Let's Reimagine "The Trolley Problem"
Tim Johnson, PhD
Cultural institutions executive. 18 years experience in plant conservation and gardens. ?? I help nonprofits and nonprofit people craft and achieve their ambitious goals.
In the season 3 episode of NBC's The Good Place called "The Snowplow", Eleanor Shellstrop (played by the amaaazing Kristen Bell) struggles with rejection. Her proposal to extend a neuroscience research study that she has been participating in with a group of people who come to be here close friends is unanimously panned by the group simply because everyone else is moving on to other things. Masking her shame and sadness, and in true Eleanor Shellstrop fashion (#shellstropout!), she defaces (#punintended) the party cake decorated with a picture of the group, declaring, "I don’t need you guys! And since you don’t need me I’m just gonna take the me out of this cake!"
A moment later, neuroscientist and friend-of-Eleanor's, Simone Garnett (played by the amaaazing Kirby Howell-Baptiste) finds Eleanor hiding in the bushes outside the party. Eleanor, ashamed and embarrassed by her own reaction, asks Simone, "You’re a brain scientist. Can you tell me why I did that in there?"
After a pithy retort from Simone that she holds advanced degrees in bio-medicine and doesn't specialize in temper tantrums, Simone offers this:
"Here’s my guess. As humans evolved the first big problem we had to overcome was me versus us - learning to sacrifice a little individual freedom for the benefit of a group. Like sharing food and resources so we don’t starve or get eaten by tigers - things like that. The next problem to overcome was us versus them - trying to see other groups different from ours as equal. That one we’re still struggling with. That’s why we still have racism and nationalism and why fans of Stone Cold Steve Austin hate fans of The Rock... What’s interesting about you is that I don’t think you ever got past the me versus us stage. Have you ever been part of a group that you really cared about?"
I shared this clip in a Landscape Studies class at Smith College during a talk I gave last year titled: Re-storying Botanic Gardens: How the stories we tell about plants can undermine colonialism, increase equity, and make us more human". The talk was about the relevance of botanical gardens today and the work botanical gardens need to do to be better models of inclusion, equity, diversity, and access by changing how we tell stories, what stories we tell, and who we empower to tell those stories. And I framed relevance around the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. This clip from The Good Place introduces perhaps the most fundamental of human conundrums: who do we help, who do we ignore, and why do we make those value judgements?
Who are the people we see as family and friends and thus worthy of sharing our resources (time, money, land, food, attention, etc.), and who are the outsiders, the nameless/faceless hordes we protect our valuable resources against? Who are the people I will let eat off my plate in a restaurant (my wife and kids... end of list...) and who are the people whose calls for spare change I won't even acknowledge as I leave the restaurant with my to-go container of leftovers that are destined to be forgotten in the back of my refrigerator.
When we examine the sustainable development goals, which are actually a reorientation of the world's most intractable problems - poverty, hunger, the under-education of girls and women, unequal access to healthcare, and climate change to name a few - towards action, we are talking about "me versus us" and "us versus them" problems. These problems look like they are about scarcity of resources, but they are not; they are about scarcity of compassion.
As has been said by many people smarter than me, the world does not have a resource problem, it has an allocation problem. This means that while some US communities are without supermarkets, 30-40% of our food supply is literally wasted, thrown out before it can be consumed. But what is easy to miss is that our distribution systems have been intentionally built to create winners and losers. Wealth attracts wealth. Opportunity attracts opportunity. Success attracts success. Our in group gets smaller as resources accumulate.
The good news is we - and her I am speaking specifically to those of us who, like myself, have power, and privilege, and unfairly better access to resources because of the color of our skin; our sex, gender identity, and sexuality; the zip codes we grew up in; the wealth we were born into; and ultimately because of the systems of oppression that were deliberately and undeniably designed to benefit people like "use" at the expense of "them" - we know how to solve these big problems: those who are taking more than their fare share need to give a lot more up and use our privilege to undo this sh*t. We need to build new networks of resource sharing based on different models of what is right, fair, and just.
Conscious intervention is needed to break these cycles so that wealth, opportunity, and success are more equitably available. We need to change the way we see the world, perceive it to work, and imagine how it can work. The question is how?
I was reminded of all this a few weeks ago when an economic botany instructor said his class was discussing an article by Evan Mandery called, "What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America's Partican Divide", which is about what teaching the infamous The Trolley Problem tells us about the ideological divide in America. It's an unusual reading for a class about how humans use plants as spices, intoxicants, and fibers. But for a class with a not so hidden agenda of helping students appreciate plants, it makes perfect sense to talk about the universality of human dependency on plants... which good instructors like this one use to open doors to discussions about the powers-that-be and access to resources.
For those unfamiliar, The Trolley Problem is a psychological thought exercise that posits that you are a trolley conductor on a runaway trolley headed down a track where 5 workers (or 10, or 100, or...) are working and will be unavoidably killed by the runaway trolley. That is unless you throw a switch that moves the trolley onto another track. The catch is that this other track sends the trolley careening towards a single worker (or a beloved pet, or a friend, or a member of your family...).
The Trolley Problem works on two different levels. First, it highlights the conflict between utilitarianism ideals (the ethic of the greater good, if you will) and deontological (the morality of the absolutely right and wrong). Some people (deontologists) may balk at the idea of taking any action in this situation, even if it results in fewer casualties, believing that any participation in the taking of a life is wrong. But as Evan Mandery points out in his article, most people look at this as a math problem... at least at first; once they have to choose between a group of strangers and just a single loved one and a group of strangers (5, or 10, or 50...), most people start deploying fuzzy logic to rationalize why saving a single loved one is the right thing to do, even if it comes at the cost of a whole bunch of other good people.
Us versus them. In one iteration of The Trolley Problem, imagine choosing between a loved one and a stranger who will cure a form of cancer, or solve world-hunger, or do something else extraordinary that dramatically improves the plight of humanity. It's still hard for us to even pretend to make that sacrifice. Why do we value a loved one's life more than that of a stranger even if that stranger is more exceptional, kinder, nicer, and potentially more impactful human being?
The answer is pretty simple actually: it's bias. Our brain looks for any excuse to make a faster/easier decision. It was designed to detect patterns that signal danger, identify resources, and keep us alive long enough to reproduce. This fast thinking system also lies to us sometimes, creating the illusion that we are being rational when we are instead making a snap judgment and then rationalizing it after the fact.
The Trolley Problem makes an appearance in The Good Place as well (season 2, episode 6... but who's counting). And, in a twist that I will not reveal here, Elleanor Shellstrop finds a third solution, breaking the third wall of the us versus them conundrum. Which brings me to the point of all this rambling about ethics and pop culture. If the world's most challenging problems are us versus them problems, and the solution is a) for the haves to do much more sharing and that requires that b) we shrink this conceptual divide between us and them, then as leaders, we have to start thinking about all the third options. We need fewer dichotomies. Fewer win-lose scenarios. Like Highland Park High School Debate Team, we need to start inspecting our systems for signs of oppression, designed inequality, and unequal access. We need a growth mind set.
So, what happens when we stop playing the zero-sum game? Well, quite frankly: everything. To that end, I offer a few new takes on The Trolley Question. Questions other than will you act? and who will you choose? Questions like, what if we didn't make people work on trolley lines when the trolley's were running in order to keep their jobs? What if we didn't build trolley lines in such a way that working on them put people's lives in danger? What if we were as outraged about the unjust and preventable death of a stranger on a trolley line as we were about the death of a loved one? What if the world didn't need trolleys anyways because we built locally robust circular economies, and strong social networks (I'm not talking about virtual ones, but real ones), and distribution of resources was not a problem anyway? What if after the first trolley accident, we took drastic action to make sure another one never happened again?
Who has enough and who doesn't?/Who lives and who dies?... these are questions we shouldn't even have to ask.
Development Strategist | Editorial Consultant | Project Manager
5 年So thoughtful and intelligent!