This is a course about Justice and we begin with a story suppose you're the driver of a trolley car, and your trolley car is hurdling down the track at sixty miles an hour and at the end of the track you notice five workers working on the track you tried to stop but you can't your brakes don't work you feel desperate because you know that if you crash into these five workers they will all die. Let's assume you know that for sure and so you feel helpless until you notice that there is off to the right a side track at the end of that track there's one worker working on track you're steering wheel works so you can turn the trolley car if you want to onto this side track killing the one but sparing the five. Here's our first question, "What's the right thing to do?" What would you do? Let's take a poll, how many would turn the trolley car onto the side track? How many wouldn't? How many would go straight ahead? Keep your hands up, those of you who'd go straight ahead. A handful of people would, the vast majority would turn. Let's hear first now we need to begin to investigate the reasons why you think it's the right thing to do. Let's begin with those in the majority, who would turn to go onto side track? Why would you do it, what would be your reason? Who's willing to volunteer a reason? Go ahead, stand up.

Because it can't be right to kill five people when you can only kill one person instead. It wouldn't be right to kill five if you could kill one person instead. That's a good reason. That's a good reason. Who else? Does everybody agree with that reason? Go ahead. Well I was thinking it was the same reason it was on 9/11 we regard the people who flew the plane who flew the plane into the Pennsylvania field as heroes because they chose to kill the people on the plane and not kill more people in big buildings. So the principle there was the same on 9/11 it's tragic circumstance, but better to kill one so that five can live is that the reason most of you have, those of you who would turn, yes? Let's hear now from those in the minority those who wouldn't turn.

Well I think that same type of mentality that justifies genocide and totalitarianism in order to save one type of race you wipe out the other. so what would you do in this case? You would to avoid the horrors of genocide you would crash into the five and kill them? Presumably yes. Okay who else? That's a brave answer, thank you. Let's consider another trolley car case and see whether those of you in the majority want to adhere to the principle, better that one should die so that five should live.

This time you're not the driver of the trolley car, you're an onlooker standing on a bridge overlooking a trolley car track and down the track comes a trolley car at the end of the track are five workers the brakes don't work the trolley car is about to careen into the five and kill them and now you're not the driver you really feel helpless until you notice standing next to you leaning over the bridge is it very fat man. And you could give him a shove he would fall over the bridge onto the track right in the way of the trolley car he would die but he would spare the five. Now, how many would push the fat man over the bridge? Raise your hand. How many wouldn't? Most people wouldn't. Here's the obvious question, what became of the principle better to save five lives even if it means sacrificing one? What became of the principle that almost everyone endorsed in the first case? I need to hear from someone who was in the majority in both cases is how do you explain the difference between the two?

The second one, I guess, involves an active choice of pushing a person and down which I guess that that person himself would otherwise not have been involved in the situation at all and so to choose on his behalf I guess to involve him in something that he otherwise would have this escaped is I guess more than what you have in the first case where the three parties, the driver and the two sets of workers are already, I guess, in this situation. But the guy working, the one on the track off to the side he didn't choose to sacrifice his life any more than the fat guy did, did he? That's true, but he was on the tracks. This guy was on the bridge. Go ahead, you can come back if you want. Alright, it's a hard question but you did well you did very well it's a hard question. Who else can find a way of reconciling the reaction of the majority in these two cases? Yes?

Well I guess in the first case where you have the one worker and the five it's a choice between those two, and you have to make a certain choice and people are going to die because of the trolley car not necessarily because of your direct actions. The trolley car is a runway, thing and you need to make in a split second choice whereas pushing the fat man over is an actual act of murder on your part you have control over that whereas you may not have control over the trolley car. So I think that it's a slightly different situation. Alright who has a reply? Is that, who has a reply to that? No. That was good, who has a way who wants to reply? Is that a way out of this? I don't think that's a very good reason because you choose either way you have to choose who dies because you either choose to turn and kill a person which is an act of conscious thought to turn, or you choose to push the fat man over which is also an active conscious action so either way you're making a choice. Do you want to reply? Well I'm not really sure that that's the case, it just still seems kind of different, the act of actually pushing someone over onto the tracks and killing them, you are actually killing him yourself, you're pushing him with your own hands you're pushing and that's different than steering something that is going to cause death into another...you know it doesn't really sound right saying it now when I'm up here. No that's good, what's your name? Andrew. Andrew and let me ask you this question Andrew, suppose standing on the bridge next to the fat man I didn't have to push him, suppose he was standing over a trap door that I could open by turning a steering wheel like that would you turn it?

For some reason that still just seems more more wrong. I mean maybe if you just accidentally like leaned into this steering wheel or something like that or but, or say that the car is hurdling towards a switch that will drop the trap then I could agree with that. Fair enough, it still seems wrong in a way that it doesn't seem wrong in the first case to turn, you say An in another way, I mean in the first situation you're involved directly with the situation in the second one you're an onlooker as well. So you have the choice of becoming involved or not by pushing the fat man. Let's forget for the moment about this case.

That's good, but let's imagine a different case. This time your doctor in an emergency room and six patients come to you they've been in a terrible trolley car wreck five of them sustained moderate injuries one is severely injured you could spend all day caring for the one severely injured victim, but in that time the five would die, or you could look after the five, restore them to health, but during that time the one severely injured person would die. How many would save the five now as the doctor? ow many would save the one? Very few people, just a handful of people. Same reason I assume, one life versus five. Now consider another doctor case this time you're a transplant surgeon and you have five patients each in desperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive on needs a heart one a lung, one a kidney, one a liver and the fifth a pancreas. And you have no organ donors you are about to see you them die and then it occurs to you that in the next room here's a healthy guy who came in for a checkup. and he is

you like that and he's taking a nap you could go in very quietly yank out the five organs, that person would die but you can save the five. How many would do it? Anyone? How many? Put your hands up if you would do it. Anyone in the balcony? You would? Be careful don't lean over too much. How many wouldn't? All right. What do you say, speak up in the balcony, you who would yank out the organs, why? I'd actually like to explore slightly alternate possibility of just taking the one of the five he needs an organ who dies first and using their four healthy organs to save the other four. That's a pretty good idea. That's a great idea except for the fact that you just wrecked the philosophical point.

Let's step back from these stories and these arguments to notice a couple of things about the way the arguments have began to unfold. Certain moral principles have already begun to emerge from the discussions we've had and let's consider what those moral principles look like. The first moral principle that emerged from the discussion said that the right thing to do the moral thing to do depends on the consequences that will result from your action. At the end of the day better that five should live even if one must die. That's an example of consequentialist moral reasoning. Consequentialist moral reasoning locates morality in the consequences of an act. In the state of the world that will result from the thing you do but then we went a little further, we considered those other cases and people weren't so sure about consequentialist moral reasoning when people hesitated to push the fat man over the bridge or to yank out the organs of the innocent patient people gestured towards reasons having to do with the intrinsic quality of the act itself. Consequences be what they may. People were reluctant people thought it was just wrong categorically wrong to kill a person an innocent person even for the sake of saving five lives, at least these people thought that in the second version of each story we reconsidered.

So this points a second categorical way of thinking about moral reasoning categorical moral reasoning locates morality in certain absolute moral requirements in certain categorical duties and rights regardless of the consequences. We're going to explore in the days and weeks to come the contrast between consequentialist and categorical moral principles. The most influential example of

consequential moral reasoning is utilitarianism, a doctrine invented by Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth century English political philosopher. The most important philosopher of categorical moral reasoning is the eighteenth century German philosopher Emmanuel Kant. So we will look at those two different modes of moral reasoning assess them and also consider others.

If you look at the syllabus, you'll notice that we read a number of great and famous books. Books by Aristotle John Locke Emanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. You'll notice too from the syllabus that we don't only read these books, we also all take up contemporary political and legal controversies that raise philosophical questions. We will debate equality and inequality, affirmative action, free speech versus hate speech, same sex marriage, military conscription, a range of practical questions, why not just to enliven these abstract and distant books but to make clear to bring out what's at stake in our everyday lives including our political lives, for philosophy. So we will read these books and we will debate these issues and we'll see how each informs and illuminates the other. This may sound appealing enough but here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this to read these books in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, to read them in this way carry certain risks; risks that are both personal and political, risks that every student of political philosophy has known. These risks spring from that fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know.

There's an irony. The difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. That's how those examples worked worked the hypotheticals with which we began with their mix of playfulness and sobriety. it's also how these philosophical books work. Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing but, and here's the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it's never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence, however unsettling you find it, it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficult but also riveting, is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don't know where this story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you.

Those are the personal risks, now what of the political risks. one way of introducing of course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment you'll become a more effective participant in public affairs but this would be a partial and misleading promise political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one and that's because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity And you see this going back to Socrates there's a dialogue, the Gorgias in which one of Socrates