This opening lecture is designed to unsettle you on purpose. Instead of starting with a definition of justice or a list of political theories, it begins by putting you in situations where every option feels morally dirty. The professor’s strategy is simple: before students can argue about justice in society, they need to see how quickly their “common sense” breaks when it meets real conflict. So the lecture opens with the trolley problem, not as a trick question, but as a moral X-ray—something that reveals what you actually believe when you’re forced to decide fast.
In the first trolley scenario, you are the driver. A trolley is headed toward five workers on the track. 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. They don’t say it lightly, but they tend to feel the reasoning is clear: if death is unavoidable, choosing one death to prevent five feels like the least terrible option. This reaction is used to introduce the instinct behind outcome-based morality: we weigh results, we compare harms, and we choose what seems to minimize tragedy.
Then the lecture repeats the same numbers but changes the action in a way that shocks the conscience. Now you stand on a bridge above the track. You can stop the trolley only by pushing a very large man off the bridge so the trolley hits him and stops, saving five workers but killing him. Even though the math is identical—one life traded for five—most people refuse to push. The lecture highlights this gap as the central mystery: why do we treat two “one dies, five live” cases differently? The aim isn’t to accuse anyone of hypocrisy. It’s to prove that morality isn’t just calculation. Method matters. Personal involvement matters. Intention matters. And many people feel there is a deep difference between redirecting a threat and using a person as a tool.
To deepen the point, the lecture shifts to medical dilemmas that feel more realistic. An emergency room doctor must decide between saving one severely injured person or five moderately injured people. Many say “save five.” But a transplant case flips the intuition again: should a surgeon kill one healthy patient to harvest organs and save five others? Almost everyone says no. The lecture uses these examples to show that people often support maximizing lives—until the act requires deliberately killing an innocent person. By the end of Part 1, the lesson is clear: our moral instincts are powerful, but they’re not automatically consistent, and justice can’t be understood without confronting why our judgments change when the scenario changes.
Part 2
After exposing the conflict, the lecture gives students a vocabulary for what they just experienced. On one side is consequentialism: the view that the rightness of an action depends on its outcomes. If your goal is to minimize suffering or maximize wellbeing, then saving five rather than one appears obviously preferable. Consequentialism feels practical, especially in politics, where decisions affect millions and tradeoffs are unavoidable. It speaks the language of public policy: reduce harm, increase benefits, maximize welfare.
On the other side is categorical moral reasoning: the belief that some actions are wrong in themselves, even if they lead to better results. Under this view, rights and duties matter more than totals. A person is not just a number in a calculation. That is why many people refuse to push the man off the bridge or kill a healthy patient for organs—those acts feel like violating a moral boundary, like turning a human being into an instrument. The lecture frames this as a clash between two ways of thinking: “What produces the best results?” versus “What must never be done to a person?”
This is where the lecture tees up the philosophers the course will study. Jeremy Bentham (and later John Stuart Mill) represent utilitarian thinking: a structured, outcome-based approach that tries to measure morality by overall happiness or utility. Utilitarianism is appealing because it offers a clear decision procedure. But it also creates fear because it seems capable of justifying cruelty if cruelty increases total benefit. The transplant case becomes the emotional warning: if saving five can justify killing one, then where do we draw the line?
In contrast, the lecture previews Immanuel Kant, who argues that morality is not just about what happens, but about what kind of action you choose and what principle you act on. His idea of a categorical imperative points toward unconditional moral duties—rules you must follow regardless of consequences. Even without deep Kantian detail yet, the lecture makes the direction obvious: if you believe persons have inherent dignity, then using someone merely as a means—pushing them, harvesting them, sacrificing them—feels fundamentally wrong.
The lecture also insists this is not a purely academic fight. These frameworks show up in real disputes: punishment, equality, free speech, military drafts, and social policy. Consequentialists may accept painful tradeoffs to prevent greater harm; categorical thinkers may reject tradeoffs that violate rights, even if rejection creates worse outcomes. Part 2’s function is to set the battlefield: the course will repeatedly return to this tension, because it’s the engine behind most disagreements about justice.
Part 3
To prove the stakes are real, the lecture moves from hypothetical puzzles to a real legal case: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. Here, the classroom can’t hide behind diagrams. After a shipwreck, four sailors are stranded at sea with no food or water. As survival becomes desperate, Dudley and Stephens kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and cannibalize him. When they are rescued, they are tried for murder. Their defense is necessity: they argue that killing one was required so that more could live.
This case is the lecture’s moral grenade. If you believe morality is about outcomes, you feel pressure to justify the killing—because it “saved” lives. But if you believe murder is categorically wrong, you feel pressure to condemn them—because desperation doesn’t erase the victim’s right to life. The lecture uses the case to show the cruelest philosophical truth: many moral questions are not clean. They force you to choose which value breaks first.
Then the discussion introduces “procedural fairness” as a possible escape. Some students wonder: what if they had held a lottery? If everyone had an equal chance of being chosen, would that make it morally permissible? The lecture pushes hard here because it exposes something important: a fair process might reduce bias, but it might not change the nature of the act. Killing may remain killing, even when chosen fairly. It’s not obvious that “fairly choosing a victim” turns murder into justice.
Consent becomes the next escape hatch. What if the cabin boy agreed to be sacrificed? The lecture complicates this instantly: can consent be meaningful under extreme coercion? When starvation is the alternative, agreement can become a twisted form of surrender. And even if consent were present, some people still believe the act is wrong because it treats human life as a tool for others’ survival, reducing a person to meat and utility.
By ending with Dudley and Stephens, the lecture delivers its final message: justice is not just law and not just feelings—it is the struggle to justify principles under pressure. The trolley problem shows how our instincts shift with context. The medical cases show that saving more doesn’t automatically justify doing anything. The shipwreck case shows that real life can corner people into moral horror, and society still has to decide what it will call right, wrong, excusable, or punishable.
The lecture also warns that philosophy is personally risky. It can destabilize beliefs you assumed were obvious, and it can make you realize your political opinions rest on moral assumptions you’ve never defended. But it argues that skepticism—giving up because “there’s no answer”—isn’t an option, because we make moral judgments every day anyway. The course is presented as training for that unavoidable reality: learning to think clearly, argue honestly, and face the uncomfortable truth that justice is often about choosing which moral cost you refuse to pay—and why.
