glumshoe:
The trolley problem, Shroedinger’s cat, and other thought experiments are meant to be absurd situations. They’re not really about boxes, cats, trolleys, or levers. Those things are only there to help you visualize the concept being explored, and are ultimately irrelevant. They’re like word problems on a math quiz–the narrative is there only to help you create a mental model for the equation in common language.
They’re simplified and absurd and do not describe real-world situations that you are likely to ever encounter because they’re more palatable that way. You could set the trolley problem in a hospital or in a burning building or on a battlefield and it would still be the same thought experiment even if there were no trolleys involved. The variable being tested is a question of ethical responsibility in a no-win situation, where every choice you have is a bad one.
Obviously you’ll never be trapped in a train yard with sole control over a lever and four people tied to train tracks, but if you end up in the medical field or a leadership position, you might one day be forced to make difficult decisions between unthinkable choices about other people’s well-being.
The relative absurdity of the trolley problem is meant to make it easier to contemplate your personal values and ethical framework in a pure state, rather than complicated by real-world context and distractions.
That’s why Tumblr’s fixation on treating the trolley problem like a riddle with a “Secret Third Option” solution misses the point isn’t actually meaningfully engaging with the question. It’s like answering a word problem on a math test by criticizing Jenny’s plans to bring 450 lemons on a picnic instead of doing the equation.
To completely derail this post over to Star Trek, this is why it’s so important that Captain Kirk’s rebellion against the Kobayashi-Maru test happens in the context of ‘Dagger of the Mind.’
The unwinnable simulation scenario exists to both prepare potential starship commanders for and evaluate how they cope with being in a trolley problem scenario, where none of the outcomes are good or even acceptable and yet the decision is still on them to choose something.
Kirk’s dogged refusal of this scenario isn’t simply rejecting authority or missing the point of the test or feeding his own ego or a simple reflection of control issues, or any of those ways it’s often read. It’s not about needing to win.
One of his formative life experiences was front-row seats to someone trapped in a situation that looked like this, who said very well and buckled down and started choosing who would die, forcefully, with a view toward the end number of people being as small as possible.
Trying to make the best choice he could with his authority in a no-win scenario.
And then it turned out that there had been a third option all along, out of his sight and out of his power when he made the decision but there, and coming, and nobody had had to die.
So the way Kirk engages with the test is saying, I understand what you’re doing here, but I don’t need to be placed in this emotional or philosophical position. I’ve inhabited it before. I have thought about this question a whole damn lot, and it’s never going to be really theoretical for me again. This is what I know about this kind of moment in reality.
I tend to think that the sheer number of times he was permitted to retake the test shows that the Starfleet Academy people were accommodating his trauma, though I expect they thought he was using it to try to process his feelings about Kodos’ decision in the sense of ‘using a controlled repetition to come to terms with what had happened,’ not by changing the script.
And that he didn’t wind up getting major demerits to his ‘fitness to captain a starship’ for this demonstration of lunatic bullheadedness because the people grading it understood that he wasn’t incapable of understanding the point of the exercise, it just meant something different to him.
