Solving the Trolley Problem and Other Moral Dilemmas

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 a solution. 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, markets, supply chains, research and development, social safety nets. When someone is hungry, food is available, and there are predictable ways to get it.

Both approaches address hunger, but only the second makes it non-recurring. The first relies on charity; the second builds civilization. It’s the difference between giving money to a starving man so he doesn’t commit a desperate crime, and creating an economy in which he can use his talents and be rewarded for them.

Call these two approaches resolution and dissolution. Resolution addresses problems after they occur; dissolution redesigns the background so they rarely arise.

If we reflect on 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 devising better procedures for selecting who would be enslaved. We dissolved it by building societies where the institution became unthinkable, through multiple reinforcing changes: economic development that made free labor more productive than forced labor, moral and religious movements that delegitimized the practice, legal reforms that criminalized it, and 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 legal systems and social norms that rendered them obsolete. And we’ve dramatically reduced famine, not mainly 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?”

Take climate change and economic development. The usual framing pits environmental protection against prosperity, developed nations’ historical emissions against developing nations’ right to grow. We’re told to accept painful trade-offs: sacrifice growth, lower living standards, or decide which countries get to develop and which must bear the burden of reduced emissions. We treat the trade-off as fundamental.

The dissolution approach rejects this framing. Instead of arguing over how to divide a fixed pie, we focus on technological abundance and institutional arrangements that eliminate the trade-off: clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, carbon capture that’s economically viable, agricultural methods that increase yields while lowering emissions. The work of ethics here is continuous with that of innovation and institution-building, so that future generations inherit both a livable planet and material abundance.

Or consider autonomous vehicles, which revive the trolley problem in a new, concrete form: how should a self-driving car be designed for cases when a crash is unavoidable? Should it kill one person instead of five? We can debate endlessly how to code these trade-offs. The dissolution perspective says: the real moral achievement is in designing vehicles and infrastructure that make such edge cases vanishingly rare.

This shift in perspective changes where we direct our attention and resources. Instead of focusing primarily on guilt and retribution, we invest in technological development and institutional design. Instead of treating trade-offs as inevitable, we ask when they are really hard constraints and when they are symptoms of a world that could have been built differently.

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 great chunks of his wealth than by a civil servant who designs a boring tax reform that quietly lifts millions out of poverty. Our moral imagination likes vivid, dramatic acts of sacrifice better than slow, structural work.

Our task is to get better at building a world with fewer terrible choices, not only at making heartbreaking decisions when they arrive. 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.