The Trolley Problem is Dumb (and so is Voting for a Third Party)

You know this one. There’s a trolley on a track. Up ahead, the track splits: if the train goes straight, it will run over five people, but if the train turns, it will only run over one person. You stand at the junction holding a lever and you have to decide if the train will continue straight or if you’ll pull the lever and reroute the train so that it only kills one person. What do you do?

This dilemma is called “the trolley problem” and for years it’s been a staple of ethical thought. On the one hand, if you do nothing, the trolley will kill five people but you can tell yourself that you weren’t responsible because the trolley was already going straight. On the other hand, if you pull the lever and the trolley kills one person, the trolley kills four fewer people, but the decision to kill that one person rests on your shoulders. The decision is therefore between five deaths and the possibility you weren’t responsible or one death and the clear fact that you were. What would you choose?

The problem with the trolley problem, however, is that it’s really stupid! On its own terms, the problem is stupid because the answer is obvious: you should definitely pull the lever so that only one person dies. Yes, if you don’t pull the lever you can tell yourself you didn’t make a choice at all, but a more blatant example of self-deception would be hard to find. Of course you bear some responsibility for those deaths, because you chose NOT to pull the lever, and choosing not to do something is as much a choice as choosing to do something. Lie as you like, the choice is between killing one person and killing five. And what kind of ethical dilemma could this be if the answer is so stunningly obvious?

Beyond the obviousness of the answer, the trolley problem is stupid for a second reason that is more frustrating than the first: it doesn’t help explain any ethical dilemma that we might face in real life. However, the utility of an ethical problem lies in its ability to help explain some aspect of our actual lives. The point of such hypothetical problems, after all, is to help bring clarity to our real lives. But when do any of us face a choice even remotely close to this one? I’d hazard that “never” gets pretty close to the mark.

The rhetorical effectiveness of the trolley problem stems from its simplicity—you either pull the lever or you don’t—but real life problems are never this simple. They’re filled with nuance and complexity, history and context, and all of this shapes the meaning of our ethical problems as well as our responses. But the trolley problem eliminates all of these questions—who are the people on the track? how did they get there? why am I holding the lever? let alone, who’s driving this damn train?—in favor of distilling ethics down to such a narrow point that it applies to nothing at all. So the trolley problem is not only stupid because on its own terms the answer is obvious, but its doubly stupid because as a hypothetical problem it doesn’t actually illuminate any real ethical problems. If anything, in its simplicity, it obscures them because it makes complex problems seem like simple ones. The trolley problem is both obvious and irrelevant, or more simply, its just plain dumb.

Every time I see the trolley problem used to explain an ethical dilemma my frustration rises, because it’s always clear that the trolley problem is being applied to a situation much more complicated than the problem makes it appear. Yet, despite my annoyance, every four years I’m reminded that there is actually one real-life example to which it does apply: voting in a two-party election.

Like it or not, voting in a two-party system is just as dumb as the trolley problem: we know that either choice is going to lead to a lot of suffering, so lesser-evil voting is really the only logical option. It would be nice to live in a world where we got to choose between two (or more) good options, or even, one good option and one bad option, but in the United States, that’s not the choice we have: we have to choose between a bad choice and a worse one. Given that choice, the answer is as obvious as it is in the trolley problem: we need to choose the less bad choice.

Even though the logic of voting is clear, this doesn’t stop the months of hand-wringing that precede every election (especially on the left). This was most acute during the Hillary campaign, but it’s returned in full force for Harris. We’re therefore treated to no end of diatribes about how people can’t in good conscience lend their support to the Democratic Party, and how they’ll either abstain from voting or vote for a third party. But in a two-party system (assuming you live in a swing state), it’s pretty obvious that if you’re not voting for the lesser-evil candidate of the two main candidates, you’re lending support to the worse of the two candidates. After all, it’s inevitable that one of those two candidates is going to win, just as the trolley is going to take one of the two tracks, and by refusing to make a choice (or by choosing a third party), you’re making it easier for the worse candidate to win (or for the trolley to kill a greater number of people).

This logic is so obvious that it takes creativity (and moral evasion) to maintain a commitment to progressive values while not voting for the Democratic Party. So we’re treated to a plethora of excuses that range from the moral (I can’t in good conscience support a party that is so morally odious) to the practical (how will we ever get better choices if we continue to tacitly endorse these ones). It’s the same tried and true hand-wringing we see every fours years. But none of this matters because we’re facing the trolley problem. We either choose the lesser of two evils, or else, be it by actively supporting the worse evil, voting for a third-party, or by abstaining altogether, we end up supporting the worse of two evils. You might want to be able to choose something good, but no amount of hand-wringing or equivocation is going to change the fact that you’re being forced to choose between two evils.

I want to be clear: none of this is an endorsement of the Democratic Party who are every bit as bad as critics say (and maybe even worse). This should be clear in the fact that I think the trolley problem applies to these elections (or that we call it lesser evil voting): we’re choosing between two “evils” because, in part, we’re choosing how many people will die. Hardly hyperbole, in the case of American elections, this is the literal truth. But what is also literally true is that the lesser evil is less evil. It shouldn’t take a hypothetical scenario involving trains to make this argument, but we nonetheless have one. And the trolley problem should be happy to finally be of use.

I also have absolutely no desire to beat up on people whose political gestures are ultimately those of a people hopeless about the future of American politics and who have good reason to feel that way. Similarly, I have no desire to try to sway these voters to vote differently: these voters have been betrayed by the Democratic Party, and trying to convince them to vote for that party (or blaming them for any potential loss) is basically a form of victim blaming. And I have no taste for it. Let alone that I probably couldn’t bring myself to actually endorse the Democratic Party.

But that said, I also have little patience for how these voters justify their votes. If you care about progressive values, there is only one vote that is consistent with those values, and not because the Democratic Party shares those values, but because sometimes (unfortunately, oftentimes) voting for progressive values doesn’t mean voting for progressive values, it means voting to make things worse (but less worse than the other party would make things). And no amount of rhetorical flourish is going to change the choice that we all face. Go ahead and vote how you’d like—I get it, I really do get it—but don’t try to convince me of the righteousness of your choice.

When it comes to the specific justifications—the moral and the practical—I don’t think either holds much water. I understand that people see their vote as a moral action and they want their action to be consistent with their morality. But these people are only focusing on the one person that would die if they pulled the lever and not the four additional people that will die if they don’t. Given the actual choice between killing one person and killing five, as odious a choice as it is, killing one person is “more moral” than killing five. Or maybe more accurately, it’s less immoral. Again, it sucks that we have to choose between two evils, but that is our choice. The only way it doesn’t seem so is if we ignore what we’re otherwise allowing to happen.

As for the practical justifications, these are somewhat more complicated, if they’re equally wrong headed. These arguments run that by abstaining from voting or by voting for a third party, action is being taken to try to help ensure that there are better choices in future elections. In other words, third-party voters argue that by supporting a third-party we might one day get a better option come election time, while those who abstain argue that their abstention is sending a message to the Democratic Party that they need to take voters demands more seriously, and offer better candidates. But again, this position is pretty obviously wrong.

In the first case, the barriers to a third-party are pretty much insurmountable in this country. There’s a reason we call it a two-party system, and it’s not because we have a long track record of third-parties breaking through. I could make an extended argument about why this is the case, but given the terrible track record for modern day third-parties, it seems pretty obvious. A vote for a third-party might be a protest vote, or a vote of conscience for a party you feel an affinity towards, but effecting the outcome of an election it will not (unless it’s to help one of the two parties win). As for abstention, there’s similarly a complete lack of evidence supporting this position. If there was, our currently dismal voter turnout rate would have somehow magically materialized into better candidates. Since it hasn’t, there’s no reason to think that lowering the voter turnout rate even further will somehow do so. Similarly, the threat (or actuality) of electoral defeat seems to have affected the Democratic Party not at all. Hillary’s defeat didn’t give us Bernie, it gave us Biden. And a Harris defeat will probably just give us Buttigieg or a similarly terrible option. All told, low voter turnout seems like a recipe for getting more of what we already have: a slew of terrible choices.

What makes all of these arguments so frustrating—both the moral and the practical—is that they’re ultimately self-defeating. Aside from the obvious flaws in these arguments, each iteration of these arguments is simultaneously expressing a sense of hope and also hopelessness. They express a sense of hopelessness at the current state of affairs, but also a sense of hope that the future might one day be better. The problem, however, is that the actions they’re taking aren’t actually making that better future, they’re making the future worse. So it’s self-defeating. But that’s where we’re at in American politics: sheer and utter despair.

Here’s the crux of the matter: there are actually ways to help make the future a better place, a place that even includes having better candidates at the federal level. There’s nothing magical about how to do this: it’s called organizing. It starts by organizing your community and your workplace, moving on to your county and then city, before then organizing your state. Eventually, maybe, you can think about organizing at the national level. And then, and maybe only then, will you get better candidates so that you don’t feel so bad voting in federal elections.

For the people who spend their lives making the world a better place, voting for the lesser evil probably isn’t a big deal. Yes, it always sucks to cast a vote for someone who is objectively bad, let alone evil, but when you spend your days doing the hard and practical work of making the world a better place, when your hope is grounded in the actual work that you do and not in a self-defeating gesture you make at the voting booth, the nature of your decisions also become clearer. You know where the better future comes from—it comes from you—and this allows the election to appear as exactly what it is: the only real life example of a really stupid ethical problem. And your vote should be clear.

So you want to feel better about voting for the lesser evil? Organize! You’ll feel better about a lot more too.