Justice with Michael Sandel
For homework, I watched the first episode of ‘Harvard University Justice by Michael Sandel, Whats the right thing to do? – The Moral side of murder’. When I was watching this video, the first impression that I got was that Sandel has little bias towards objective and subjective point of views. But during this presentation, Sandel suggests and questions each student’s thinking (questioning the morals of the students). From this Tv show, I realized that my Morals are very subjective, and is really difficult to come to a solid right or wrong answer (verryy difficult to make a objective decision).
I am an subjectivist, and do have morals, but by looking at this episode, it made me question what Justice really is. Is justice there to please what the population? even if the act of murder it self is a horrific act, but if the population agrees to this decision, would this make him innocent?. I think that this presentation was a mind blower. It made me question what JUSTICE, which sounds very powerful and logical, still has a lot of flaws.
I am an Subjectivist and I personally thought that in terms of stirring the train, I would decide not to turn the wheel, also interms of pushing the fat man off the bridge, I would say no as well. This is probably to do with the action of physically killing that men with your own hands. If I were to be pushing the fat man off the bridge, that is very intentional and it is murder. But if you are in the train, and has no control over stopping the train, I would say that I will have an excuse to ‘kill’ 5 people. This goes with the cannibalism as well. I think that the idea of killing someone to survive is not a great idea since killing/murder is morally wrong. But as an alternative, if I were the sailors there, I would have waited for another few days and once I know that he has actually died, I would eat the sailor. by ding this, I think we can avoid us from being a ‘murderer’ so I think this solution is ‘Moral friendly’.
