Imagine, Michael Sandel suggests to his Harvard University students (and may tell you if you attend his 7 p.m. Thursday talk), you’re operating a trolley car and its brakes are gone. Rolling downhill, it’s gaining speed and you notice five men working on the track just ahead. Coming up is a spur: you can steer it there, but a man is working on that track. Do you veer onto the spur and kill one, thus sparing five?

After a short, straightforward chat with the class, Mr. Sandel makes it stickier: You’re on a bridge above the track on which a runaway trolley is fast approaching five unwitting workers. Standing next to you is a huge man weighing hundreds of pounds; his body would provide enough mass to stop the trolley. Should you push him off the bridge and onto the tracks, killing one to save five?

Those teasers are ice breakers, lubrication to get the cranial wheels turning.

“Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” is the title of the annual Edward Shapiro Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toledo, as well as Mr. Sandel’s popular 2010 book. Since 1980, he’s taught this conscience-tweaking class to about 17,000 Harvard students and countless others through recorded online talks and lectures around the globe. He’s also written What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012) and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (2009).

“Philosophy helps each of us understand and make sense of the lives we live, the ethical dilemmas we confront in public life and in our everyday lives,” he said in an interview with The Blade.

His goal is to lift ideas from scholarly tomes into the hands of everyday people so we can do two things: think critically about tough ideas, and the harder task, talk about them with others. Issues such as whether to restrict agriculture and industry in order to improve water quality, which gender of people should be allowed to marry, and whether some groups should receive affirmative action. Should your next-door neighbor be forced to cut down a dead tree on her property, should the rich have the best doctors, should we carry out an order from our boss or commanding officer even if we know it’s wrong, and should corporations have the same rights as individuals? Must I vote to increase my taxes for something I won’t directly benefit from?

In a democracy, citizens are responsible for shaping their society. That means spending precious time examining issues that we may be uncomfortable talking about.

“Our public discourse suffers today for the lack of moral and spiritual engagement with the big questions. I don’t believe that moral and spiritual questions should be restricted to churches and synagogues and mosques and religious communities. A pluralist society should welcome all voices to public discourse whether they be secular or whether they draw inspiration from various faith traditions,” he says. “This is the true meaning of pluralism in a democracy and we have a lot of work to do to try and lift up the terms of public discourse, the way we think together about hard ethical questions that matter for our civic life.”

It applies to political culture as well.

“I think people are frustrated with politics and political parties and with the terms of public discourse. And I think the reason for the frustration is people sense the emptiness in our public discourse. People want big questions of values to be discussed in our public debates and we’ve not been very good at doing that. So part of my mission is to encourage and to provoke and inspire readers and students and the general public in a morally more robust kind of public discourse.”

And civility, he maintains, is essential.

“There’s an art of listening to one another as we engage in debate about big questions: equality and inequality, how to distribute the good things in life, what are our obligations to one another as fellow citizens. These are some of the questions we should be debating and yet we need to cultivate the art of listening if we are to engage in more serious ethical debate. That’s the only way we can conduct these debates — in a civil manner. And maybe we can learn some things.”

How do we make that happen?

“Great question. It’s important to strengthen communities of discourse, communities that can convene people and bring them together, especially people from different walks of life, different social and economic backgrounds.

“Sometimes, religious communities can do this. In the past labor and trade unions or local civic organizations have done this.

“I think that schools, especially public schools and colleges and universities, have a role to play in equipping young men and women with the civic skills and abilities to engage in reasoned public debate, to care about the common good and public affairs.

“I also think the media has a role to play in shaping and providing a forum for more meaningful kinds of discussions than the ideological food fights that are all too familiar in politics. I think we have to look to all of these institutions and forms of community to nourish and strengthen citizens to engage with one another, including where there are strong disagreements, on the big moral and civic questions that matter.”

The Shapiro lecture is part of $5 million in gifts given to UT by the late Mr. Shapiro, a UT economics professor who died in 2005. Among the people it’s brought to town are Elie Wiesel, Toni Morrison, Wynton Marsalis, and Oliver Sacks.

Contact Tahree Lane at tlane@theblade.com and 419-724-6075.

First Published September 14, 2014, 4:00 a.m.