Justice with Michael Sandel – Lecture 1

The Moral Side of Murder

If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? What would be the right thing to do? That’s the hypothetical scenario Professor Michael Sandel uses to launch his course on moral reasoning.

Lecture: http://justiceharvard.org/themoralsideofmurder/

My thoughts about this lecture…

The first questions were easy to answer. As we went deeper into the lecture, they became harder. Often I had to go back to the previous questions are revise my answers… not the outcome of the moral dilemma (which option is the morally correct one?) but the reasoning that led to that outcome.

Very often we know why we believe that something is right, but when pushed to dig deeper, we realize that we actually don’t know. We feel that something is right, and our rational brain comes up with a logical reasoning – it rationalizes our choice. But that rationalizing can be challenged and it sometimes breaks down.

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