A runaway trolley is barreling down the tracks towards five people. You are standing next to a lever. Pulling this lever will cause the trolley to switch tracks before it hits the five people, saving them from certain death. But it will divert the trolley towards one person on the other set of tracks. If you do nothing, five people will be killed. If you pull the lever, one person will be killed. Do you pull the lever?
This popular thought experiment creates an absurd and horrifying no-win scenario. Luckily, few will ever face this choice in reality. However, there is one aspect of the quandary that is true to life: many people conceive of morality in terms of their individual decisions and culpability for their outcomes.
Nobody can prevent disaster in the trolley problem; it is inevitable, caused by irrelevant forces beyond the individual’s control. We’re meant to pretend it doesn’t matter, for example, how this trolley was designed, built, and approved for use without an emergency braking system. The moral dilemma we’re presented with isn’t, “How do we build a safer trolley system that won’t result in pointless death?”
Instead, the question is concerned with how individuals, once trapped in this deadly scenario, attempt to secure their own blamelessness via moral reasoning—advocating either for non-interference or for cold, utilitarian mathematics. But there is no moral decision to be made. Both options are terrible. When we face the lever, we are not moral agents, but victims of conditions we seemingly had no part in creating.
There’s the rub: humans live in a world of complex systems and banal evils. There’s rarely a villain driving the trolley—one single person committing an unambiguous wrong, holding all the moral responsibility for devastation and death. Behind every trolley disaster are dozens of engineers, safety inspectors, bureaucrats, executives, and legislators “just doing their jobs,” all flawed humans working within complex systems, subject to myriad demands and constraints. When complex systems fail, no single person is ever wholly responsible.
That’s why it’s essential that we grapple with our collective responsibility to the complex systems all around us. Focusing only on the lever in front of us is an insidious kind of myopia. It won’t prevent this trolley disaster—or the next one, or the one after that.
By committing sociology, we can reframe the trolley problem from a niche moral dilemma to a very real social problem—from an unlikely and nightmarish hypothetical to a compelling question that is actually relevant to our daily lives: how do we collectively take responsibility for systemic problems? This question is not only moral in nature; it is essentially political, and it can be answered by collective action.
The world doesn’t need perfect people. It needs systems designed for the common good.
But it’s our responsibility to build them.
Photo by Linas Drulia on Unsplash
