing one to save three might seem like tragic math, not cruelty. Others argue the opposite: murder remains categorically wrong, even in a lifeboat, because allowing “necessity” to excuse killing destroys the very concept of rights. The lecture uses this to highlight a central theme of justice: sometimes a society draws absolute lines not because reality is simple, but because certain permissions are too dangerous to allow—even when circumstances are extreme.
Then the lecture raises procedural fairness. What if the sailors had used a lottery to decide who would die? Would that make the act morally acceptable, or merely more “fair” in its brutality? This question is designed to unsettle a common assumption: that fairness of process automatically creates moral legitimacy. The lecture suggests that procedure matters, but it may not be enough—an act can be distributed fairly and still be fundamentally wrong.
Finally, the lecture interrogates consent. If the boy had agreed, would that change the moral status? Students confront how consent can be morally powerful in ordinary contexts, yet morally compromised in desperate ones. Starvation and fear can make “agreement” feel coerced, and the lecture pushes students to consider whether “consent” under extreme pressure is meaningful or merely a desperate surrender.
The lecture ends by widening the lens to the course itself. These dilemmas are not isolated puzzles—they are training grounds for thinking about justice in the world: law, punishment, equality, rights, freedom, and moral responsibility. The instructor warns that philosophy is risky because it forces you to question beliefs you thought were stable. Skepticism is mentioned as a temptation—“maybe there’s no right answer”—but the lecture insists that we cannot escape moral reasoning in real life. Even refusing to choose is a choice, and every society builds institutions on some moral assumptions, whether acknowledged or not.
By the end of Part 3, the course has defined its mission without giving a final verdict: it will examine the battle between outcomes and principles through major thinkers like Bentham and Kant, and it will keep returning to the same haunting question in new forms—when we say something is “just,” do we mean it produces the best results, or do we mean it respects the kind of human beings we believe people are?
