Professor Michael Harrington stood at the front of Lecture Hall B, hands resting calmly on the podium, eyes scanning the faces of two hundred first-year law and philosophy students. It was the first session of his course, Justice and Moral Reasoning, and he had learned long ago that no syllabus mattered until discomfort entered the room.
“Let’s begin with a simple question,” he said. “One that isn’t simple at all.”
He described a runaway trolley hurtling down a track toward five railway workers. The driver, panicking, could pull a lever and divert the trolley onto a side track, where it would kill one worker instead of five. Michael paused, letting the image settle.
“Raise your hand if you would pull the lever.”
Nearly every hand went up.
Michael nodded. “Now, a different version.”
This time, the students imagined Daniel Ross, an ordinary man standing on a bridge above the tracks. Next to him stood a large stranger. If Daniel pushed the man onto the track, the trolley would stop, saving five workers—but the man would die.
The room changed. Hands stayed down. A low murmur rippled through the hall.
“Same math,” Michael said quietly. “Five lives saved. One lost. Why does this feel different?”
A student in the front row, Emily Carter, spoke up. “Because in the second case, you’re directly killing someone. You’re using him.”
Others jumped in. “It feels like murder.”
“It crosses a line.”
“You become responsible in a different way.”
Michael listened, then shifted the scenario again. He described an emergency room late at night. One patient was critically injured and likely to die even with treatment. Five others were moderately injured and would survive if treated quickly.
“Who should the doctor save?”
This time, consensus returned. Save the five.
Then came the final variation. A transplant surgeon with five dying patients and one healthy man whose organs could save them all.
Silence.
“No one,” Michael said, “ever agrees to that.”
He let the quiet stretch, then delivered the moment he had planned. “These aren’t puzzles. These are mirrors. They reveal how you already think about responsibility, intention, and human dignity.”
At the back of the room, Thomas Keller, a second-year student auditing the course, felt uneasy. His father had once been involved in a real case—one the courts still argued over. A survival case at sea. A man killed so others could live.
Michael wrote a single question on the board:
Is justice about outcomes—or about principles that must never be broken?
“That,” he said, “is the war between two giants: Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant.”
He closed his notebook and looked up. “And before this course is over, every one of you will discover which side you instinctively stand on—and what that choice costs.”
The bell rang, but no one moved.
The discomfort had taken hold.
One week later, Professor Harrington brought no diagrams, no hypotheticals. Only a case file.
“The Crown v. Dudley and Stephens,” he announced.
He told the story plainly. A shipwreck. Four men adrift at sea. No food. No water. Days turned into weeks. One cabin boy, sick and near death. Two men made a decision. They killed him so the others could survive.
“They lived,” Michael said. “They were rescued. And then they were arrested.”
The class erupted.
“They had no choice.”
“They would’ve all died.”
“It was survival.”
Michael raised a hand. “And yet the court convicted them of murder.”
Emily frowned. “So the law rejected the trolley logic.”
“Yes,” Michael replied. “The court said necessity is not a defense for killing an innocent person.”
Thomas felt his chest tighten. This wasn’t abstract anymore.
Michael divided the room. One side argued from utilitarianism—Bentham’s view that morality is about maximizing overall happiness and minimizing suffering. The other side defended Kant’s categorical imperative: that human beings must never be treated merely as a means to an end.
“You can’t balance lives like numbers,” Emily argued. “If you allow that once, where does it stop?”
Another student fired back. “But refusing to act is still a choice. You’re choosing five deaths instead of one.”
Michael watched carefully. This tension—this fracture—was the heart of justice.
“Notice something,” he said. “In almost every case, people accept indirect harm but reject direct killing. Pulling a lever feels different than pushing a man. Diverting resources feels different than harvesting organs.”
“Why?” someone asked.
“Because intention matters,” Michael said. “Because dignity matters. Because the law often draws lines where morality hesitates.”
After class, Thomas approached him.
“My father was a maritime lawyer,” Thomas said quietly. “He worked on a similar case. It destroyed him.”
Michael nodded. “Justice is not clean. It asks ordinary people to carry unbearable weight.”
That night, Emily couldn’t sleep. She replayed the scenarios, realizing something unsettling: her instincts changed depending on distance, emotion, and involvement. She wasn’t as consistent—or as moral—as she believed.
And that was the point.
By mid-semester, the class had stopped looking for the “right” answer. Instead, they examined consequences.
Michael challenged them with modern examples: autonomous vehicles choosing between pedestrians, doctors allocating scarce ventilators, governments weighing national security against individual rights.
“Justice,” he said, “is not about feeling good. It’s about deciding who bears the burden when no option is innocent.”
Emily wrote in her final paper that morality without limits becomes cruelty disguised as math. Thomas argued that rigid principles can become moral cowardice when they ignore preventable suffering.
Neither was wrong.
On the final day, Michael returned to the first question.
“If you were the driver,” he asked, “would you pull the lever?”
Most hands went up again—but slower this time.
“And if you were on the bridge?”
Almost none.
Michael smiled faintly. “You’ve learned the most important lesson. Justice is not consistency. It is responsibility.”
He closed the course with a final thought. “The law exists because humans cannot bear moral perfection. It draws boundaries so we don’t justify the unjustifiable.”
As the students filed out, Emily realized something profound: justice isn’t about choosing cleanly. It’s about choosing while knowing you will be judged—by others, and by yourself.
And that burden, she understood, is the price of living in a moral society.