The lecture opens the Justice course by refusing to start with definitions or laws. Instead, it throws the audience into moral emergencies to expose a disturbing truth: most people carry two different moral instincts that clash the moment life-and-death stakes appear. The instructor frames the class as a place where you don’t just “learn theories”—you discover what you already believe, why you believe it, and why your beliefs collide.
The first dilemma is the classic trolley problem in its “driver” form. A trolley is speeding toward five workers. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track where it will kill one worker instead. A large majority of people say they would pull the lever. The lecture uses that near-consensus to introduce a basic moral impulse: outcomes matter, and saving more lives feels “more right” than saving fewer. Even without using heavy vocabulary yet, the class is already practicing a consequentialist way of thinking—counting lives, comparing harm, choosing the lesser tragedy.
Then the instructor repeats the numbers with one key change that detonates the room’s confidence. In the “bridge” version, you are not a driver with a lever; you are a bystander on a bridge. The only way to stop the trolley and save the five is to push a large man off the bridge so his body stops the trolley, killing him. The math is identical—one dies, five live—but most people refuse to push. The lecture highlights that people aren’t only reacting to outcomes; they react to agency, intention, proximity, and the feeling of directly killing someone versus redirecting a threat.
That’s the turning point of Part 1: the class realizes it isn’t enough to say, “Saving five is better than saving one.” If it were that simple, the bridge case would be easy. Instead, the lecture exposes hidden moral boundaries people carry—rules like “don’t kill,” “don’t use a person as a tool,” or “some acts are wrong even if they lead to better results.” The course’s purpose is set: Justice is going to be about this conflict between moral arithmetic and moral limits, and the uncomfortable question of which instincts deserve to guide law and society.
Part 2
After the trolley problem fractures moral confidence, the lecture escalates with medical dilemmas that feel closer to real policy and real institutions. The instructor moves the class into an emergency-room scenario: a doctor must decide whether to save one severely injured patient or five moderately injured patients. Many people choose to save the five. The reasoning sounds practical, even humane—limited resources, triage, maximizing survival. Again, the lecture points out the same instinct: consequences and total harm reduction pull strongly on our sense of what’s right.
But then comes the scenario that exposes the dark edge of pure outcome-based thinking: the transplant surgeon case. If killing one healthy person could provide organs to save five dying patients, should the surgeon do it? Almost everyone says no. The instructor doesn’t let the class hide behind “I just feel it’s wrong.” The lecture pushes for why it feels different—because, again, the numbers are the same.
This is where Part 2 makes the moral tension sharper and more explicit. The class is guided to notice that our judgments change when:
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The person who dies is innocent and not already doomed by the situation
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The death becomes the means to the good outcome (not a side effect)
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The action looks like intentional killing, not a tragic redirection
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A human life is treated like a resource (organs, weight, utility) rather than a person with rights
The lecture introduces the philosophical fork in the road:
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Consequentialist thinking (including utilitarian ideas) tries to justify actions by the good they produce—often framed as maximizing lives saved, happiness, or welfare.
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Categorical moral reasoning insists some acts are wrong in themselves—especially acts like murder, coercion, or treating a person as an object—no matter how attractive the consequences are.
Part 2 ends with the course’s central wound opened wider: If we fully commit to consequences, we risk approving actions that feel like moral atrocities (like harvesting a healthy person). If we fully commit to absolute rules, we risk allowing preventable deaths because we refuse certain interventions. Justice, the lecture suggests, is not an easy “pick one” answer—it’s the struggle to justify limits, justify tradeoffs, and defend why some things must never be done, even in emergencies.
Part 3
The lecture then shifts from thought experiments to a real case that forces the same conflict into law: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. After a shipwreck, four sailors are stranded with no food or water. In desperation, Dudley and Stephens kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and cannibalize him to survive. Once rescued, they are tried for murder and argue necessity—claiming the killing was required or else everyone might have died.
The instructor uses this case as a pressure test for every argument the class has made so far. If moral reasoning is about saving the most lives, the sailors can be framed as committing a horrific act to prevent total death. But if murder is categorically wrong, then starvation and fear do not erase Parker’s right to life. The courtroom becomes the course’s central question made real: when survival is on the line, does morality bend—or does justice exist precisely to prevent “survival logic” from becoming permission to kill?
The classroom debate becomes more complex with two explosive sub-questions:
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Procedure and fairness: Some argue that if they had drawn lots, it would have been more “fair.” The lecture uses this to ask whether a fair process can make an otherwise wrong act acceptable. Does a lottery transform murder into justice, or does it merely distribute cruelty with cleaner hands?
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Consent: Others ask whether consent could justify the killing. The lecture challenges how meaningful consent is under extreme coercion—when dying slowly is the alternative, “agreement” may not be free at all.
From here, the lecture reveals the roadmap of the course. The instructor explains that these dilemmas aren’t just puzzles—they mirror real controversies in law and politics (rights, equality, punishment, freedom, and the limits of state power). The class will study major thinkers who represent the two moral languages the lecture has been staging: Bentham and Mill for utilitarian/consequentialist approaches, and Kant for categorical duties and the idea that people must be treated as ends, not instruments. The warning is blunt: philosophy can be personally and politically destabilizing, because it forces you to re-examine beliefs you thought were obvious.
Part 3 closes with the lecture’s final punch: skepticism (the idea that these questions can’t be answered) is tempting, but impossible to live by. Every day, we choose, judge, vote, punish, forgive, and demand rights—so we’re already doing moral philosophy. The course isn’t offering comfort; it’s offering clarity: if you claim to care about justice, you must be willing to explain your principles when the easy answers collapse—especially when someone’s life is the cost.
