Would you pull the lever? Yes or no?”
The question hung suspended in the stagnant air of the lecture hall, heavier than the humidity of late September. I sat in the third row, my pen hovering over a fresh notebook, the spine crackling as I pressed it flat. Around me, the buzz of two hundred students shifting in their seats created a low-frequency hum of anxiety. We had come to Northbridge College expecting Justice 101 to be an easy elective—a “GPA booster” where we could debate vague concepts of right and wrong while scrolling through our phones under the desk.
We were wrong.
Professor Graham Whitaker did not look like a man interested in easy answers. He stood beneath the harsh, buzzing fluorescent lights, a piece of chalk in his hand and the calm, predatory confidence of a man who made strangers uncomfortable for a living. He wore a tweed jacket that had seen better decades, and his eyes scanned the room not with hostility, but with a clinical curiosity.
On the screen behind him glowed a stark, clean diagram: a trolley racing down a track toward five workers who were oblivious to their impending doom. A lever, drawn in white, offered a choice. Pull it, and the trolley diverts to a side track where a single worker stands.
“Don’t look at your neighbors,” Whitaker commanded, his voice projecting without a microphone. “This isn’t a democracy. It’s a decision. Five lives versus one. Do you intervene?”
I stared at the screen. My mind drifted instantly from the hypothetical ink lines to the very real spreadsheet open on my laptop in the background—my aunt’s medical bills versus my tuition. The arithmetic of survival.
“It’s obvious,” a guy in a varsity jacket shouted from the back. “You pull it. Five is greater than one. Basic math.”
Whitaker nodded slowly, like he was collecting evidence for a crime we hadn’t committed yet. “Math,” he repeated. “Is that all morality is to you? Arithmetic?”
“It’s minimizing harm,” the student doubled down.
“Good,” Whitaker said, turning to the chalkboard. He wrote the word OUTCOMES in jagged capital letters. “Now, let’s move from choosing to redirect harm… to choosing to cause it.”
He clicked a remote. The slide changed. The lever was gone. Now, the diagram showed a footbridge arching over the track. A large man—heavy enough to stop the trolley—stood peering over the edge. You stood behind him.
“The trolley is coming,” Whitaker narrated, his voice dropping an octave. “The five workers will die. You can’t stop it yourself; you aren’t heavy enough. But the man next to you is. If you push him, he falls. He dies. His body jams the wheels. The five live. Do you push him?”
The room reacted instantly. Laughter, groans, visceral sounds of disgust.
“That’s murder!” someone snapped from the front row.
“But the math is the same,” a sharp voice cut through the noise.
I turned to see who had spoken. It was Owen Ramirez, an engineering major I recognized from the library. He was sitting two seats away, frowning at the screen. “If the goal is to save five lives, the mechanism shouldn’t matter. But…” He paused, rubbing his temple.
“But?” Whitaker pressed, stepping off the podium and walking down the aisle. He moved like a shark in shallow water.
“But pulling a lever feels like an administrative decision,” Owen said. “Pushing a man feels like a crime. You’re physically responsible.”
“Precisely.” Whitaker stopped right in front of my desk. He smelled of old paper and bitter coffee. He looked at me. “And you? What is your name?”
“Leah,” I managed, my throat dry.
“Leah. Why does the physical act change the morality? If the result is five people breathing instead of five corpses, why do you hesitate to push?”
“Because he’s not a tool,” I said, the words tumbling out before I could filter them. “He’s a person. In the first scenario, the lone worker is a victim of circumstance. In the second, we are using the man on the bridge as a piece of equipment to solve a problem. We’re turning a human being into a brake pad.”
Whitaker stared at me for a long moment. The silence stretched until it was uncomfortable. Then, he smiled—a tight, joyless expression.
“We are using him as a means to an end,” Whitaker said softly. He turned back to the board and wrote: DUTY.
“This course,” he announced, addressing the whole room, “is not about your feelings. It is not about your comfort. It is about what happens when your moral instincts clash. And I promise you, by December, that clash will keep you awake at night.”
He pivoted from the trolley to the real world. “You’ve heard people say, ‘I had no choice,’” he continued. “Courts hear that every day. We tell ourselves that necessity excuses our actions.” He paused, holding up a single sheet of paper. “But does the law accept that? Does justice accept that?”
He signaled for the TAs to distribute a handout. It was a case summary: Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. I scanned the text. 1884. A shipwreck. Four survivors in a lifeboat. No water. No food. A teenage cabin boy, Richard Parker, ill and weak. Days of starvation. A decision made in the delirium of thirst. A killing. The boy was eaten so the men could survive.
The lecture hall felt colder. The playful debate about stick figures on a track evaporated. This was flesh and blood.
“They were rescued four days later,” Whitaker said. “They admitted what they did. They expected sympathy. They argued it was survival.”
He leaned against his desk. “Some of you are thinking, ‘I would never.’ Others are thinking, ‘I would do whatever it takes to live.’ The law—at least in Victorian England—said necessity was not a defense for murder. They were sentenced to death.”
Owen’s jaw tightened. I could see the gears turning in his head—the engineer trying to calculate the structural integrity of the law.
Whitaker went to the board and wrote two names in block letters: BENTHAM and KANT.
“Jeremy Bentham,” he said, tapping the first name, “asks what produces the greatest good for the greatest number. He is the father of Utilitarianism. He would ask: Is the boy’s life worth less than the three men who have families to support?”
A ripple of unease went through the room.
“Immanuel Kant,” he tapped the second name, “asks what we must never do—no matter the outcome. He believes in categorical duties. Human dignity is not negotiable. You cannot kill the cabin boy, even if it saves the world.”
He looked over the class, his eyes landing on me again.
“By the end of this course, you won’t just know their arguments. You’ll feel the weight of them. You will realize that your intuition is a fragile shield against the complexities of the world.”
A hand shot up near the back. “So… which one is right? What’s the answer?”
Whitaker chuckled, a dry sound like leaves scraping pavement. “The answer? If you want answers, go to the math department. Here, we deal in questions.”
He checked his watch. “Next week, we put the survivors on trial. Half of you will defend them. Half of you will prosecute. And I expect you to argue like your freedom depends on it.”
The room buzzed with the noise of zippers and shuffling papers as class ended, but I couldn’t move. I stared at the handout. A teenage cabin boy too weak to resist.
“Rough start,” Owen said, standing up and slinging his bag over his shoulder. He looked at me. “You’re Leah, right? That was a good point about the ‘brake pad.’”
“Thanks,” I said, finally gathering my things. “You’re Owen. The engineer.”
“Guilty,” he smiled. “I like systems. Inputs, outputs. This class…” He gestured at the empty chalkboard. “It’s messy. I don’t like messy.”
“Life is messy,” I murmured, thinking of the eviction notice on my kitchen counter.
“Maybe,” Owen said. “But we build bridges to get over the mess, don’t we?”
We walked out of the auditorium together. Whitaker was erasing the board slowly. As I glanced back, he had left only one question written in the corner, stark white against the black slate.
When ‘necessity’ feels real, what does justice require?
I didn’t know the answer. But as I walked into the blinding afternoon sun, I had a sinking feeling that I was about to find out the hard way.
The second week of the semester hit me like a physical blow. The novelty of the fall had worn off, replaced by the grinding reality of being a scholarship student in a school designed for the wealthy. My aunt’s condition had worsened; the dialysis treatments were draining her savings, and by extension, the safety net I relied on for rent.
I sat in the campus library, surrounded by leather-bound books that smelled of dust and privilege. Across from me, Owen had spread out an array of highlighters and legal pads. We had been paired up for the Dudley and Stephens mock trial. Fate, or perhaps Whitaker’s cruel sense of humor, had assigned us the defense.
We had to argue that eating the cabin boy was justified.
“It’s impossible,” I said, dropping my head into my hands. “It’s cannibalism, Owen. We have to stand up in front of fifty people and argue that murder is okay as long as you’re really, really hungry.”
Owen clicked his pen rhythmically. Click. Click. Click. “Not hungry,” he corrected. “Starving. Dying. Look at the facts, Leah. If they hadn’t killed the boy, all four would have died. Four deaths versus one. From a utilitarian perspective, it’s the only logical choice.”
“You sound like a machine,” I snapped.
“And you sound like a saint who’s never been desperate,” he shot back, his voice surprisingly sharp.
I froze. He didn’t know about the three jobs I worked over the summer. He didn’t know about the ramen noodles that made up 90% of my diet. He didn’t know that “desperation” was my roommate.
“Sorry,” Owen said, softening. “I just mean… we have to win this argument. And the only way to win is to strip away the emotion. We have to use Bentham.”
He slid a book toward me. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
“Bentham says nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters: pain and pleasure,” Owen recited. “It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.”
I read the passage. It was cold, logical, and seductive. If morality is just maximizing happiness and minimizing pain, then the cabin boy—who was already dying, who had no dependents—was the logical sacrifice.
“But what about consent?” I asked. “The boy didn’t agree to die. Doesn’t he have a right to his own life?”
“Kant would say yes,” Owen admitted. “Kant says we can’t treat people as resources. But we aren’t arguing for Kant. We’re arguing for necessity.”
We spent the next four nights in that library. We drank too much cheap coffee and argued until our throats were sore. I found myself playing devil’s advocate, channeling my own financial fears into the legal arguments. When you are drowning, I thought, you will grab onto anything to stay afloat. Even if that ‘thing’ is another person.
On the day of the mock trial, the lecture hall was transformed. Whitaker had pushed the desks into a makeshift courtroom. He sat in the back, silent, a grading rubric in his lap. A senior law student sat at the front as the judge.
The prosecution team went first. They were polished, righteous, and devastating. They spoke of the sanctity of life, the slippery slope of allowing murder for convenience. They quoted Kant. They made the cabin boy sound like a saint.
Then it was our turn.
Owen took the floor first. He was steady, methodical. He laid out the timeline of starvation. He presented the medical evidence that the boy would have died within hours regardless. He built a logical cage that trapped the jury in the inevitability of the act.
Then I stood up. My hands were shaking, but my voice was steady.
“The prosecution speaks of high ideals,” I said, looking at the faces of my classmates. “They speak of laws written by men in warm rooms with full bellies. But the law cannot demand the impossible. When you are stripped of civilization, when you are reduced to biology, the rules change.”
I saw Whitaker watching me, his eyes unreadable.
“We do not punish a man for breathing,” I continued, my voice rising. “And in that boat, the urge to survive was as involuntary as drawing breath. To condemn these men is to condemn human nature itself. It is easy to be moral when you are safe. It is a luxury. And on that boat, luxury was the first thing to die.”
I sat down. The room was silent.
The student judge adjusted her glasses. She looked at me, then at Owen. She didn’t look impressed by the rhetoric. She looked disturbed.
“If necessity excuses murder,” the judge asked, her voice cutting through the silence, “then who decides whose life becomes the sacrifice? If I am starving, can I kill the person next to me? If I need a heart transplant, can I take yours?”
No one answered quickly. That was the point. The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating.
Owen opened his mouth, then closed it. The utilitarian logic crumbled when you made it personal.
“We aren’t talking about transplants,” I said weakly. “We’re talking about a lifeboat.”
“Every moral crisis is a lifeboat,” the judge said. “That’s the danger.”
She ruled against us.
After class, the adrenaline crashed. I felt exhausted, hollowed out by the defense of something I fundamentally hated. Whitaker stopped Owen and me at the door as the room emptied.
“You lost,” Whitaker said simply.
“The judge was biased,” Owen muttered.
“The judge asked the right question,” Whitaker corrected. “You made a compelling argument for survival, Leah. And Owen, your logic was sound. But you both failed to answer the core problem.”
He leaned in, his voice dropping. “You treated the boy as a variable in an equation. You forgot that justice isn’t just about the result. It’s about the dignity of the participants.”
“So what do you believe?” I asked, bolder than I felt. “Would you have killed the boy?”
Whitaker’s eyes held steady, grey and piercing. “I believe that justice begins when you stop lying to yourself about what your beliefs cost. You want a world that is safe and free. You want to be effective and moral. Usually, you can’t be both.”
He turned to leave, then paused. “Get some rest. The real work hasn’t even started yet.”
As we walked into the hallway, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, I realized something unsettling. The course wasn’t about the trolley. It wasn’t about the lifeboat.
It was about what kind of person you become when the world backs you into a corner. And I was terrified that I was beginning to understand the men in the boat.
By November, the trees on campus were bare, skeletal fingers scratching against a grey sky. The lecture hall had changed. The jokes had stopped. The lazy certainty of the first week had vanished. Students argued now with a careful precision, afraid of the traps Whitaker laid in every sentence.
We had moved beyond classic dilemmas into the messy, bleeding edge of public policy. Torture. Income inequality. Affirmative action. Every class felt like walking through a minefield.
Leah’s confidence—my confidence—had evolved into something tougher: humility. I stopped arguing to win and started arguing to understand.
“I used to think harsh punishment was always justified if it reduced crime,” I admitted in class during a debate on the death penalty. “I looked at the numbers. But if we execute one innocent person to scare a thousand criminals… aren’t we just pushing the man off the bridge again?”
Whitaker didn’t praise me. He just nodded. “So, you’ve found your line. Now, let’s see if you can hold it.”
For the final assignment, he didn’t give us a test. He gave us a role.
“You are advisors to the Governor,” Whitaker explained, handing out a thick packet of documents. “A fictional state. A very real crisis.”
The scenario was brutal. A highly contagious, lethal virus was spreading in the capital. The hospitals were overrun. The police were losing control. There was a treatment, but it was scarce.
The Dilemma:
Option A: Impose a total military lockdown. Weld doors shut if necessary. Force-treat the sick. This stops the spread in two weeks. Estimated deaths: 500. Civil liberties: Suspended.
Option B: Respect individual rights. Voluntary quarantine. Treatment by lottery. The virus burns through the population for three months. Estimated deaths: 5,000. Civil liberties: Intact.
“Write a memo recommending a course of action,” Whitaker ordered. “Defend it against the strongest counter-arguments. You have one week.”
I sat in my dorm room that night, the packet staring at me. My phone buzzed. It was my mom.
“They’re raising the rent again, Lee. And your aunt’s insurance denied the new medication. We’re $800 short this month.”
I stared at the text. Then I stared at the prompt. 500 deaths vs. 5,000 deaths.
If I chose Option A—the utilitarian lockdown—I saved 4,500 lives. But I trampled on the rights of the poor, the people who couldn’t afford to be locked in, who needed to work to eat. People like my mother.
If I chose Option B—the Kantian respect for rights—I let thousands die. But I kept the government from becoming a tyranny.
I met Owen at the coffee shop downtown. He looked haggard. The engineering student who loved clear answers was drowning in the grey.
“It’s Option A,” Owen said, gripping his cup. “It has to be. You save 4,500 people. How can you justify letting them die just to say you respected their ‘rights’?”
“Because once you allow the government to weld doors shut,” I said, “they don’t stop there. Who gets locked in, Owen? The rich neighborhoods? No. It’s always the poor. Efficiency always costs the vulnerable the most.”
“But 5,000 dead!” Owen slammed his hand on the table. A few people looked over. “That’s not just a number, Leah. That’s five thousand funerals. Five thousand empty chairs.”
“I know!” I hissed back. “I know what the numbers mean. But if we treat dignity as negotiable, we lose something we can’t get back.”
“You’re choosing to be pure rather than effective,” Owen accused.
“And you’re choosing to be a butcher to be a savior,” I retorted.
We sat in silence, the air between us charged with the frustration of two people realizing that there is no right answer, only different kinds of wrong.
I wrote my memo in a fever state. I wrote, erased, and wrote again. I pictured the faces of the people I was condemning. I pictured my aunt. If the government could force treatment, maybe she would be saved. Or maybe she would be sacrificed for someone “more valuable.”
In the end, I chose Option B. I argued that the legitimacy of the state rests on the consent of the governed, and to violate that trust is to destroy the society you are trying to save. I accepted the higher death toll. I wrote the number—5,000—and felt sick.
Owen chose Option A. He argued that the first duty of government is the preservation of life. He accepted the tyranny. He accepted the guilt.
We turned them in on Friday. Whitaker collected the papers without a word.
“Did you feel it?” he asked the class, tapping the stack of memos. “The nausea? The doubt?”
He looked around the room.
“Good. If you didn’t feel sick, you’re dangerous.”
He dismissed the class, but he held up a hand. “On Monday, we finish. One last exercise. Prepare a single sentence. The one moral truth you are willing to stand by, even if it costs you everything.”
I walked home through the falling snow. I had spent three months arguing about levers and lifeboats, but I finally realized that the lever wasn’t in my hand. It was in my heart. And I had no idea if I was strong enough to pull it.
The final day of Justice 101 was silent. The winter sun cut through the blinds, casting long, prison-bar shadows across the desks. There was no lecture today. No slides. Just Whitaker, sitting on the edge of his desk, and us.
“We have spent fifteen weeks dismantling your certainties,” Whitaker began quietly. “We have looked at the world through the eyes of Bentham, Kant, Aristotle, and Rawls. You have learned that every policy is a tragedy for someone.”
He stood up. “I asked you to bring one sentence. The line you would stand by. The bedrock beneath your feet.”
He pointed to a student in the front row. “Read.”
The student stood. “Justice is fairness. We must design society as if we didn’t know where we would end up in it.”
Whitaker nodded. “Rawls. The Veil of Ignorance. Good. Next.”
A girl in the middle row stood. “The greatest good is not always the greatest number; sometimes, the greatest good is protecting the one against the many.”
Whitaker’s eyes moved to Owen.
Owen stood slowly. He looked older than he had in September. The arrogance of the engineer was gone.
“If we treat dignity as negotiable,” Owen read, his voice rough, “we will one day discover it has been sold without our permission.”
The room was quiet. It was an admission of defeat for his utilitarian worldview, and yet, a victory for his humanity.
“Leah,” Whitaker said.
I stood. My hands were sweating. I thought of the shipwreck. I thought of the virus. I thought of my aunt, lying in a dialysis chair, trusting a system that viewed her as an expense.
“If we protect people in theory but ignore suffering in practice,” I read, my voice trembling, “we aren’t choosing justice—we’re choosing comfort.”
Whitaker listened, his arms folded. He looked at Owen. He looked at me. For the first time all semester, the predatory edge in his eyes softened into something like respect.
“That,” he said, “is moral seriousness. Not certainty. Not virtue-signaling. Seriousness.”
He walked to the chalkboard and picked up the eraser. He wiped away the words DUTY, OUTCOMES, BENTHAM, KANT. He wiped away the trolley tracks. He wiped away the lifeboat. The board was blank, a vast, dark void.
“The class is over,” Whitaker said. “The theories are tools, not answers. Someday, your job may put you in a position where a decision is irreversible—where you hold the lever. No textbook will help you then. Your reasoning is all you have left.”
He dropped the eraser in the tray. A cloud of chalk dust rose into the light.
“Don’t let me down.”
We packed our bags in silence. The semester was over.
I met Owen outside on the steps of the hall. The air was crisp, biting. Students rushed past us, worrying about finals, about parties, about Christmas break.
“So,” Owen said, looking out at the quad. “Would you pull the lever now?”
I laughed, a short, sharp sound. “I don’t know.”
Owen nodded. “I don’t know either. But…” He looked at me. “Now I can explain why I don’t know. And I think that scares me more.”
“It’s better than being blind,” I said.
“Is it?” Owen asked.
“Yes,” I said, and I realized I meant it.
We walked down the stairs, heading in different directions—him toward the engineering labs, me toward the bus stop to go visit my aunt. We had no clean answers. We carried the weight of every hypothetical death we had debated.
But as I watched the bus pull up, screeching to a halt, I knew that Whitaker was right. The world was a series of trolleys, careening down tracks we didn’t build, toward people we didn’t know. We couldn’t stop them all. But we had to keep our eyes open. We had to be willing to see the collision.
I stepped onto the bus, found a seat, and opened my notebook. I turned to a fresh page.
What does justice require?
I didn’t have the answer yet. But for the first time, I was ready to ask the question.
If you want more stories like this, or if you’d like to share your thoughts about what you would have done in my situation, I’d love to hear from you. Your perspective helps these stories reach more people, so don’t be shy about commenting or sharing.
