The Trolley Problem Is No Longer Theoretical. How Do We Choose?

I used to think the trolley problem was a philosopher's toy.

You know the one. A runaway trolley is hurtling toward five people tied to the track. You're standing next to a lever. Pull it, and the trolley diverts but kills one person on the other track. Do nothing, and five die. What do you do?

It's a thought experiment designed to force a choice between two ethical frameworks: the utilitarian calculus (save the most lives) versus the deontological conviction (you cannot deliberately cause an innocent person's death, regardless of the arithmetic). Philosophy students have argued about it for decades in seminar rooms, usually over bad coffee, with the comfortable knowledge that nobody is actually going to die.

That comfort is gone.

Because we are now living inside versions of the trolley problem so large, so complex, and so morally consequential that the original thought experiment looks almost quaint by comparison. The trolleys are real. The people on the tracks are real. And we - individually, collectively, politically - are standing next to the lever.

The question is no longer theoretical. How do we choose?

The trolley problem

Three Real Trolleys in the Trolley Problem

Let me name them clearly because I think we avoid looking at them directly, and that avoidance is itself a choice.

Climate change presents us with a trolley problem stretched across time. We can maintain current economic systems and consumption patterns, like protecting present comfort and livelihoods for billions, while the trolley of ecological collapse accelerates toward future generations who cannot yet speak, cannot vote, cannot pull any lever themselves.

Or we can divert the trolley now, accepting real costs to real people in the present: economic disruption, job losses in fossil fuel industries, lifestyle changes that feel like deprivation to those experiencing them.

The utilitarian says: the numbers are staggering. Hundreds of millions of future lives. Pull the lever.

The deontologist says: you cannot deliberately destroy the livelihoods of miners in Wales or farmers in the American Midwest for the sake of people who don't yet exist.

And the Kantian asks: which principle are you endorsing? What kind of world are you choosing?

There is no clean answer. Anyone who tells you there is hasn't looked carefully enough.

Artificial intelligence presents a different shape of the same problem. We are building systems of extraordinary and rapidly expanding capability, with transformative potential to solve some of humanity's most intractable problems, like disease, poverty, scientific discovery, access to knowledge. The trolley of benefit is real and moving fast.

But so is another trolley: the potential displacement of hundreds of millions of workers before alternative structures of meaning and livelihood can be created. The concentration of unprecedented power in very few hands. The possibility - not science fiction, but the considered view of serious researchers - of systems that could, if we are not extraordinarily careful, develop in ways that are catastrophically harmful to human flourishing. Perhaps irreversibly so.

Who decides when to pull which lever? The people building the systems, who have obvious interests? Governments, who move far too slowly and understand far too little? The public, who largely don't know what's being built in their name?

Political polarisation is the trolley problem turned inward. When a society fractures into groups that no longer share a common factual world, who experience each other not as fellow citizens with different views but as existential threats, the trolleys multiply. Every political choice becomes a zero-sum calculation. Every policy a weapon. The very machinery of democratic deliberation, the lever we've always relied on, begins to seize up because the people who need to pull it together can no longer agree on what the tracks look like. And when people can't use the lever, they start thinking about other ways to stop the trolley. That's where things get very dangerous indeed.

Why the Original Thought Experiment Isn't Enough

The classic trolley problem has one crucial feature that real moral crises don't have: clarity.

You can see the trolley. You can count the people. You know the lever works. You know the outcome of each choice. You have complete information and unlimited time to decide.

Real moral dilemmas offer none of this.

With climate change, we are dealing with complex systems science that is genuinely uncertain at the margins, even if the core trajectory is clear. With AI, we are trying to make decisions about technologies whose capabilities and risks are evolving faster than our ability to understand them. With polarisation, we are attempting to diagnose a social pathology while we are inside it, our perception distorted by the very thing we're trying to see clearly.

Real choices are made under uncertainty, under time pressure, with incomplete information, by fallible people who have their own interests and blind spots and fears. The clean philosophical laboratory gives way to something messier, more human, and far more difficult.

And there's another feature of the real trolleys that the thought experiment doesn't capture: they are happening to us. We are not the detached observer standing at the lever. We are also the people on the tracks. We have skin in the game. Our choices about climate, AI, and political life affect our own lives, our families, the communities we love. Our moral reasoning is not clean. It is entangled with everything that makes us human.

This is not a reason to despair of moral reasoning. It's a reason to do it more honestly.

What the Philosophical Traditions Offer

I want to resist the temptation to give you a neat synthesis here, because I don't think one exists. But I do think the different traditions illuminate different aspects of the problem in ways that are genuinely useful.

Utilitarianism, the tradition that says we should act to produce the greatest good for the greatest number, is indispensable when the stakes are civilisational. When we're talking about the lives of hundreds of millions of people, present and future, we cannot afford to ignore the arithmetic. Numbers matter. Consequences matter. Refusing to engage with scale because it feels cold is itself a moral failure.

But pure utilitarianism has a terrifying feature: it can justify almost any harm to any individual or minority group if the numbers are sufficiently large. A utilitarian calculus, applied ruthlessly, can endorse things that every decent human instinct recognises as monstrous. We need something to check it.

Deontological ethics, the tradition Kant represents, which says some actions are simply wrong regardless of their consequences, provides that check. It insists that individuals cannot be sacrificed merely because the arithmetic demands it. That human dignity is not a variable in an equation. That means matter, not just ends.

But pure deontology can produce paralysis in the face of genuine civilisational risk. If I cannot pull any lever that causes harm to anyone, I may end up causing far greater harm through inaction. Rights-based thinking, taken to its limit, can become a way of refusing responsibility for the world.

Virtue ethics, Aristotle's tradition, asks something different from both. Not "what produces the best outcome?" and not "which rule applies?" but "what would a person of good character do?" What does phronesis, or practical wisdom, look like when applied to genuine uncertainty and genuine stakes?

Aristotle understood that moral life is not primarily about solving thought experiments. It's about becoming the kind of person who perceives rightly, feels appropriately, and acts well, even when, especially when, there is no clean answer available.

I find this the most honest framework for the choices we're actually facing. Not because it provides an algorithm, but because it demands something more difficult: the cultivation of genuine wisdom.

What the Shamanic Traditions Know

Here is where I want to go somewhere the mainstream philosophy tends not to reach.

All three of the real trolley problems I've described - climate, AI, and polarisation - share a deeper root. They are, at their core, symptoms of a civilisation that has lost its relationship with the living web of which it is a part.

The Andean tradition understands the earth not as a resource to be managed but as Pachamama, a living, sacred presence with which humans are in reciprocal relationship. The concept of ayni, of right relationship and sacred reciprocity, applies not just between people, but between humans and the more-than-human world. The climate crisis, from this perspective, is not primarily a problem of carbon arithmetic. It is a crisis of ayni. A civilisation that has taken and taken from the living earth without reciprocity, without reverence, without acknowledging the sacred nature of what it depends on, is now experiencing the consequences of that broken relationship.

The Norse tradition speaks of wyrd, which is the web of cause and consequence that connects all things across time. The Norse Norns, the otherworldly beings who weave the threads of fate, do not impose destiny from outside. They reveal the consequences of choices already made, and the possibilities inherent in choices not yet made. What we weave into the web now, we and our children will encounter later. There is no escape from the web. There is only the question of what we choose to weave.

Indigenous traditions worldwide share a principle that Western philosophy has mostly set aside: that our responsibilities extend not just to living humans, but to those who came before and those who will come after. The Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois, famously considered the consequences of decisions for seven generations hence. Seven generations. Not the next quarterly report. Not the next electoral cycle. Seven generations.

If we applied that principle to climate, to AI, to the political institutions we are currently degrading, what would we choose differently?

Learning to Hold the Tension

I want to say something that I think is genuinely important, and that our polarised political culture makes very difficult to say.

There are no villains in most of these trolley problems. Or rather, there are some, but they are far fewer than our tribal narratives suggest.

The coal miner who fears for his livelihood is not an enemy of the planet. He is a person on one set of tracks, looking at the trolley coming for him.

The climate scientist demanding urgent action is not an enemy of working people. He is a person who can see a different set of tracks, with a much larger number of people on them.

The AI researcher who believes the technology will cure cancer is not a naive fool. The AI safety researcher who believes we are building something we don't yet know how to control is not a fearmonger. They are looking at the same phenomenon and perceiving, with genuine clarity, different aspects of its nature.

The person who feels that rapid cultural and economic change has rendered their community unrecognisable is not a fascist. The person who believes that inclusion and justice cannot wait for the pace of the most reluctant is not an enemy of stability. They are both on the tracks. They are both real. They both matter.

Our current political culture wants us to pick a side and treat the other side as the trolley. That is a catastrophic misreading of the situation. We are all on the tracks. The question is whether we can find our way to the lever together.

That requires something very difficult: the willingness to hold the tension between competing genuine goods without resolving it prematurely into the comfort of certainty. To sit with complexity rather than collapsing it into a story where we are right and they are wrong.

In shamanic practice, we call this the capacity to hold paradox. To be in the space between worlds, between certainties, between the answer you wish you had and the reality you're actually in. It is not comfortable. It is not simple. It is, I believe, where wisdom lives.

So How Do We Choose?

I promised I'd attempt an answer, so here it is, honestly offered, without false certainty.

We choose by expanding the circle of who we count. Future generations. Other species. People on the other side of the world and the other side of the political divide. The wider we can honestly hold that circle, not as an abstraction but as a felt reality, the better our choices will be.

We choose by cultivating the quality of attention we bring to decisions. Not just gathering more data, but developing the capacity to perceive clearly, to notice our own biases, our own tribe's blind spots, the ways our fear and self-interest distort our moral vision. This is as much a spiritual practice as an intellectual one.

We choose by refusing the false comfort of purity. Every real choice in a trolley situation involves getting something on your hands. Pretending otherwise, withdrawing into ideological purity while the trolleys keep moving, is not innocence. It is a different kind of responsibility, and not an honourable one.

We choose by insisting on the humanity of everyone on the tracks. Not as a platitude. As a practice. Actively, repeatedly, especially when it's hardest.

And we choose by choosing. This sounds obvious, but it isn't. One of the most powerful ways the real trolley problems persist is through the collective paralysis of people who can see them clearly but are waiting for a more perfect moment, a more complete understanding, a cleaner choice. The trolley does not wait.

Aristotle was right that practical wisdom cannot be reduced to rules. Kant was right that the principles behind our choices matter, not just the outcomes. The shamanic traditions are right that our choices are woven into something larger than ourselves, and that we will live, and our descendants will live, with what we weave.

None of that tells you exactly which lever to pull. But it tells you what kind of person you need to become in order to pull it well.

That, I think, is where we have to start.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. Questions at the edge of philosophy, science, and ancient wisdom are what I live for. If this sparked something in you, I'd genuinely love to continue the conversation at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

Where do you feel the weight of the real trolley problems in your own life? And what helps you hold the complexity without collapsing into despair or false certainty? I'd really love to hear.