“Do not forget about the Trolley Problem,” a middle school teacher once told us. “You’ll look back on this moment and be glad you studied this specific dilemma early.”
In hindsight, she was right. In fact, I had no idea I would need to use that knowledge until I was directly in the middle of the situation.
Imagine this: you’re standing by a railroad track. There’s a lever in front of that railroad track, next to a button. The button sends an affirmative signal to a waiting train, so it can proceed. The lever allows the operators to switch between the primary track, and a secondary track, just in case.
Before pressing the button, standard operating procedure is to manually inspect the tracks, to ensure no debris exists. The operators even run a small cart through, to ensure the tracks themselves are not in bad shape.
All of the operators are out for the weekend. That’s okay, they just helped prepare the train for departure. They deserve the time off.
Except, someone bumped the big red button on the way out, without realizing it.
The train starts to build momentum. There’s no stopping it now. Everyone was so busy preparing the train, that checking the tracks to see if they were ready… not on their mind.
How could they forget? Well, the cart was out for repair. It passed the last three dozen times, why would it fail this time? Why would there suddenly be debris on the tracks?
Imagine you’re an engineer who just happened to walk by the button and lever. You see the train is starting to move. There’s debris even before the junction, and you can hear it. It’s loud.
But again, the operators are off-site. It’s not technically “your job” to even touch the lever. You’re just an engineer, you’re not an operator. Why would you flip that switch?
Well, because there’s a large rock straight ahead. If nobody flips the lever, it will hurdle right towards it and crash.
So, last second, you walk up to the lever, and flip it. That being said, in order to clear the last bit of debris off that secondary track to avoid the rock, you have to sacrifice your favorite wooden stick.
You spent decades whittling that stick until it was perfect. Except now, it’s the only thing you have to stop the train.
Would you sacrifice your favorite stick to save the train from the rock?
Let’s entertain both scenarios.
What if you just “let it be,” and pretended you didn’t see it? That would probably make some feel guilty, as if they were the person that pressed the button.
The other option would be to sacrifice your stick. It’s a material object, but you put years of effort into it. That would make you feel a different set of emotions.
That’s why the Trolley Problem is so difficult. You’re either sacrificing one person, or multiple. You have to choose one, you can’t choose both.
For the sake of argument, let’s say there’s a perfect 50% chance that you walk by the train. There are security cameras, but they can’t be viewed off-site due to a technical outage.
A few people in management heard the sound of the train from a great distance away, which made them nervous. They might be asking several questions, such as:
* Is the train intact?
* Which track did the train go down?
* Was there actually any debris in the way?
* Who caused the train to start moving prematurely?
It was an honest mistake, someone just pushed the button. All of these questions though, they almost remind me of a different dilemma of sorts:
https://medium.com/media/4ec6b678f4c67437bd9f844bd50b9acb/hrefWhat would you do?
Talk to you all on Monday.
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