The lecture starts the Justice course by doing something unsettling on purpose: it refuses to begin with laws, rights, or political ideologies. Instead, it forces everyone to make fast moral judgments in extreme situations, because those snap reactions reveal what people really believe—before they can hide behind slogans. The goal is to show that “justice” isn’t just a topic; it’s a constant conflict between competing moral instincts.
The first dilemma is the trolley problem in the “driver” scenario. A trolley is about to kill five workers on the track. You, as the driver, can pull a lever and redirect it onto another track where it will kill one worker instead. Most people say they would pull the lever. The lecture highlights why: the outcome seems clearly better—one death instead of five—so the moral instinct here is almost mathematical. If morality is about minimizing harm, then the “right” move is to reduce casualties.
But the lecture immediately disrupts that confidence with a second version that keeps the numbers the same while changing the method. In the “bridge” scenario, the only way to stop the trolley is to push a very large man off a bridge so his body blocks the trolley, saving the five but killing him. Most people refuse to push, even though the arithmetic matches the first case. That gap—between “I’d pull the lever” and “I wouldn’t push the man”—is the hook of the entire course.
The point is not to shame the audience. It’s to reveal the hidden structure of moral judgment. People don’t only care about outcomes. They care about whether harm is intended or merely foreseen, whether the victim is used as a tool, whether the action feels personal and direct, and whether the act crosses a line that “should never be crossed.” The lecture frames this as the beginning of a deep philosophical conflict: one way of thinking judges actions by results, while another judges actions by duties, rights, and moral boundaries.
By the end of Part 1, the course has planted its central question: if we can’t explain why these two trolley judgments differ, then we don’t yet understand our own moral reasoning. The lecture sets up justice as a project of making those reasons explicit—testing them, defending them, and seeing what happens when they collide.
Part 2
After splitting the audience with the trolley dilemma, the lecture moves into medical cases to show that these conflicts aren’t abstract puzzles—they mirror real decisions in hospitals, public policy, and law. The first medical example is triage: an emergency-room doctor must choose between saving one severely injured patient or five moderately injured patients. Many people again choose the five. The reasoning sounds practical and compassionate: scarce resources should be used where they save the most lives.
Then the lecture intensifies the discomfort by introducing the transplant surgeon scenario. A surgeon could save five dying patients by killing one healthy patient and distributing the organs. Almost everyone rejects this. Again, the numbers are identical, but the moral judgment flips. The lecture forces the class to sit inside that contradiction: why do we accept sacrificing one to save five in some scenarios but not in others?
The lecture draws out the differences that people instinctively react to:
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In triage, the doctor is choosing where to allocate help among people already in crisis.
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In organ harvesting, the doctor would be intentionally killing an innocent person who is not otherwise doomed.
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The healthy person becomes a means, a resource, not a patient.
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The act feels like murder disguised as efficiency.
This is where the key philosophical frameworks become clearer. One approach says morality depends on consequences: if more lives are saved, the act can be justified. Another approach says some acts—especially deliberate killing of an innocent person—are wrong no matter how beneficial the outcome is. The lecture emphasizes that both instincts are powerful, and most people use both depending on the case. The course is not pretending this tension is easy to resolve; it’s saying justice lives inside this tension.
Part 2 ends by sharpening the stakes: if we follow consequences too far, we risk approving acts that feel like moral nightmares. If we follow absolute rules too rigidly, we risk allowing preventable suffering because “the rule is the rule.” Justice, the lecture suggests, is the attempt to build a moral framework that can survive both kinds of cases without collapsing into hypocrisy.
Part 3
The lecture then pivots from thought experiments to a real legal case that forces the same conflict into the courtroom: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. The facts are brutal: sailors survive a shipwreck, drift for days without food or water, and eventually Dudley and Stephens kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, then cannibalize him to survive. When rescued, they are prosecuted for murder. Their defense is necessity: they claim the killing was required, because otherwise everyone might have died.
This case becomes a real-world version of everything the lecture has been teasing apart. If morality is about outcomes, the sailors may look like desperate people choosing the lesser evil to prevent more deaths. But if murder is categorically wrong, then the circumstances—no matter how extreme—do not make it permissible to kill an innocent person. The lecture uses the class discussion to highlight how quickly “survival logic” can become a dangerous permission slip: once you allow necessity to justify murder, where does it stop, and who decides?
The discussion expands into two morally explosive variables. First is procedure: some argue a lottery would have been fairer—if everyone had an equal chance of being chosen, the act might feel less like predation. The lecture asks whether fair procedure can moralize an act that otherwise feels evil. Does fairness cleanse killing, or does it merely spread brutality evenly?
Second is consent: could the cabin boy’s consent have changed things? The lecture pushes the audience to confront the reality of coercion. Under starvation, “consent” can be distorted—agreeing to die when the alternative is watching everyone die may not be truly free. This leads back to the course’s earlier point: justice is not just about outcomes; it is also about rights, agency, and the conditions under which choices are meaningful.
Part 3 closes by explaining why the course is built this way. The trolley problem and the shipwreck case are not random drama—they are gateways into the central debate between consequentialist ethics (often associated with Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism) and categorical ethics (often associated with Kant’s duties and rights). The lecture warns that philosophy is personally risky because it forces you to question beliefs you hold emotionally and politically. Skepticism—the temptation to say “there’s no answer”—is acknowledged, but the lecture rejects it as a resting place: we make moral judgments every day, so avoiding moral reasoning is itself a choice.
By the end, the course has made its promise: justice won’t be taught as a list of rules. It will be explored as a battle between moral frameworks—tested in impossible dilemmas, exposed in real legal cases, and carried forward into modern debates where the cost of getting it wrong is not theoretical, but human.
