Why The Trolley Problem Isn't a Problem
The Trolley Problem is a psychological or philosophical moral debate. A trolley is coming down a track and you see that it is set to hit 5 people that are unable to move. There is a lever available to pull that would send the trolley down a different track where only one person would be hit. What do you do?
Before we answer the question, let’s talk about death. Death is not something we can avoid. Every single person we know, including ourselves, will die at some point in some way. Humans are not meant to live forever.
Death is not the tragic ending that humans have a tendency to make it out to be. It is simply a transition point for the spirit that is along for the ride, to go back and forth between the human world and the spirit world. It’s a neutral transition. There is nothing to save anybody from.
There is no heaven or hell. Those are religious myths designed to scare people into behaving in certain ways. The spirit simply goes back to the spirit world and gets to decide whether to hop into another human body and do it again or not. There is no tragedy or punishment in human death. It is a neutral experience.
Philosophically, I believe in existentialism. Experience is neutral. It has no inherent value or meaning of its own. The experience gains meaning only through human perception. When our perceptions are warped it causes pain. When you find the truth, there will be no pain in your perception.
I also believe in determinism to some degree because I believe that the soul comes into the human body with the intention of exploring a certain theme or set of experiences. Each human being comes in with a life path of some kind. The experiences that person has on that life path are based on a given theme. The experience itself may not be fated or pre-determined, but the theme is. We can’t save each other from those life paths or the experiences that come with a given path.
We see this in the human world all the time. We have the sole survivor of the plane crash. We have the person that wasn’t in the building when it blew up. We have the random house on the street that survived the fire when nobody else’s home did. Essentially, what this means is that if we’re not meant to have the experience because it does not fit the theme of our life path, we will not have the experience. Those things are not for humans to decide. They are out of our control. They are what humans tend to think of as divine intervention and miracles. It’s not a miracle. It’s a pre-determined life path that didn’t include a given experience.
Morality is a human constructed belief system that is meant to guide an individual’s behavior. It is a personal belief system, not a societal belief system as some people would like it to be. Morality is subjective and changeable. Given the right circumstances, people can and will go against their own morality. It happens all the time. Moral arguments are currently one of the main causes of distress in our political systems.
The moral dilemma in the trolley problem is based on some warped perceptions about death and experience. There is no moral dilemma in simply allowing experience to occur. We have no need to save each other from our own life paths. We have no need to save each other from death because death is not a negative or bad experience. We have no need to change the outcome of an experience. What is meant to be will be. There is nothing wrong with passively allowing experiences to play out. It’s actually not our job to intervene. How do I know that? Because the person or people that are meant to survive will survive every single time, regardless of experience. There is nothing for you to change.
The perceptions that are examined using this hypothetical problem are painful. Remember, the truth isn’t painful. That means there must be a way to see this problem that isn’t painful.
The perceptions and constructs that we use to discuss this problem are warped. We need to see the problem differently so that it doesn’t become a painful choice. We need to understand how experience, death, and morality actually work. When we remove all of the warped perceptions and constructs from this hypothetical problem, it ceases to be a problem. We can allow the experience to play out and trust that what is meant to happen will happen and that everything will simply be as it is meant to be.
To answer the question, the only problem with this hypothetical trolley is the perception that it is a problem that needs to be solved. It is not. There is nothing to do but allow the experience to be as it is.
Love to all.
Della