This introductory Justice lecture doesn’t begin with laws, rights, or a clean definition of fairness. It begins by shaking the student’s confidence in their own moral certainty. The professor uses classic dilemmas to show that most people already carry strong moral instincts, but those instincts often collide the moment the situation changes—even when the outcome looks identical on paper. The first case is the trolley problem in its “driver” form: a runaway trolley is heading toward five workers, and the driver can divert it onto another track where it will kill one person instead. Many students say they would turn the trolley, because the decision seems like a tragic but rational trade—minimize deaths, save more people. Right away, the lecture uses that reaction to highlight a familiar style of reasoning: judging actions by consequences and choosing the option that produces the best overall outcome.
But the lecture then repeats the same numbers in a way that exposes a deeper moral discomfort. In the “bridge” version, you are not a driver pulling a lever; you are a bystander who can stop the trolley only by pushing a very large man off a bridge, killing him to save the five on the track. Even though the result is still “one dies so five live,” most people refuse to push. The professor’s point is not to mock anyone—it’s to ask why the moral verdict flips. If outcomes were the only thing that mattered, the answers should match. Yet most students feel a difference between redirecting harm and intentionally using a person as a tool, between “letting one die” and “making someone die,” between impersonal distance and direct personal force. The lecture is basically saying: your moral judgment depends on more than a scoreboard of lives saved.
To make the tension even sharper, the professor introduces medical dilemmas. In an emergency room scenario, the choice is between saving one severely injured patient or five moderately injured ones. Many students again lean toward saving five. But then comes the transplant scenario: could a surgeon kill one healthy person to harvest organs and save five others? Almost everyone rejects that option immediately. The class is forced to confront a pattern: people often support “save the greater number” until the act requires deliberately killing an innocent person. By the end of Part 1, the lecture has done its job: it has surfaced the central conflict of the course—our intuitions pull us toward outcomes in some cases, and toward inviolable moral boundaries in others. The rest of the course will ask whether those boundaries can be defended with reasons, not just feelings, and whether outcome-based thinking can avoid turning people into disposable parts.
Part 2
After the dilemmas expose the contradictions in our gut reactions, the lecture gives the class the philosophical tools to describe what’s happening. One tool is consequentialism, the view that the morality of an action depends on its results. If you care most about reducing harm or maximizing wellbeing, then saving five rather than one looks obviously better. This framework sounds practical, especially in public policy, where leaders constantly face tradeoffs and must justify hard decisions with measurable outcomes. The lecture connects consequentialism to utilitarianism, especially as developed by Jeremy Bentham (and later refined by John Stuart Mill): the idea that we should act to maximize overall happiness or “utility.” Utilitarianism is attractive because it offers a clear direction—count up benefits and harms, then choose what creates the greatest total good.
But the lecture doesn’t present this as a neat victory. It uses the transplant case (and the bridge case) to show why many people resist pure outcome-based logic. If the only rule is “maximize good outcomes,” then horrifying actions can become permissible whenever they increase the total. That triggers a second tool: categorical moral reasoning, the idea that some actions are wrong in themselves, regardless of how much good they produce. Under this view, moral duties and individual rights matter so deeply that they can block even the most beneficial calculation. The lecture previews Immanuel Kant as the key figure here, especially his idea of the categorical imperative—unconditional moral requirements that don’t bend just because breaking them would be useful. Even without going deep into Kant’s full system yet, the lecture makes the basic contrast vivid: utilitarian thinking tempts us to treat people like numbers, while categorical thinking insists people must never be treated merely as means to someone else’s end.
This is also where the course’s broader purpose becomes clear. These frameworks aren’t only for hypotheticals—they shape real arguments about law and politics. When society debates free speech limits, equality, punishment, or military conscription, people often disagree because they’re using different moral “engines.” Some argue like consequentialists: “What policy produces the best overall outcomes?” Others argue like categorical thinkers: “What policy respects rights and dignity no matter what?” The lecture warns students that studying justice will feel personal and even politically uncomfortable, because philosophy doesn’t just add new information—it challenges the foundations of beliefs students already hold. It even acknowledges skepticism (the temptation to say “there’s no answer”), but pushes back: moral judgment is unavoidable in real life, so refusing to think carefully is itself a choice with consequences. Part 2 sets the stage for the course’s method: debate, confrontation with hard cases, and learning to defend moral claims with reasons rather than instinct alone.
Part 3
To prove that this isn’t just a classroom game, the lecture turns to a real legal and moral controversy: Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. The facts are brutal in a way that forces philosophy to become real. 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 arrested and tried for murder, arguing necessity as their defense—claiming that the killing was required to save lives.
This case becomes the lecture’s “real-world trolley problem,” except it’s not hypothetical and not clean. Students immediately feel the pull of consequentialist reasoning: if everyone would have died otherwise, doesn’t survival change the moral calculus? But categorical moral reasoning strikes back hard: does desperation erase the wrongness of murder, or does it prove why murder must remain forbidden—because once killing becomes “allowed” when useful, the weakest person will always be at risk? The lecture uses the class debate to sharpen moral questions that will echo throughout the course: if an act is wrong, can circumstances ever make it right? If outcomes matter, do they matter enough to override a person’s right not to be killed?
Then come two “escape routes” students often reach for—procedure and consent—and the lecture shows how complicated they are. Some ask whether a fair lottery would make it morally acceptable: if everyone had an equal chance of being chosen, would the killing become less unjust? Others ask about consent: if the victim agreed, would that change the moral status of the act? The lecture pushes back by highlighting how “fairness” can be morally thin if the act itself is still murder, and how “consent” can be morally unstable when people are trapped, starving, and coerced by circumstance. Even if a lottery seems fair, it may still institutionalize a horrifying principle: that human life can be traded like currency. Even if consent is offered, it might not be truly free under extreme threat. The case forces the class to confront an uncomfortable possibility: some moral lines may exist precisely for moments when breaking them feels most tempting.
By ending with Dudley and Stephens, the lecture closes the loop: trolley problems aren’t pointless puzzles—they’re training for the kinds of conflicts law and society must actually judge. The lecture’s final impact is to leave students with a clear map of the terrain: one path emphasizes consequences and collective welfare; another path emphasizes duties, rights, and human dignity; and most real disputes about justice arise because these paths sometimes point in opposite directions. The course will move forward by testing both frameworks against additional philosophers and real controversies, not to hand students easy answers, but to force them to explain—carefully and honestly—why they believe what they believe when the stakes are life, death, and the meaning of justice itself.
