In Which I Solve the Trolley Problem Forever

We’re on day nineteen of philosophy week at Alexander Kaplan poetry, because what even is time anyway? In case you missed the other entries, we’ve covered mass murder, handsome philosophers, and free will. In this entry, I shall solve the trolley problem forever. My apologies to all the dorm-room stoners out there.

When I ask my students what they would do in the original thought experiment—five people on one track, one person on the other track, a lever to redirect the trolley from the five to the one—the responses are usually ninety percent “pull the lever,” five percent “don’t pull the lever,” and five percent “I refuse to engage with the thought experiment.”

It’s the latter two groups who interest me the most. The people who refuse to pull the lever are often women, often religious, and almost always unable to live with the guilt of killing someone, consequences be damned. I’ll try to get them to change their minds by upping the ante to ridiculous extremes—“Okay, if you pull the lever, one person dies, but if you don’t pull the lever, everyone on Earth will be strapped into an experience-machine and tortured for a million years ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’-style”—and they still won’t do it. It’s almost like the thought experiment loses its value at that point.

More annoying are the students who refuse to engage with the thought experiment on its own terms, but they usually don’t speak up until the second iteration.

In this scenario, rather than saving five people by a pulling a lever, you save five people by pushing a fat man onto the tracks. This is where the non-engagers get creative:

• I’d just call the trolley conductor on my phone.”

• “No one could be fat enough to stop a trolley.”

• “Someone that large could stop a trolley without being harmed.

• “Someone that fat would die from a heart attack soon anyway.”

• “Is the fat man Hitler? I’d push fat Hitler.”1

Listen, I get it. When I first heard this thought experiment2 it felt intuitively correct to pull the lever and intuitively incorrect to push the fat man. The fact that the numbers didn’t change but my actions did drove me nuts. I tried every which way to justify my answer—I even tried changing my answer—but the thought experiment bothered my conscience like a pebble in my shoe. The third iteration was even worse.

This one doesn’t even have a trolley, but it’s the same genus, so it completes the trifecta. In it, five patients are each dying from the failure of a different organ. A conveniently healthy hobo with conveniently few loved ones passes through town and you must make a choice: should you murder the hobo, harvest his organs, and save the patients?

Once again, the math doesn’t change, but once again, it feels wrong to murder the hobo.

Years ago I read a philosopher3 who said some questions should be answered and some questions should be un-asked. That’s how you solve the trolley problem. You don’t figure it out or grapple with its implications or invent complicated new ethics to explain it: you un-ask it. It turns out the students who refused to engage were correct!

You see, the trolley problem is not about ethics, but uncertainty.

The reason it feels intuitive to pull the lever is because the whole situation is predetermined: we know how levers and tracks and trolleys work, so barring some bizarre anomaly, we have a perfect understanding of the future. I will concede, therefore, that in this case you should pull the lever.

But pushing a fat man? Killing a hobo? The people positing these situations assure us that of course the fat man will stop the trolley, of course the patients won’t reject their donor organs, but that’s what makes these thought experiments pointless: these scenarios could never actually have predetermined outcomes. Sneaking in that “pretend you can be sure of the future” caveat changes the thought experiment from “interesting counterfactual” to “meaningless la-la land logic.” It doesn’t matter what your brain tells you: your gut tells you the fat man will be crushed, the trolley will keeping rolling, the next five people will be crushed, and you’ll be sent to jail for manslaughter.4

By the time we get to murdered the hobo the possible outcomes have bloomed from one to a hundred to ten thousand—the sick people might reject the organs; the hobo might turn out to have a loving family; the surgeon performing the operation might turn you in—the list goes on and on, and pretending we could have perfect knowledge of what will happen becomes truly insane.

So there you have it. The trolley problem has been solved, not by being answered, but by being un-asked. I can only assume this thought experiment will never be mentioned again.