The lecture opens the Justice course by doing something intentionally unsettling: it refuses to begin with definitions of justice, rights, or law. Instead, it throws the audience into moral emergencies where every option feels wrong in some way. The goal is to expose a fact we usually hide from ourselves—most people already carry strong moral judgments, but they often can’t explain why they believe what they believe until they are forced to choose under pressure. The professor frames the course as a conflict between two big moral instincts: one that cares most about results and one that cares most about principles—especially the idea that some acts are wrong no matter how helpful the outcome seems.
The first dilemma is the trolley problem in its simplest form. A runaway trolley is headed toward five workers. You are the driver and can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track where it will kill one worker. Most people say they would pull the lever. The lecture highlights how natural this answer feels: one death seems like a tragic but rational price to avoid five deaths. This response becomes the class’s first clue that many of our moral instincts lean toward consequence-based logic when the situation looks like a clean tradeoff.
But the lecture then makes a sharper move: it keeps the numbers identical and changes only the method. In the bridge version, the trolley is still going to kill five, but now you are not a driver with a lever—you are a bystander who can push a very large man off a bridge to stop the trolley. His death would save the five. Suddenly, most people refuse. The professor uses this whiplash to reveal the deeper structure behind our judgments. If morality were only math, the two scenarios should feel the same. Yet one feels “acceptable” to many, while the other feels like a moral violation.
This is where the lecture starts building the course’s foundation. It suggests that people aren’t just counting lives; they’re reacting to features like intention, directness, and whether someone is being used as a tool. Pulling a lever feels like redirecting harm. Pushing a man feels like turning a person into an object—a human brake. That difference hints at a competing moral framework: categorical moral reasoning, where certain actions (like intentionally killing an innocent person) are forbidden even if the outcome is better overall.
Then the lecture widens the scope with medical dilemmas to prove this isn’t a silly thought experiment. An ER doctor must choose between saving one severely injured patient or five moderately injured ones. Many people again choose saving five—outcomes matter. But when the scenario becomes a transplant surgeon killing one healthy patient to harvest organs for five others, almost everyone rejects it. That refusal exposes a moral line: even if five lives could be saved, we resist the idea of murder as a tool for good results. By the end of Part 1, the audience is left in a productive discomfort: our moral intuitions are powerful but inconsistent, and the course will try to understand whether that inconsistency is a flaw—or a clue about what justice really demands.
Part 2
Part 2 develops the philosophical framework more clearly by naming what the dilemmas are testing. The lecture identifies two styles of moral reasoning that collide again and again. The first is consequentialism—the idea that morality depends on outcomes, so the “right” action is the one that produces the most good or the least harm. The second is categorical moral reasoning—the idea that morality is grounded in duties and rights, so some actions are wrong in themselves regardless of consequences.
The power of the trolley/medical examples is that they reveal how easily people switch between these two modes depending on how an action is framed. When the choice looks like “save more lives,” consequence-based reasoning feels humane and obvious. But when saving more lives requires intentionally killing an innocent person—especially in a hands-on, personal way—many people feel that something deeper than outcomes is being violated. The lecture emphasizes that this isn’t just squeamishness; it might reflect a belief that each person has a kind of moral boundary around them that cannot be crossed even for a greater total benefit.
This is where utilitarianism is introduced as a major version of consequentialism, linked to Jeremy Bentham and later refined by John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism, in broad terms, aims to maximize overall happiness or “utility.” The lecture sets this up as a powerful approach because it offers a simple, systematic rule: choose the action that produces the greatest net good. That clarity is attractive, especially for public policy, law, and governance—fields where decisions affect large numbers of people.
But the lecture also shows why utilitarianism generates fear. The same logic that supports sacrificing one to save five can, in principle, justify horrifying acts if they increase total welfare. That’s why the transplant case is so important: it exposes the intuitive resistance people have to treating individuals as expendable resources, even if doing so would increase the total number of lives saved. The lecture suggests that when we feel that resistance, we’re appealing to something like the idea of rights, human dignity, or inviolability—concepts that do not behave like numbers in a calculation.
On the other side, the lecture previews Immanuel Kant and the idea of a categorical imperative—a moral law that binds us regardless of outcomes. While the lecture doesn’t fully teach Kant yet, it sets the expectation: Kant-like thinking would reject actions that treat people merely as means to an end, even if doing so would produce a better outcome overall. In other words, the moral constraint isn’t based on what happens after the act; it’s based on what the act is.
Part 2 also introduces why the course matters politically. These frameworks don’t stay in the classroom. Governments constantly face trolley problems: resource allocation, healthcare, war, policing, speech regulation, taxation, and equality. If you lean consequentialist, you may accept harmful tradeoffs for larger benefits. If you lean categorical, you may refuse those tradeoffs even when the consequences are severe. The lecture’s message is that justice is partly about learning what kind of moral engine you trust—and what you’re willing to sacrifice to remain consistent.
Part 3
Part 3 escalates everything by moving from hypothetical dilemmas to a real legal case: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. The lecture uses it as proof that moral philosophy is not abstract entertainment—it is the hidden structure behind real judgments that courts and societies must make. The facts are brutal. After a shipwreck, four sailors are stranded at sea without food and water. As starvation becomes unbearable, Dudley and Stephens kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and cannibalize him to survive. When they are rescued, they are tried for murder. Their defense: necessity—without the killing, they argue, everyone might have died.
This case is like the trolley problem with teeth. If you think consequences justify actions, you might feel pulled toward their defense: perhaps one death to save three is “necessary.” But the law’s response exposes the opposing moral intuition: if we allow necessity to justify murder, then human life becomes negotiable whenever the situation is desperate enough. The lecture uses this to ask a terrifying question: if survival can excuse killing, what stops the strong from declaring “necessity” whenever it benefits them?
The class debate in the lecture digs into two ideas that seem like they might fix the moral ugliness: fair procedure and consent. Some argue that if a lottery had been held, it would have been fairer—everyone would face equal risk. But the lecture challenges whether fairness of procedure changes the moral nature of the act. Does a lottery make intentional killing morally acceptable—or does it just make injustice look orderly? The case forces the class to confront the possibility that even perfect fairness cannot cleanse certain actions.
Then comes consent. If the cabin boy had consented, would it change anything? The lecture pushes back hard by emphasizing the problem of coercion: can consent ever be truly free when death is otherwise imminent? Even if someone agrees, is it moral for others to kill them? Here the lecture shows why consent matters but also why it cannot do all the moral work. Consent may reduce wrongdoing in some contexts, but in life-and-death extremes it becomes morally unstable, because desperation can turn agreement into surrender.
The final move in Part 3 is to explain what the course is setting up. The trolley cases, medical cases, and Dudley and Stephens are not meant to provide easy answers. They are meant to expose the fault lines inside our moral instincts and force us to test whether our principles can survive when the stakes are real. The course will study philosophers like Bentham and Kant because they offer rigorous systems for answering these questions, and then apply those systems to modern issues—equality, rights, free speech, military service, and law. The lecture ends with a warning: philosophy is risky because it can break the comfort of “common sense.” It may force you to admit that your beliefs conflict, or that your moral certainty depends on emotion, habit, or social norms. But it also insists that skepticism isn’t a safe escape—because even refusing to decide is still a decision with consequences. In everyday life and in public life, we are always choosing. The course simply demands that we choose with awareness, reasons, and the courage to face what our choices imply.
