Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? — Episode 1

Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course is legendary at Harvard — the largest course in the university’s history, regularly filling a 1,000-seat theater. When Harvard made it available online for free, it became one of the most-watched lecture series on the internet, and this first episode shows why.

Sandel opens with the Trolley Problem — would you divert a runaway trolley to kill one person instead of five? — and then methodically destroys every answer the audience gives. Each time a student offers a justification, Sandel pushes them deeper into the consequences of their own logic. Within minutes, the room is debating the foundations of moral philosophy without anyone realizing they’ve been led there.

This is the Socratic method at its finest. Sandel doesn’t lecture about ethics — he performs it, drawing the audience into genuine moral reasoning in real time. If you’ve never taken a philosophy course, start here. If you have, you’ll wish your professor was this good.