The trolley problem is a well-known thought experiment in moral philosophy. You’re standing at a railway switch. A runaway trolley barrels down the tracks toward five workers who will certainly die if it continues. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track, but there’s one worker there who will be killed instead. What do you do?
This is an example of a moral dilemma, variants of which appear throughout philosophical thought experiments and in fiction. In Sophie’s Choice, there is an even more harrowing scenario: a mother in a Nazi camp is told she must choose which of her two children will be killed. If she refuses to choose, both will die.
Once you’re in such a situation, there is no good answer, if by “answer” we mean something that would satisfy our usual expectations of an answer. Every option involves a tragic outcome that will haunt you so long as you have memory and a healthy conscience. Philosophers argue about whether there are “genuine” moral dilemmas, cases where, even by the lights of the best moral theory, you cannot avoid doing wrong. While we can debate this, it is clear that no amount of ethical reasoning will transform a terrible situation into anything other than what it is.
But if we are interested in solving these dilemmas in the real world, I think we’re asking the wrong question. The real ethical work happens long before anyone is standing at that lever. The most important form of moral progress isn’t getting better at choosing between bad options but creating a world where such options arise less often. The task is not to resolve dilemmas, but to dissolve them. Historically, this is exactly how humanity has addressed many of the moral dilemmas that plagued previous generations.
Take hunger. There are two broad ways to respond.
The first is reactive. A person is hungry, someone provides aid, and the immediate problem is solved.
The second is more systematic. We know people will inevitably become hungry given human biology, and we know hunger creates all sorts of problems like theft and resentment. So we build structures that let people obtain food reliably: agriculture, supply chains, markets, research and development, social safety nets. When someone is hungry, food is available, and there are predictable ways for them to get it.
Both approaches address hunger, but only the second makes it non-recurring. The first approach is of resolution where we address problems after they occur: we give money to a starving man so he doesn’t commit a desperate crime. The second approach is of dissolution where we design the background so the problems rarely arise: we create an economy in which the man can use his talents and be rewarded for them.
If we reflect on the history of moral progress, we find that our greatest achievements follow the dissolution pattern. Consider slavery. We didn’t solve slavery by making it more humane or by discovering better answers about who should be enslaved. We dissolved it by building societies where the institution became unthinkable, through economic development that made free labor more productive than forced labor, through moral and religious movements that delegitimized the practice, through legal reforms that criminalized it, and through education that made its injustice self-evident to subsequent generations.
Similarly, we ended the practice of dueling over honor disputes not by making duels fairer but by developing systems and norms that rendered them obsolete. And we’ve dramatically reduced famine not through emergency aid or appeals to the conscience of the rich but through science and technology, economic growth, and better political institutions.
Sophisticated civilizations don’t merely get better at managing recurring crises. They engineer those crises out of existence. The ethical question, then, is not “What should I do when confronted with an impossible choice?” but “What world should we build so that fewer people face impossible choices at all?”
Why, then, do we favor resolution over dissolution? To the extent we do, it is in part for the same reason we find ourselves more emotionally moved by a philanthropist who gives away large portions of his wealth than by a civil servant who helps design a boring tax reform that silently lifts millions out of poverty. Our moral imagination likes vivid, dramatic acts of sacrifice better than slow, structural work.
Philosophical attention to tragic dilemmas can be illuminating, but when we start to treat wrestling with impossible choices as the essence of moral life, we risk treating suffering itself as morally important, as a source of meaning and redemption, rather than as a problem to outgrow.
Continue Reading:
→ Review of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments
→ Michael Shermer on Morality and Science (podcast)
Other Projects:
→ Universal Open Textbook Initiative — World’s largest repository of free, multilingual textbooks.
→ Nasada — A productivity suite for the AI era.