Let’s consider the case: you are on the side of a railroad switch. A trolley is coming down the tracks and will kill five tied-up individuals who cannot move and whom you can save by doing nothing. But there is a switch, it is a switch that can divert the trolley onto a side track and save the five. But a single tied-up individual is on the other track. Do you work the lever and have an active role to play in killing one in order to preserve five? Or do you stay back and let five die and keep your own hands free of premeditated evils?
This is the traditional Trolley Problem, a philosophical exercise first conceived by philosopher Philippa Foot and later modified by Judith Jarvis Thomson. On its face, it is an ethics question. But underneath, it is a question of what it means to be human when faced with impossible choices.
One possible solution to the dilemma is utilitarianism: an ethical system which holds that what is moral is what maximizes happiness, or what minimizes pain. One bullet, five saved, one killed, less pain overall. Numbers matter. And yet many of us hesitate. Why? Because ethics is not concerned with consequences, it is concerned with principles.
The Kantian deontological position is that the intentional infliction of harm is morally wrong flat out no matter what. Flicking the switch is taking an active hand in deciding someone’s life, and that is crossing an ethical line. Not doing anything, unfortunate as it is, does not actively get your hands soiled with guilt. Ethics here is a matter of obligation and preserving human dignity and not mere mathematics.
But the puzzle is harder the more we think about it. If you don’t act, aren’t you also responsible for the five deaths? If acting is wrong, isn’t not acting right? The Trolley Problem shows us the unpleasant truth that morality far too often involves balancing incommensurable kinds of responsibility, neither one nor simple.
It mirrors everyday life more than we would like to acknowledge. Governments are faced with “trolley problems” in war, choosing to bomb a target and killing civilians to avoid greater destruction. Doctors face them in hospitals, where there is not enough to go around and they must determine who to save first. Even we, in small things, they catch us off guard—when our attempts to help someone end up hurting another person, or when we are pleasing the wishes of many more than pleasing one friend.
What the Trolley Problem actually forces us to do is push against the margins of moral thinking. No theory, however much utilitarian mathematics or Kantian morality, can ever fully encompass human moral life. Perhaps morality isn’t a recipe for perfection, but rather an endless tug-of-war between reason, sympathy, and the diseased weight of responsibility.
And perhaps the larger lesson is that the Trolley Problem can’t be solved because morality is not something to be solved. It’s not a riddle with a single solution, but an illustration of the ugly truth that every decision makes us who we are. Whether to pull the lever, or not to pull, it’s less about what is “right,” and more about being able to live with ourselves in the mirror.