The Trolley Problem

Mose from The Office (US) is played by a man called Michael Schur. You’d never know it from Mose but Schur is a genius storyteller and brilliant producer. He wrote for SNL and then The Office. Then, he co-created Parks & Recreation. He would then go on to co-create Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Still later, he created The Good Place.

All of these are shows I would recommend without hesitation. I have adored how they take ordinary situations and everyday people and then turn them into something extraordinary, telling their stories in a way that is engaging and beguiling.

But The Good Place, though. I have watched this show in all its four seasons many times over. The first time I watched Season One, I did it because I didn’t know any other TV show to watch at the time and it was nice and bright, cheery and bubbly. A no-brainer. Till the season finale and f*ck my brains, that was the biggest plot twist I have ever had the honour to be hit with. Not even M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense compares.

Watch the show.

I shall get to my point. In one of the episodes in The Good Place, they discuss “The Trolley Problem”. The trolley problem is quite a simply put moral-philosophical problem. An intellectual debate on ethics, if you will. The situation: 

1. You are driving an out-of-control trolley. 

2. There are two tracks in front of you. 

3. On one track, there are 5 people.

4. On the other track, there is one person.

5. The trolley is unstoppable.

6. When it hits the people/person, they die.

7. Who do you choose to save – five people or one person?

There are many variants to this problem. For example: What if they are people you know? Or: What if it’s not a trolley but if you’re a doctor and you can cut up one healthy person and save the lives of, say, five people using their body parts? And so on.

I don’t suppose there is any real solution to the trolley problem. It is just a way to present the complexities in judgment. A really cool thought experiment on a very real moral dilemma. It is designed to highlight the way decision-making is complex and sometimes the choices are non-choices but you still have to make them.

All of this to say real world is so tough, so complicated. I don’t trust myself to choose between ice-cream flavours yet I make decisions every day and take risks for people who I don’t even know. The life of a civil servant, in a manner of speaking. 

Spoiler but Michael in The Good Place said he figured out the trolley problem. He said the problem with it is that it forces you to sacrifice one for the other. The actual solution, he said, was quite simple: you sacrifice yourself. I have heard a variant of this from a church service a long time ago. There, the driver sacrificed his beloved son on one track to save the others in the other track. I suppose with the Trinity, Michael’s solution may still hold – God sacrificed himself to save humanity. Of course, the trinity is a whole discussion on its own. I won’t venture there.

Is this it? I don’t know. Sometimes people appear to you as Mose but they are really Michael Schur. Sometimes you have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. And sometimes you have to ask if you can sacrifice say 820 villages for 10. Just fun thought experiments.