Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
The Trolley Problem is history’s most famous thought experiment about public transportation, murder, and the thin moral line between the two. It has ruined more dinner parties than politics, religion, and cheap wine combined.
I am, by clinical philosophical assessment, a Consequentialist Chaos Agent. I know this because I took an online trolley problem quiz (which is exactly how Socrates would have resolved moral inquiry if he’d had Wi-Fi, a personality disorder, and a BuzzFeed account) and it handed me my diagnosis with the gentle bedside manner of a WebMD search for “persistent rash.”
Three out of four rounds, I chose violence. Then, I flinched. Consider what follows a trolley problem ethics essay written by a man who has no business making moral decisions, which (fun fact) is not yet a felony in any jurisdiction, though I assume someone in Florida is working on it.
The Lever
Five people on one track. One on the other. A lever in your hand. This is the most famous ethical thought experiment in history (at least for the purpose of this essay), and also the SAT of moral philosophy: everyone takes it, nobody feels good afterward, and your score determines whether strangers will let you hold their baby.
I pulled the lever. Not pulling it is like watching your house burn down because you didn’t want to get the hose’s inside wet. Inaction is still a choice. It’s just a choice you’re making while standing very still, pretending you don’t have hands, and rehearsing the phrase “there was nothing I could do” for the 911 operator, the insurance adjuster, and eventually the documentary crew.
The Kantians (God bless their trembling, over-caffeinated, graduate-student hearts) will tell you pulling the lever makes you the cause of that one death. By that logic, holding a door open makes you an accessory to whoever walks through it. I didn’t build the trolley or didn’t tie anyone down. I didn’t design a public transit system that apparently runs on homicide and vibes. No, I just showed up and made things 80% less terrible, which, incidentally, is also my performance review every year at work.
The Fat Man
Same trolley dilemma. Same five people. But no lever. Now your only option is to push a large man off a bridge onto the tracks, where his body stops the trolley. He dies. They live. The math hasn’t changed. The vibe has gone from “moral philosophy” to “thing that gets you on a true crime podcast hosted by two women who drink wine and say ‘literally’ a lot.”
I pushed him.
I’m not proud of it. I’m not not proud of it. I exist in a quantum state of moral ambiguity that would make Schrödinger’s cat deeply uncomfortable, and that cat is already dealing with a lot.
Here’s the thing: if you pulled the lever but can’t push the man, your ethics aren’t principled. They’re just squeamish. You’re not a Kantian. You’re a person who’s perfectly fine with killing someone as long as you don’t have to touch them while you do it. That’s not moral philosophy. That’s drone warfare. It’s firing someone over Zoom while eating a yogurt. That’s breaking up by changing your Netflix password and calling it “setting boundaries.”
The distance between a lever and a shove is three feet and one doctoral dissertation nobody will ever read. I absolutely refuse to let the ergonomics of murder dictate my moral convictions. If the math says push, I push. I’m not going to let the fact that I can feel his shirt fabric be the thing that suddenly gives me a conscience. I’ve been to Walmart on Black Friday. I’ve felt fabrics under worse circumstances.
The Professor
This is where the trolley problem eats itself like a snake that minored in philosophy, and also where my ruthless utilitarian record collapses like a folding chair at a family reunion where everyone brought opinions and nobody brought dessert. If this essay has been moral philosophy satire up to now, this is where it becomes a confession.
A trolley is heading toward a philosophy professor who spent forty years writing trolley problems. On the other track: the last copies of every trolley problem ever conceived. Destroy them and humanity goes free. No more of this. Ever. No more awkward Thanksgiving silences when your nephew who just declared a philosophy major leans across the cranberry sauce to make everyone “really think about it.”
I saved the professor.
Yep.
I had a one-time, manufacturer’s-coupon, act-now opportunity to liberate our entire species from the most annoying thought experiment since “If a tree falls in a forest,” and I rescued the man directly responsible for inflicting it on us. I chose more trolley problems. Deliberately. With my whole chest. Like a man cannonballing into a pool of his own bad decisions.
My defense: you can always rewrite papers, but you can’t unmake a person. That professor’s singular, God-given talent for making nineteen-year-olds question their own existence at 8 a.m. while hungover on cheap beer and cheaper regret? That’s rare. An annoying rare. Like being seated next to an amateur magician on a six-hour flight who keeps asking if this is your card. It is never your card. But you can’t replicate that energy.
Besides, destroy all the trolley problems, and philosophers will invent something worse. The Escalator Problem. The Self-Driving Car Problem. The “What If the Uber Driver Is Also the Trolley and He’s Giving You One Star While You Burn” Problem. You can’t kill an idea by torching its paperwork. If you could, the IRS would have been dead for decades, student loans would be a folk memory, and we’d all be living in a utopia built on spite, shredded receipts, and a shared unwillingness to do math.
The Mirror
The final round dropped all pretense of intellectual exercise and came for my existential jugular with a rusty scalpel and no anesthesia.
One track: my past self. Blissfully ignorant. Able to ride a subway without whispering “five or one” like a serial killer doing recon at a railway museum. Other track: current me. A man who typed “ergonomics of murder” sixteen paragraphs ago, meant every syllable, and is now concerned about what that says about his Google search history.
I saved the idiot.
Innocent Me still thinks “trolley” is a cute San Francisco thing. He eats dinner without wondering whether the waiter would push a fat man off a bridge to save the kitchen staff. He has never heard the phrase “categorical imperative.” His blood pressure reflects this. His therapist bills reflect this. He can enjoy a simple goddamn train documentary on Netflix without spiraling into an ethical seizure during the opening credits and making his wife leave the room.
Burdened Me, meanwhile, has deployed his hard-won knowledge of moral philosophy in exactly zero real-world situations. Not once has someone at the Piggly Wiggly said, “Excuse me, sir, we’re out of eggs, there’s a man tied to the conveyor belt in produce, and we need you to make a choice.” My ethical expertise is, in the most literal and financially devastating sense of the word, academic. I am a black belt in a martial art that has no opponents.
So I let the philosopher-me die. Call it cowardice or self-care. Call it the one decision in this entire bloodbath that didn’t require a follow-up appointment with a professional who charges by the hour to nod at me.
The Verdict
Four rounds of escalating moral catastrophe taught me exactly one thing: ethics isn’t about finding the right answer. It’s about finding the answer you can sleep with and then building an elaborate intellectual alibi out of Latin words, a bibliography, and the kind of confident eye contact that makes people assume you’ve read more books than you have. Kant did it. Mill did it. I’m doing it right now, in this essay, where consequentialism meets humor and neither survives intact. I will almost certainly read it aloud to my pig while she stares at me with the blank, judgmental indifference of a creature who solved ethics forty million years ago by eating whatever was in front of her.
Trouble McFussbucket would have pulled the lever, pushed the man, destroyed the papers, and eaten the trolley. Then she’d have rolled in the wreckage. Pigs are natural utilitarians with zero patience for hand-wringing and an unshakable commitment to outcomes-based dining. If Bentham had owned a pig, Western philosophy would be four pages long, infinitely more practical, and it would smell like mud and moral clarity and absolutely nothing like regret.
Sometimes it would pee in the house.
So here I stand: three-for-four on the action scale, haunted by the one time I blinked. I pulled levers, shoved strangers, and did the terrible, beautiful math. Then flinched when it came to destroying an idea. Because ideas, even ones specifically engineered to ruin dinner parties, first dates, Thanksgiving, and every train ride you’ll take for the rest of your increasingly anxious natural life, are the only things that outlive us. And if I’m going to be a monster, I’d like to be a well-read one.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to feed my pig. She’s been making very pointed eye contact that I can only describe as “utilitarian,” and I learned the hard way what happens when a four-hundred-pound consequentialist doesn’t get dinner on time. Spoiler: she doesn’t form a committee. She doesn’t weigh the options. She acts.
Brian is the author of Not Bukowski, Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind, and The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville with his wife, a chihuahua named Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS, and a pig who would absolutely push you off a bridge.
Key Takeaways
- The Trolley Problem explores moral dilemmas involving choices between harm and greater good, often leading to unsettling conclusions.
- The author identifies as a Consequentialist, revealing his moral complexities through humor and personal anecdotes.
- He discusses various trolley scenarios, expressing a willingness to act even when choices are morally ambiguous.
- Ultimately, the essay argues that ethics is about choosing what one can accept, rather than finding universally right answers.
- The author concludes with a reflection on the lasting power of ideas and the absurdity of moral philosophy in everyday life.
Related Links
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His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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