I first heard the trolley problem in my undergraduate honors program, in a course called “The Making of the Modern Mind.” It’s a basic thought experiment in moral and ethical theory that positions you near a runaway trolley that is heading toward five people tied on the track, who will die unless you pull a lever to switch the trolley to another track. The problem is that track isn’t empty. There is one person tied down there. You are faced with a choice: allow the trolley to run its course and kill five people or pull the lever and kill one person. It’s the kind of thing that would make the Joker giggle.
The original problem might seem simple (although personally I don’t think so), but it gets increasingly complicated. What if there were four people on the second track? What if the person on the second track was your best friend, or far more righteous than the five evildoers on the original track? What if the people on the first track tied themselves down willingly?
You can explore all these scenarios and more on a Neal.fun visual activity that I recently came across. It’s a fun (if morbid) thought experiment, but also draws out complex philosophical and moral questions: What is a human life worth? What is my role and responsibility in participating in and preventing evil? How can a human with limited knowledge make real-life decisions with innumerable unknown variables?
What makes the Neal.fun site even more interesting is that it provides a tally of responses. For each scenario, box at the bottom of the page reveals the percentage of people who agree with your selection. This reveals some patterns. People initially tend toward numerical utilitarianism: As of this writing, 74% of people choose the pull the lever and kill the one man instead of the five. It’s closer when the second track has four people, but still definitive: 65% choose the track with four. However, once details start to emerge about the people on the tracks, a sense of self-interest and personal feeling arises. For instance, 35% of people choose to allow five people to die instead of sacrificing their life savings, and 60% let the five die when they themselves are the one person on the second track. And 66% will actively pull the lever to kill five people instead allowing their best friend to die. Of course, this is not an official survey with an accurate sampling of people in the world. It probably skews toward nerdy young people with a weird sense of humor and too much free time. It also doesn’t account for silly/unserious responses (for instance, 16% allowed a death to maintain the punctuality of their Amazon package) and for the gap between the theoretical and reality. Would I really sacrifice my life for five strangers if given the opportunity in real-life, or do I just like to think I would?
Still, it’s a fascinating look into the popular moral consciousness. How do we decide what is right and wrong? Particularly, it reveals the impossibility of comprehensive ethical systems in this morally-muddy world. For many religious people like myself, we rely on a divine standard of ethics taken from a set of scriptures. Thus, if God said it, I do it, or something along those lines. But this is still incomplete, for there is no verse in my Bible about trying to decide between lives on a track. No commandment of Moses tells me what to do about my teenager’s cell phone or if I should shop at Amazon. Even for the utilitarian, how could a person possibly calculate the potential variables and outcomes of a decision in the seconds it takes for the trolley to run its course? (There’s an episode of The Good Place about that. Speaking of, everyone should watch The Good Place.) The Trolley Problem gives us an endless string of “what if”s that all might affect the ethics of the choice we have.
We humans must admit that we are children feeling around in the dark, guessing at what way is right and what way is wrong. I don’t mean that there is no right or wrong, or that morality is unknowable, or that Scripture cannot guide our moral decision-making (it has everything we need for “life and godliness”). More so that ethics in the real world requires humility and self-examination and trust in something beyond my own judgment and interpretation. If I have to make a split-second decision about whose life to save, often as not I’ll choose wrong. As a Christian, I believe God gave us Scripture like emergency lights along the floor, keeping us from straying too far off, and the Spirit to call to us from the dimness, leading us toward what is right. But we must be looking and listening and willing to change our course when we realize our trolley is on the wrong track.