The computer screen showed a line drawing of the classic philosophical thought experiment called The Trolley Problem. Except instead of stick figure people tied to the railroad tracks like in the original version – which asks you to decide whether to redirect the trolley and save the 5 people on the tracks but kill a single person on the alternate track – it was a choice between you and five identical clones of you.

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting twist,” I commented to my older son, who was both laughing and seriously contemplating the moral implications of this ridiculous choice. It was one of a series of increasingly silly versions of the problem that he was futzing around with. I pointed out, “You know, a lot of people think the original version is silly too because it only offers those two awful choices. Which is true. I guess the thing is that it makes us think about who gets hurt in the decisions we make.”

While the trolley problem itself is ridiculous, there are plenty of versions of it in our society, like people who posit that we have to trade off between environmental protection and the economy. Or posit that to have a good life, we have to screw over Amazon workers so we can have overnight delivery. (In fact, one of the versions says “A trolley is heading towards one guy. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your Amazon package will be late. What do you do?”) Or that we don’t have an obligation to pay school taxes over a certain age because well, that’s not *our* responsibility. At that point, society is not even presenting us with an impossible choice – it’s saying that we don’t have to care at all. After all, it’s not our responsibility if the trolley is going to run someone over.

Except it is.

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