The lecture opens the Justice course in a deliberately unsettling way: instead of giving a clean definition of justice, it throws students into moral emergencies where there is no perfect option. The goal is to reveal something most people don’t notice about themselves—our moral beliefs often feel solid until we are forced to apply them under pressure. In those moments, our instincts split, our principles collide, and we suddenly realize that “what seems right” can change depending on how a situation is framed.
To trigger that collision, the instructor begins with the trolley problem. In the first version, you are the driver: a trolley is about to kill five workers unless you pull a lever and divert it onto a side track where it will kill one worker instead. Most people say they would turn the trolley. That reaction suggests an outcome-focused instinct: fewer deaths feels like a morally better result, even if it still involves tragedy. Without using heavy theory yet, the lecture quietly introduces a core moral approach hiding behind that instinct—consequentialist thinking, where the right action is tied to the consequences it produces.
Then the lecture repeats the same numbers in a more personal form, and the class flips. In the bridge version, you are not pulling a lever from a distance—you are standing beside a large man on a bridge, and the only way to stop the trolley and save five workers is to push him onto the track, killing him. Even though the math is still “one dies, five live,” most people refuse. The lecture uses that refusal as evidence that moral judgment is not only about totals. It can also be about how harm happens, whether someone is used as a tool, and whether the act feels like direct killing rather than redirecting danger.
From the beginning, the instructor’s point is not to shame anyone for inconsistency. The point is to show that moral philosophy starts exactly here—at the moment you realize you believe multiple things that don’t fit neatly together. If saving five is “better” than saving one, why does the method matter so much? If killing is wrong, why do so many people accept it in one form but reject it in another? The course is framed as an exploration of that tension, because those same tensions appear in real politics, law, rights, and justice.
Part 2
After the trolley scenarios expose the contradiction, the lecture intensifies it with medical dilemmas that feel closer to real life. In an emergency room, a doctor must choose between saving one severely injured patient or five moderately injured patients. Many people choose saving the five—again reflecting an instinct to maximize lives saved. But when the situation becomes an organ transplant case—killing one healthy person to harvest organs that could save five others—nearly everyone rejects it. The lecture highlights how quickly our judgments shift once the choice involves intentionally killing an innocent person who wasn’t already “in danger” in the same way.
At this stage, the lecture begins naming the deeper moral tension more clearly: some moral reasoning focuses on outcomes (consequentialism, including utilitarianism), while another kind treats certain actions as forbidden no matter how beneficial the results might be (categorical reasoning about duties, rights, and human dignity). The class is pushed to explain what their instincts are really protecting. Are they protecting life totals, or are they protecting a rule like “do not kill the innocent,” or a principle like “never treat a person as a mere instrument”?
A key move in the lecture is showing that small changes in a scenario can reveal what people value without them realizing it. For example:
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Distance vs. directness: pulling a lever feels different from pushing a person.
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Side effect vs. mechanism: one death feels “collateral” in the lever case, but becomes the “plan” in the bridge case.
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Choosing harm vs. allowing harm: letting five die can feel passive, yet pushing one to death feels like crossing a moral line.
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Using a person as a means: the transplant case feels especially repugnant because a human being is reduced to spare parts, even if the outcome is “more lives saved.”
Here’s the pattern the lecture wants students to see—same numbers, different moral reactions:
| Scenario | Typical Judgment | What the Judgment Seems to Track |
|---|---|---|
| Divert trolley to kill 1, save 5 | Many say “yes” | Consequences, harm reduction |
| Push man off bridge to stop trolley | Many say “no” | Direct killing, using a person as a tool |
| ER: save 5 vs save 1 | Many save 5 | Utility, triage logic |
| Transplant: kill 1 to save 5 | Nearly all say “no” | Rights, innocence, categorical limits |
By the end of Part 2, the lecture has built the course’s central problem: if we only follow outcomes, we risk justifying actions that feel like moral horror; if we only follow absolute rules, we risk ignoring preventable suffering. Justice, the lecture suggests, lives in the struggle between these two moral languages—especially when real institutions (courts, laws, governments) must make decisions that affect life, death, freedom, and equality.
Part 3
The lecture then pivots from thought experiments to a real legal case that forces the same moral clash into history: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. After a shipwreck, four sailors are stranded without food or water. As desperation grows, Dudley and Stephens kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and cannibalize him to survive. When they are rescued, they are tried for murder and argue “necessity” as a defense—claiming the killing was required to prevent everyone from dying.
This case is introduced as a moral earthquake because it makes the classroom’s abstract debate brutally concrete. If you believe morality is about maximizing survival, the sailors’ choice can look like a tragic calculation under impossible conditions. But if you believe murder is categorically wrong, then desperation doesn’t erase the victim’s right to life. The lecture uses the case to show why “necessity” is a dangerous idea in justice: once a society allows killing to be justified by survival math, it may weaken the protective walls that human rights depend on.
The class debate expands into two explosive questions.
First: Does fairness of procedure matter? Some students ask whether the sailors should have drawn lots, letting chance decide who dies. The lecture uses this to test a deep assumption—maybe a fair process makes an outcome morally acceptable. But the discomfort remains: even if it’s fair, is it still murder? Does a lottery cleanse the act, or just distribute brutality more evenly?
Second: What about consent? If the victim agrees, does that transform the act? The lecture challenges how meaningful “consent” is under extreme hunger, fear, and coercion. A person can “agree” when they have no real alternative, and justice must ask whether that agreement is morally valid or merely forced surrender.
From there, the lecture zooms out to the structure of the course: students will study major thinkers who represent the competing moral frameworks—Bentham and Mill for utilitarianism (a systematic form of consequentialism), and Kant for categorical moral reasoning (where duties and the dignity of persons matter regardless of outcomes). The instructor also warns that philosophy is personally risky because it can destabilize comforting beliefs. Skepticism—the idea that moral questions can’t be solved—is acknowledged, but the lecture rejects it as an escape route: in real life, we still make choices, support laws, judge others, and vote for policies. Whether we admit it or not, we live inside moral reasoning every day.
Part 3 ends with the course’s central challenge left intentionally unresolved: justice is not just about what works, and not just about what rules say. It’s about what kind of moral boundaries we believe humans deserve, what sacrifices we can demand, and what we refuse to do—even when doing it might “solve” the problem.
