station. You’ve been on the job for several  days. By the end of the day today, you’ll be  

done. You’re excited to go home and enjoy a  couple days off with your friends and family. 

Everything is going normally, beginning to  wrap up, when suddenly, you hear a loud crack.  

A pillar on the front of the station has broken,  causing the station’s roof to collapse sideways,  

pulling the rest of the building’s infrastructure  out and toward you. You try to get out of the way,  

but you can’t. You and four co-workers become  pinned on the train tracks by the debris.  

You can’t barely move. You try to maintain your  composure, but the feeling of panic begins to set  

in, quickly exasperated by the bellowing yells  of your co-workers’. Some of them are injured.  

You become confused when suddenly their yells  go quiet. There’s a vibrational hum in the  

distance that replaces them. Then, a train  horn. The yells pick back up, now changed  

from the sound of pain to the sound of terror.  Closer and closer you hear and feel the train  

come. This is it, you think to yourself. You hear one of your co-workers yelling,  

“Switch the track! Switch the track!” You remember there’s a manned control  

booth on the bridge about forty yards behind  you. Inside, the attendant can push a button  

that will switch the tracks and divert  the train away right before it hits you. 

You join in on the now collective  chant to change the tracks. 

After a moment passes, you hear someone  else yelling near you but not with you. 

It’s your other coworker and good  friend. He is pinned on the other track. 

The person in the control booth sees what’s  happening. They saw the whole thing and called  

for help immediately, but it won’t get here  in time. They watch the oncoming train get  

closer and closer. They have a decision to  make. Choose to switch the track and have  

the train kill one person or do nothing and  let the train kill a total of five people. 

You feel the vibration of the train increase  as you consider your whole life—a tapestry of  

experiences and feelings; relationships  and achievements; desires and hopes.  

You plead for it to continue. You  don’t want to die. No one here does. 

The person in the booth is thinking intensely  about what to do. They have about five  

seconds to decide. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 

This dilemma is a version of the thought  experiment known as the trolley problem.  

Originally posed by philosopher Philippa  Foot in 1967 and later advanced in 1976 by  

Judith Jarvis Thomson, the trolley problem has  become an increasingly popular and sometimes  

comical category of thought experiments that  challenge our most basic moral intuitions and  

show us how unclear questions about ethics  and decision making can easily become. 

To explore this further, imagine  for a moment now that you are the  

one in the control booth. What would you do? Would you do nothing, avoiding involving yourself,  

but allowing five people to die that  you could have otherwise saved; or,  

would you switch the tracks and, in some sense,  cause one person to die but save the other five? 

For most people, the choice is clear enough.  In a variety of different surveys, about 90%  

of respondents claim that in this situation,  they would flip the switch and divert the train.  

Afterall, five people dying is worse than one,  and most people want to do the least worst thing.  

This way of thinking follows from one of the most  influential and commonly held ethical theories  

known as utilitarianism, originally developed in  the 18th century, which describes decisions and  

actions as moral when their outcomes result in  the greatest amount good (pleasure, happiness,  

or well-being) and the minimal amount of bad  (pain or suffering). Alternatively, however,  

people who disagree with this choice might  follow the ethical theory known as deontology,  

which argues that decisions and actions are  moral solely based on whether or not they  

follow defined rules and principles, and not  based on their consequences. In other words,  

for example, the act of killing someone under  any circumstances, even if by not killing them,  

you are essentially killing more people, is and  will always be wrong on principle. And therefore,  

since flipping the switch involves you  committing the act of killing someone,  

doing so is morally wrong. However, this raises  the following question: what is the difference  

between allowing and causing? Is there any? By  simply observing the event, understanding it,  

and possessing the ability to easily change  and improve it, are you not already involved?  

Is there a difference in involvement between  observation and inaction verses observation  

and action? Isn’t choosing to not be involved a  choice that is already involved? No one can choose  

to not choose and no one can opt out of what they  already are a part of. What if there was no one  

on the other track? Wouldn’t allowing the five  people to die clearly be the wrong thing to do? 

Even at this level, in just the original, basic  version, clearly it isn’t 100% obvious what is  

right and how we ought to treat the situation. And  it only gets far less obvious with subtle changes. 

What if we change the numbers? What if there  are fifty people on the main track and ten on  

the other? How about five thousand on the main  track and one thousand on the other? Now, if you  

switch the tracks, you will direct the death of  one thousand people, but you will also save five  

thousand. The proportions are exactly the same  as the original, and therefore the logic should  

also be the same, but it seems to feel a lot  different knowing that you will at least be partly  

responsible for the death of one thousand people. What if we change the proportions now? On the main  

track, there are five people. On the other,  there are two. How about three on the other,  

or four? Again, from a purely utilitarian and  seemingly rational perspective, four is still  

less bad than five, and so, switching the  tracks is still seemingly the right choice.  

But yet, there almost seems to be a point at which  the difference in people between the tracks feels  

more negligible than the intervention itself.  Is saving one more person worth the weight of  

responsibility you will feel in that decision?  What about your own personal suffering and  

trauma as a result of this? How do we weigh  that against the delta of one person’s life? 

Now, let’s make it even harder. What if  there are five people on the main track,  

and only one on the other, but the one is someone  you love. A family member, a partner, a friend,  

a child. What do you do then? Your impulse is  most likely not to switch the tracks. That is,  

of course, very understandable. But is  it right? If, in the original version,  

you believe you should switch the tracks,  the only difference here is your emotional  

attachment to the one person. But the morality  and logic of the situation does not change  

otherwise. Even if in the original version  you believe you should not switch the tracks,  

just put your loved one in the group of five on  the main track and consider the same problem.  

Is your emotional involvement enough to  compromise your morality? Presumably,  

the majority of people would say yes and do the  same. But then, we would have to also agree that  

morality is flexible based on our emotions  and not based on our consistency of logic. 

How much of ethics is really just emotion,  anyway? The meta-ethical theory known as  

emotivism argues that ethical statements never  express truths or falsehoods, but rather,  

merely our emotional states, influenced by things  like our cultural and experiential backgrounds,  

moods, personalities, and so on. If this is  true, how does that effect things in general? 

Let’s return to the bridge in the original  example. Again, five people are stuck on the  

train tracks and a small train is coming. This  time, however, there is no control booth, button,  

switch, or any second track at all. You are just  a random pedestrian watching the event unfold  

from the bridge. Near you, however, at the edge of  the bridge, stands a large man also observing the  

event unfold. He is massive—morbidly obese. You  don’t know any of the people on track. You don’t  

know the obese man. But you do know that if you  push the man off the bridge in front of the train,  

he will cause the train to stop in time,  killing him but saving the other five people. 

Do you do it? In the same surveys mentioned earlier where 90%  

of respondents claimed that they would switch the  track by a lever or button, less than 10% claimed  

that they would push the man off the bridge. But  yet, it’s the same outcome, same number of people,  

same relationship with the people involved,  and so on. Everything else is exactly the  

same. Neither the man on the alternative track in  the original scenario nor the man on the bridge  

in this scenario chose to be in the situation.  This obese man is no more or less involved in  

the unfolding of events, and they would both be  just as safe if you weren’t there. But yet, you  

likely feel differently in this situation, simply  because it feels more personal. Emotionally,  

you are affected enough to not do what you  already (likely) agreed was logical and moral. 

For one last twist, let’s imagine a different  person is in this same situation on the bridge  

making the decision of whether or not to push  the man. This person, however, is psychopathic,  

and they choose to do whatever you chose to  do, but they do it because they want to feel  

personally involved in killing someone or they  want to see more people die. In either case,  

does their intention change the morality  of the situation? Would they be more or  

less moral than someone who chooses to do the  opposite if the psychopaths actions results in  

the same outcome of what you believe is moral?  Taking the utilitarian view, the psychopathic  

person would have done the more moral thing. But  who would you want to be alone in a room with? 

Let’s say that they did do the more moral thing,  but they are an immoral person, justifiably worth  

condemning. But what happens if six weeks later,  they go to a neurologist after having experienced  

months of chronic headaches, and it is discovered  that they have a tumor in their brain that had  

caused brain lesions in areas responsible for  morality and value-based decision-making? The  

tumor has directly caused their behavior and  decision making to change in ways that they  

had no control over. How do we perceive them  now? Are they morally responsible for their  

behavior? What if the same person didn’t have  a tumor but was horribly abused psychologically  

and physically as a child, which directly  caused a response that led to this behavior.  

They would not have chosen or controlled this  anymore than a tumor. Is there a difference?  

Is anyone truly morally responsible for  who they become and the choices they are  

led to make if they are by causes they never  chose or controlled to begin with? Of course,  

the individual still needs to be dealt with and  taken out of society—rehabilitated if possible.  

But just because you can’t take the tumor out,  does not make the person any less of a victim. 

Ultimately, the trolley problems aren’t just  interesting thought experiments and goofy  

memes. They show us that what we think is right  or wrong is often based on a lot more than just  

rational evaluations of pros and cons, good and  bad. They reveal to us that decisions and actions  

are often a consequence of a complex array of  intentions and beliefs, all puppeteered by a  

backstory of cause-and-effect in a chaotic  system comprised of incalculable variables.  

The point of these questions isn’t to  trick the mind, but to demonstrate just  

how complicated and unclear matters of ethical  decision making sometimes are and can be. 

Right now, in this moment of history, we are  entering new realms of moral understanding and new  

conditions of societal reality. What rights might  we owe our animal cousins? How should we program  

AI, self-driving vehicles, and other technologies  to make decisions on their own about things like,  

for example, whether or not a self-driving  car should hit one person in order to avoid  

five? How should we choose when all choices  are bad? How will we? How should we update  

laws and justice systems and punishments as we  venture out further into these new realms of  

understanding and society? In the words of Peter  Singer, “What one generation finds ridiculous,  

the next accepts; and the third shudders  when it looks back on what the first did.” 

It is both a wonder and an incredible feat that  we have come as far as we have as a society and  

as a species—to understand and agree, at scale,  what it means to at least try to be moral, and  

to do our best every day to behave accordingly.  To attempt uphold peace, and order, and reason,  

and understanding. Of course, there is so much  chaos, disdain, and misalignment in the world. Our  

immorality is always lurking in each moment and  each stage of history. But there is also so much  

compassion, so much kindness and desire to treat  other people and things right, as best we can. 

We have come so far. We must not forget this.  

But we have so much farther still to  go. We must not forget this either.