1Zumba Student!

Thank you everyone who is here with us tonight, reading our posts, especially our new readers and visitors from the US, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Australia, n Russia 😉

That was the first question asked in the first lecture of “Justice” by Prof. M. Sandel, Harvard University:

“Suppose you are a driver in a trolley car going down fast on a track at seventy miles an hour, and you can see five workers standing on the track, working. You try to stop , but you can not, the brakes went dead. You don’t know what to do, coz if you crash into those workers, you know that they will die, assuming that you know that for sure.

You notice a side track, off to the other side, where there is a worker on that track, but only one. You realize that you can turn the trolley onto the side track, killing the one worker, but sparing the five.

What should you do? Most people would say turn! Tragic though it is to kill one innocent person, it’s even worse to kill five. Sacrificing one life in order to save five does seem the right thing to do.”

Another version is you are not the driver but an onlooker, standing on a bridge overlooking the track. No side tracks, n down the track comes a trolley and at the end of the track are five workers, once again the brakes don’t work. The trolley is about to crash into the five workers. You feel helpless to avert this disaster, until you notice standing next to you on the bridge, a very heavy man. You could push him off the bridge, onto the track, into the path of the oncoming trolley. He would die, but the other five workers would be saved. (You even think of jumping onto the trolley yourself, but you are too small to stop the trolley).

Would pushing the heavy man onto the track be the right thing to do? Most people would say, of course not. It would be terribly wrong to push a man onto a track.

Pushing someone off a bridge to a certain death does seem an awful thing to do, even if it saves five innocent lives. But this raises a moral puzzle: Why does the principle that seems right in the first case – sacrifice one life to save five- seem wrong in the second?

If, as our reaction to the first case suggests, numbers count- if it is better to save five lives than one- then why shouldn’t we apply this principle in the second case, and push?

It does seem cruel to push a man to his death, even for a good cause. But is it any less cruel to kill a man by crashing into him with a trolley car?

Perhaps the reason it is wrong to push it is that doing so uses the man on the bridge against his will. He didn’t choose to be involved , after all. He was just standing there.”

[The story has more]

The lectures were very enjoyable and the teacher was an outstanding, and the students were so impressed and engaged. It is the best model I’ve seen for giving lectures to say the least.

I know that many students are under a lot of pressure for taking exams, and completing their term projects, or getting ready for finals. I would like to wish everyone of them good luck, and hope that they would be able to sleep well, to eat well, and to plan well their studying times 😛

For those, who think that they are old to be students, believe me, it is never too late to start. Being a student would take you to a place, where you would find a world full of endless magic; the world of being 1Zumba student 😉

Dear 1Zumba friend, I miss my fitness class today, coz I had a long walk yesterday, and I know this is not an excuse, I’ll try not to do this again, haha!