The Trolley Problem Is Missing One Very Important Thing: Tomorrow

You have probably heard of the Trolley Problem. A trolley is flying down the tracks toward five people. You are standing beside a lever. If you pull it, the trolley moves to another track where one person is standing. Do nothing and five people die. Pull the lever, and one person dies. So, what do you do? Most people immediately start doing math. Five lives or one life? Saving five seems like the obvious choice. Philosophers have argued about variations of this problem for years, usually trying to figure out what our answers say about morality, responsibility, intention, and whether actively causing one death is different from allowing five deaths.

I have a different problem with the whole damn thing. Where is tomorrow? The Trolley Problem gives us a few seconds of information and asks us to determine whether a decision is good or bad based on what happens during those few seconds. Five people are here. One person is there. The trolley is coming. Pick. Apparently, we are supposed to make a moral judgment about an entire chain of events while being given about three links of the chain.

Fine. I pull the lever. The one person dies, and the five people live. Everyone standing around probably thinks I made the sensible decision. Five lives were saved at the cost of one. Based on what I knew when my hand was on that lever, the math was simple. Five is more than one. Case closed, right? Not even close, because everybody involved still has a tomorrow.

They take the man I killed to the morgue. During the examination, doctors discover something extraordinary about him. His body has a biological resistance they have never seen before. He is one person among eight billion carrying something researchers desperately need to understand: a disease that will eventually threaten millions of lives. Nobody knew that while he was standing on the track. I certainly didn't know it when I pulled the lever. All I knew was that there was one person on one track and five people on the other.

Now let's make it worse. One of those five people I saved becomes critically ill after the accident. There was one person who could have saved that person's life because of some incredibly rare biological compatibility. Guess who? The man I just ran over with the trolley. The person I sacrificed to save five was the person needed to keep one of my five alive. So now one of the five dies anyway.

Then we discover that the person who just died was the one whose biology, research, knowledge, genetics, or some other completely unforeseen circumstance could have unlocked the importance of the resistance found in the first man. The two people needed each other in a chain nobody standing beside that trolley could possibly see. The disease eventually spreads; the answer we needed died on those tracks, the person who could have helped us understand that answer died afterward, millions of people die, and maybe eventually we all die. Congratulations. I pulled a lever to save five people and somehow wiped out humanity.

Yes, I am intentionally taking the example to an extreme. That is the point. I could create a thousand possible tomorrows after that trolley moves, and every single one could completely change how we judge the original decision. Maybe the one person saves millions. Maybe one of the five saves millions. Maybe one needs the other. Maybe one of their children changes something important fifty years from now. Maybe someone meets someone because the accident happened. Maybe someone never meets someone because it happened. Every person involved continues creating another chain of events involving other people, and those people create more chains of events.

We have absolutely no idea where those chains end, yet we love looking at one tiny section of the chain and declaring that a decision was good or bad. That is what fascinates me about the Trolley Problem. We are being asked to determine the right decision while holding almost none of the information required to know the eventual consequences of either choice. We know what happens in the next five seconds. Life does not end five seconds later.

We do this to ourselves constantly. We make a decision on Monday using everything we know on Monday. Something happens Thursday, and suddenly Monday-you is an idiot. Now you are sitting there replaying the decision, saying you should have done something differently, should have noticed something, should have known what was coming. How exactly were you supposed to know Thursday on Monday? Thursday hadn't happened yet.

You made a decision standing at your own little trolley lever with whatever information life had handed you at that moment. Then life kept moving. More information arrived. More people became involved. Circumstances changed. One thing caused another thing, which affected something else, which changed something else entirely. Then you turned around and judged yourself using information you received after the decision. That is like giving someone half a book, demanding they tell you how it ends, and then calling them stupid because they guessed wrong.

This is why I have a hard time calling decisions simply good or bad. We can look at what we know, consider consequences, use common sense, consider the people involved, and make the best choice available to us in that moment. I am not suggesting we throw logic out the window and start making major life decisions by spinning around three times and pointing at something. I am saying we never possess the whole story, no matter how convinced we are that we do.

Even the decision you currently regret may have changed the direction of your life in ways you cannot see yet. The relationship you wish you had never entered may have created a chain that puts you somewhere completely unexpected years later. The job you regret leaving may have removed you from another chain of events. The opportunity you missed may have redirected your entire life toward something that does not even exist yet. You cannot know the complete outcome of a decision while you are still living inside the chain it created.

That brings me back to something I have been exploring for a while: intuition and the possibility that what we call a gut feeling may involve information our conscious mind cannot explain. I have gone even further with my own hypothesis and wondered whether intuition could somehow be connected to our future selves. I am not presenting that as scientific fact. I am exploring the possibility because when we accept that our conscious mind only has access to what it knows right now, those strange moments when something inside us seems absolutely certain become even more interesting.

Think about how often people say they didn't know why, but something told them not to go somewhere, call someone, accept something, leave something, or make a particular choice. Sometimes they later discover a reason. Sometimes they never do. Maybe there was nothing mystical about it and their brain noticed something their conscious awareness missed. Maybe there is more happening than we currently understand. Either way, I think we dismiss our gut far too quickly simply because it cannot always hand us a PowerPoint presentation explaining itself.

So when your hand is on your own metaphorical trolley lever, gather the information you have, think about what you know, pay attention to what you feel, trust your gut, and make your choice. Then trust that you made the choice you were supposed to make with the information available to you in that moment. You cannot demand that today's version of you know what the version of you standing ten years down the road will know.

Stop dragging your past self into court every time the future hands you another piece of evidence. She didn't have that evidence when she made the decision. She had what she had, knew what she knew, felt what she felt, and chose from there. Tomorrow will always have information today doesn't have, and ten years from now may completely change the meaning of something you are judging yourself for today. The trolley is still moving, the chain is still being created, and you have no idea where it ends.

Ocean~Spirithealer

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