The correct answer to the trolley problem is that you should provide support to the survivors and families of victims, launch an independent inquiry into why the safety system failed, and invest in fixing the safety problems.

That’s the answer after the fact. If you know in advance that your trolley’s safety system is vulnerable to that kind of catastrophic failure, the right answer to the trolley problem is to fix your safety system.

Either way, whether or not the trolley operator pulls the lever is the least morally significant question in a trolley accident scenario.

There’s something really morally horrifying as treating the trolley operator as the only one with moral agency.

It erases the fact that it was other people’s choices that created a scenario in which the trolley operator would inevitably come to kill someone.

What kind of person looks at Sophie’s Choice and thinks that the right question is ‘Which child should she have picked?’ rather than ‘How do we defeat Nazis?’

I don’t think that it serves any constructive purpose to subject people to nightmare scenario trolley crash practice.

It’s gratuitously traumatic. It doesn’t help anyone. And it erases the people who are actually responsible for creating the situation that’s killing people.