The lecture hall is calm at first—students half-awake, laptops open, coffee cups steaming. Then the professor writes one word on the board:
JUSTICE.
“Let’s start with a simple case,” he says. “A trolley is out of control. Five workers are on the track. You’re the driver. You can turn the wheel, sending the trolley onto another track where one worker stands. What do you do?”
Hands rise quickly.
Most people say the same thing: turn the trolley.
One life for five. A hard choice, but the “best” outcome.
The professor nods like he expected that. Then he leans forward, almost casually, and says:
“Now let’s change the situation. You’re not the driver anymore. You’re a bystander on a bridge. The trolley is still heading for five. There’s a large man beside you. If you push him, he’ll fall onto the track and stop the trolley—saving the five, killing him. Would you push him?”
The room changes temperature.
A few students laugh nervously. Someone whispers, “That’s different.”
Hands that were confident before now freeze in midair. People stare at the floor. Some shake their heads.
And that’s the first crack in the neat logic.
Same numbers. Same “save five.”
But suddenly, many refuse.
The professor doesn’t scold. He just asks the question that stings:
“If outcomes are what matter, why did your answer change?”
No one wants to say it out loud, but everyone feels it:
Because pulling a lever feels like steering fate…
and pushing a person feels like becoming the weapon.
PART 2
The professor builds the pressure.
He shifts from trains to hospitals—because hospitals feel real, and real things hurt more.
“You’re an ER doctor,” he says. “You can either save one severely injured patient or five moderately injured patients. Who do you save?”
Most choose: save the five.
It matches the trolley lever instinct. A moral calculator wakes up: more lives, more good.
Then the professor drops the next scenario like a trapdoor:
“You’re a transplant surgeon. Five people will die without organs. A healthy patient comes in for a routine checkup. If you kill him and harvest his organs, you save five. Do you do it?”
The room reacts instantly.
“No.”
“That’s murder.”
“That’s insane.”
Almost nobody says yes.
And now the contradiction becomes loud:
People were willing to sacrifice one to save five…
until the one becomes an innocent person you must intentionally kill.
The professor lets the discomfort sit.
“What changed?” he asks.
A student finally says what everyone is thinking:
“In the transplant case, you’re using a person like a tool.”
Exactly.
The lecture isn’t trying to give easy answers—it’s trying to show that inside our moral instincts, two forces are fighting:
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One voice says: maximize good outcomes (save the most lives).
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Another voice says: some actions are wrong no matter what (don’t kill an innocent).
The classroom realizes something unsettling:
Even when we believe we’re “logical,”
our morality has hidden rules we didn’t know we had.
PART 3
Then the professor stops playing with hypotheticals.
He tells a true story.
A shipwreck. Four survivors. No food. No water. Days drifting. They believe they will die.
And then two of them—Dudley and Stephens—kill the cabin boy, Richard Parker, and eat him to survive.
In the lecture hall, nobody laughs anymore.
The professor asks:
“Is it morally justified? Should the law excuse them under ‘necessity’?”
Some students argue:
“They were going to die. It was survival. One died so three lived.”
Others push back:
“Murder is murder. Desperation doesn’t give you the right to choose who dies.”
Then the class finds the sharpest edge of all:
“What if they had done a lottery?”
“What if the boy consented?”
Now the conversation becomes brutal.
Because “fair procedure” sounds comforting—until you imagine drawing lots for your life while starving. Consent sounds moral—until you realize coercion can hide inside hunger.
The professor doesn’t hand out a final verdict like a judge.
Instead, he names the two giants the course will wrestle with:
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Bentham / Utilitarianism: judge by consequences—maximize happiness, minimize suffering.
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Kant / Categorical reasoning: some acts violate human dignity—people are not tools.
And the lecture ends with the real punch:
You can’t escape moral reasoning.
Even when you say “there’s no right answer,” you’re still choosing how to live—how to judge, how to vote, how to treat others.
The room sits quieter than it started.
Because the students didn’t just learn philosophy.
They learned something about themselves:
Most of us will pull a lever to save five…
but we hesitate to push a man, even if it saves more people—
because deep down, we believe justice is not only about outcomes.
It’s also about what we refuse to become.
