There Is No Trolley Problem

We actually aren't constrained into atrocious premises by thought exercises. Obstacles are a reason to fight, not an excuse to quit. Our friends and neighbors aren't distractions.

So here comes the trolley, barreling its way to the fork in the tracks. Yes, and here's the switch, set to pass it on the straightaway. Here are the people on the tracks; five of them in the trolley's current path, one on the alternate track. And then there's you, standing at the only switch. Flip it, and only one person will die—but they will be dead at your hand. Don't, and five people will die—not at your hand, perhaps, but at your discretion.

You are asked: What will you do?

You are sensible and empathetic, so you do not want anyone to die. Because you have this sensible and empathetic outlook, you do a sensible and empathetic thing. You look for an alternative.

"I will warn the people," you say, and your interrogator shakes his head: No good, they are tied to the track and cannot free themselves.

"I will untie the people," you say, and your interrogator clucks his tongue: No, no, no, there is no time.

"I will sabotage the track," you say, and your interrogator rubs his eyes: No good, the tracks are unbreakable.

"I will warn the conductor," you say, and your interrogator loses patience: There is no conductor, he snaps. There's nobody at the controls. The trolley can't stop, nothing can stop it, somebody has to die. It's up to you, and this is the only choice.

I don't blame him for snapping. He's trying to demonstrate something about moral quandaries by employing a theoretical thought experiment, and here you are, trying to break the premise, which means they won't get to make their point, and making their point is the point here, because this is a philosophy class, or maybe a seminar or something. What the interrogator is trying to do is force you into playing along by removing all options that a sensible and empathic person would pursue. The experiment requires you assume a position where you feel the culpability and the weight of a terrible choice, and it accomplishes this by presenting you with an abstracted set of circumstances under extreme and inescapable constraints, so that various ideas might be introduced and pondered

Also, the interrogator is building to a punchline and you're ruining it. If you opt to switch and kill only one person, saving the five, they're going to ask you to run the same scenario again, but this time imagine the one person is somebody dear to you: a spouse, a parent, a child. It's a hell of a punchline. Not so easy when you love the person on the track, is it?

The punchline delivers one of the great points of the trolley problem, which is demonstrating the way ethical decisions change when they stop being abstract and enter the realm of the personal. This is a fancy way of saying you feel differently about people getting killed when they're real instead of abstract, and even more differently when you know them or even love them. The trolley problem also perhaps demonstrates the ethical limitations of utilitarianism. I bet there are many other lessons to be taken from this famous thought experiment, and we could go learn about them if we wanted to, and maybe we should.

Anyway, the interrogator isn't limiting your options to be cruel, but rather because the constraints force you to accept the necessary premise, so the premise might be explored in an unreal and theoretical way—and it is crucial from an ethical standpoint that the scenario and the constraints not be real. The constraints and the scenario aren't cruel precisely because the trolley problem isn't real; it's an abstraction meant to illustrate a specific set of problems that strain the bounds of human ethics without actually crossing those bounds. The value of the trolley problem is that there is no trolley problem.

The trolley problem would be a horrific scenario to set up in the real world, you know: to tie people to tracks, to force somebody to make a choice between killing a few people and killing one of their loved ones, to set the trolley in motion to ensure that the people chosen really do die; to take away every option until nothing is left but the switch and the victims. It's the sort of thing a cartoon villain in a silent movie does.

It's also the sort of thing our national fascist party, commonly known as "the Republicans," are doing right now.

Everywhere we look, they're throwing somebody or another on the tracks, and demanding that we recognize their right to do so, and validate their rationales for doing so as good—or, if not good, at least reasonable. I could give hundreds of examples, but let me lay out just a few. There are the lawless and unaccountable gangs kidnap squads who harass and terrorize and kidnap immigrants or those suspected of being immigrants. And their Nazi-aligned White Christian President has mobilized the U.S. army to invade and occupy American cities, sending armed troops up and down the streets to intimidate citizens and noncitizens alike and terrorize homeless people, who fascists frame not as the people in grave danger that they are, but as a disease to be cleansed. And the fascists have started making it impossible for trans people to exist in more and more places, stripping away healthcare access and the ability to secure government documents or even to use a public restroom. And the fascists recently started kidnapping Democratic elected officials in Texas, forcing them to accept full time law enforcement escorts so that they could be compelled into participating in the Republican-led Texas legislature's racist gerrymander. This gerrymander is a tactic designed to further erode our badly eroded democracy by ensuring that already underrepresented racial minorities in Texas are even more underrepresented, particularly when compared to voters who are deemed "white." This is the sort of thing an organization would only initiate if it intends to further marginalize already marginalized groups, and it's been a very common practice of Republicans over the decades—as you can imagine would be true of a white supremacist political party. And the racist Texas gerrymander did indeed pass, which is a big problem, because Texas is a big state, economy-wise and influence-wise.

In all such cases, specific groups of people are targeted by the Republican fascists based on rationales constructed of the most laughable bullshit, with the either explicit or implicit promise that if everyone else allows the few to be harmed and excluded and neglected and terrorized and killed, then the rest will be spared. And then they tell you that you have the switch and must decide who dies first.

This is the standard fascist offer, and it's exactly what you'd expect from a government-as-mafia ideology like fascism—that is, it is a shakedown. There are many reasons fascists make the offer, one of them being that it allows them to terrorize and exclude and neglect and kill people without consequence, another being that it forces people into positions of complicity so that the blame for the outcomes that the fascists want can rest upon somebody other than the fascists.

More than anything, though, fascists set up real-life trolley problems to get people to agree to their horrific premises: that there must be people tied to the trolley tracks, that the trolley must run down the tracks no matter who is killed, that talking about the horrors that ensue is an offense against civility greater than the horrors themselves; that rescuing people from death is more dangerous to a properly ordered society than is condemning them to death; that stopping the trolley or fouling the track is a violent crime in a way that running people over with a train car is not. Fascists set up real-life trolley problems because it gives them a framework and justification for removing all options that a sensible and empathic person would pursue, so they can convince their opponents that the pursuit of sensible and empathetic things is both wrong and impractical.

Once you agree to the premise of the trolley problem, then it's just a matter of arguing over who to put on the tracks, and in what order, and who to set at the switch. This sort of debate is fine with fascists like Republicans, who intend to put everyone on the tracks eventually, and have even written those plans at great detail and length.

So now, against my better judgment, I'm going to talk about Gavin Newsom, and, since there doesn't seem to be any way to talk about him without bringing up the subject, let's glancingly mention the 2028 presidential election.

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So Gavin Newsom is the Democratic governor of California. He is planning on meeting the Texas gerrymander with a California gerrymander in order to counter the effects of this Republican attempt to subvert the will of the people along racist lines. I think this is very good, and something that more governors should do, because bringing a knife to a knife fight is a vital step in winning the knife fight even if we would avoid knife fights generally, and we are going to need leaders willing to do what is necessary in order to oppose the fascist attempt to seize even more power. However, Newsom's support for this measure is especially important because California is an even bigger state than Texas, economy-wise and influence-wise, and so the gerrymander will pose a problem for the fascists to solve. Newsom's team has also engaged on social media with a bunch of memes and shitposts trolling the Republican leader, White Christian President. This seems more performative and empty to me than the gerrymander, but people who like that sort of thing seem cheered by it, and refusing to respect a fascist dictator is a vital part of opposing a fascist dictator, so OK I suppose.

Anyway all this stuff has certain people talking about Newsom as a nominee in the 2028 presidential election. I see why this sort of talk might rise. Newsom's an ambitious guy who clearly is planning to make a run, and as this sort of thing is making him wildly popular with a certain portion of the electorate who like the memes or the gerrymanders, or both, the 2028 election becomes germane. However, this is understandably a pretty big problem for a lot of people, because Gavin Newsom has also spent a lot of his time and energy agreeing with Republican premises about trans people and homeless people, and participating in the violence against homeless camps, while telling all of us that agreeing with Republicans about these unpopular people is a necessary sacrifice in order to gain the support of anti-homeless and anti-trans bigots, so we can save everyone else.

In the Trolley Problem of homeless people and of trans people, Newsom wants to be at the switch and he intends to pull it, and he seems to want us all to pretend we don't know that trans and homeless people are on the tracks because Republicans very deliberately and strategically tied them there. For that reason, a lot of people don't want anything to do with Newsom in 2028 or any other year—even if they may salute his efforts to counter Texas gerrymanders—because as the theoretical trolley problem teaches, you feel differently about people getting killed when they're real instead of abstract, and even more differently when you know them or even love them.

In response to this anti-Newsom antipathy, many Newsom-boosters are scolding trans people and homeless people and their families and friends and other allies about the utility of sacrificing a few for the good of the many. This make me think that most of these scolders haven't really stopped to consider the ways in which the people they are scolding are the few, and they who are doing the scolding are the many. Some scolders have even announced that if these marginalized groups won't fall in line and pre-approve Newsom for the presidency some 3 years ahead of time, then they deserve what they get. This makes me think the scolders might have a weak understanding of how coalition-building works and an even weaker understanding of how despair works on the desperate.

It also suggests that this "get in line or you deserve what you get" contingent simply doesn't seem to recognize or care for the people they demand the rest of us keep on the tracks. It suggests that for this contingent, the people we'd sacrifice remain abstract. Finding out who is on the tracks doesn't change the equation for them, and they're willing to enforce the trolley and the tracks and the switch by removing all options that a sensible and empathic person would pursue.

I want to be very clear that this is not an invitation to speculate or argue about the 2028 election, and I won't be doing so. We haven't even had the 2026 election yet, and frankly elections feel like a chancy thing these days when the U.S. military has invaded the U.S. to support the strategies and whims of fascist white supremacists. It would be better if those people who still are doing the work to pursue electoral solutions focus on making sure there are elections next year, and that they are as fair as possible, and that those nominees are certain to fight fascism, rather than worrying about who should be nominated in the one after it. (If you want my extended thoughts on how elections tend to create trolley problems, you can look here and here, and one of those links even leads to an essay that explicitly references the trolley problem. These are the sorts of bonus deals you get at The Reframe Dot Com.) All I'll note is that directly opposing Republican fascism with showy norms-breaking behavior that rejects Republican premises is proving very popular right now, and a very calculated and ambitious politician out in California named Newsom seems to know it, and this suggests that any other leader could also select combativeness and prosper. Meanwhile, accepting other Republican premises about homeless and appears to be very unpopular, in a way that even Newsom's boosters recognize might threaten his hopes, and the only way to convince any calculated and ambitious politician of this is not to fall into line behind them, but to tell them people exactly that, as loudly as possible, as often as possible.

However, this is an invitation to use the conversation around Newsom as a way of looking at real-world trolley problems. It's a suggestion that what we actually need to do is to return to our very sensible and empathetic instinct to break the premise. It's an examination of this habit that many of us seem to have cultivated, of not only accepting the premises of our nation's many trolley problems, but enforcing false constraints back upon anyone who would question the premise.

And I'd like to offer three practical alternate frames for dealing with our real-world trolley problems.

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Break the Premise

In the world of thought exercise, there is no permissible way out of the thought exercise, because the point of the exercise is to engage with it. The whole point of the theoretical trolley problem is to theoretically run over people with the theoretical trolley, which is precisely why we have to accept it in theory. Running over real people with various trolleys is the whole point of real-world trolley problems, too, which is is precisely why we have to reject them in the real world.

The answer to the trolley problem in the real world is to either brake the trolley or break the trolley. The answer is to either block or wreck the tracks. The answer is to free everyone tied to both sets of tracks, or lay down new tracks without people on them. Or the answer is to issue a warning. Or to set an alarm. Or, more likely, to try all of these at once. Gerrymandering California to counter the racist effects of the Republican gerrymander is a part of the answer to racist disenfranchisement, and refusing to further elevate somebody who would pursue the oppression of marginalized people is a part of the answer to marginalization.

So the answer to the trolley problem is to reject the premise. But how do we identify the premise?

This can get tricky, because fascists always feint toward some fine quality (safety, security, even equality or anti-racism) as rationale for their atrocities, and some of these brutes even do it adroitly and persuasively. For example (even though the thought-exercise trolley problem is at least in part meant to illustrate the limitations of bloodless utilitarian thinking) our real-life trolley problems are often framed as necessary and utilitarian expressions of harm reduction, and harm reduction indeed has its utility and appropriate uses. This means that arguments in favor of strapping a few people to the tracks can be made to seem morally correct, even as they feel horribly wrong.

Whenever you're dealing with an argument that you know is wrong somehow but are unsure of why, the best advice I have to give is to ask: "in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't? In what way is this argument founded in the premise that it is good that people who don't matter suffer and die—or, if not good, at least not of much consequence when set against the comfort of those who do?"

This point of dehumanization is almost always where those wrong arguments go wrong, no matter how fine their rationales; it's supremacy's indefensible foundation of sand. Failing to attack the premise at that precise location is almost always where well-meaning counters go wrong, because if you focus on how well-crafted the ceiling beams are, you validate the supremacist architecture even as it sinks beneath its own untenable weight.

Instead, dig into the foundations of the argument until you find the place where you can say "I do not accept that we have to sacrifice other human beings in order to achieve the good things you say you want to achieve. In fact, I believe that it is precisely the impulse to sacrifice human beings that ultimately prevents us from achieving those good things. I perceive that your entire moral architecture contains an unsupportable flaw, and it is precisely because I find it unsupportable that I will not support it."

That's going to be a firm foundation to stand upon. You can build from there.

Embrace the Obstacles

Whenever somebody proposes an action that breaks the premise of a real-world trolley problem, I've noticed a tendency among opponents of the proposal to list all the obstacles to that action. By itself listing obstacles is fine, of course; how can you succeed at something unless you anticipate the obstacles? But what I've noticed is that the obstacles are not introduced in order to identify and overcome them, but as a reason to not take the action in the first place or even consider it.

We need to remove the president, you might say, only to be told that that the current Republican Congress is complicit and therefore won't ever do that. This is pretty observably true, yet it doesn't mean that we don't need to remove the president, who is a terminally ignorant fool and a Nazi maniac, it only means a Republican Congress is an obstacle to that necessary goal. So you might respond that it sounds as if we're going to need to replace most of Congress one way or another—to which you might hear that even if Democrats take power, they won't ever actually meaningfully oppose fascism. And even this may be true, but all that means is that we are going to need to replace a lot of Democrats, too, or form a viable third option. To this you might hear that the voters won't ever vote anyone out, not with fascist interference and electioneering. Which seems both fatalistic and probably overstated, but even if you accepted that premise, it doesn't mean that Congress and the president and much of the opposing party don't need to be replaced, it just means that the current state of electoral politics needs to be rethought and redone so that elections are fair and the will of the people can be better expressed. To this you might hear that the Supreme Court will never allow any reforms, which might be true, but god damn if that doesn't just mean that we need to overcome the obstacle the Supreme Court poses, perhaps by recognizing the illegitimacy of that corrupted body and resolving to stop accepting their edicts. To which you might hear ... you get the idea. Once you climb onto that trolley there's no getting off.

When this happens, you're dealing with somebody who is not oriented toward preserving a just and equitable human society and overcoming the obstacles to that end, but rather to preserving and enforcing our trolley problems; insisting on the trolley and the switch and the tracks and the people on it, and rejecting any suggestion for moving outside those boundaries.

But every obstacle to taking some needed action—even if usually presented as a reason to not take the action—is actually just identifying another problem that must be solved.

So embrace the obstacles. Show these unimaginative naysayers against human progress that all they are doing with each objection is redefining and expanding the scope of what human progress can and should include. To every constraint these problem-defenders offer, reply yes, we have to fix that too; yes, and that, too, yes, and that, too, yes and that, and that, too, yes, yes, yes, tell me more, tell me more.

Pursue Everything

I'm told that the fascist president invading his own country's capital with its own military is just a distraction. I'm told that his lawless kidnap squad are just a distraction. I'm told that trans rights are just a distraction. I'm told that the plight of homeless people is just a distraction.

A distraction from what? one might wonder, if one is me.

Some would say its a distraction from the growing evidence that White Christian President, who is already a known and adjudicated rapist and by his own admission a serial sexual predator, is also a serial child rapist. That seems like a pretty important thing! Others tell me that this issue is actually just a distraction from his collusion in the Ukraine war among other things with war criminal and Russian president Vladimir Putin, or that that collusion is just a distraction from his open corruption, or that his corruption is a distraction ... you get the idea. The idea of distraction is another trolley that never stops running its tracks.

The thing about this popular idea of political distractions is that it accepts a theoretical thought exercise's artificial constraints, and suggests that we have before us a simple binary switch, forcing us to identify and focus on the one true issue and ignore all others.

But everything that matters matters, so none of it is a distraction. It's impossible for one person to take it all in, so each person may need to cultivate their own focus in order to avoid getting overwhelmed and burned out, but there is no reason that as a collective whole we can't address everything, and there is no reason that we need to choose to abandon one good thing to secure another, or actualize some atrocities in order to prevent other atrocities. We aren't bound by the limited premises of thought exercises and their pre-defeated constraints. And we know that the dehumanizing abstractions used to enforce and defend these premises and constraints aren't distractions—they're our friends and neighbors, they're our human family.

So clear the tracks or wreck them. Brake the trolley or break it. Don't accept the premises and constraints of those who would tie others to tracks. Pursue options that a sensible and empathic person would pursue, and let others pursue other ones, so that we can pursue them all.

There is no trolley problem.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. It's time to put his wingsuit on.