The Right Wing Hasn't Solved The Trolley Problem

They think it's a serious moral conundrum, unlike the left

The trolley problem is an age old philosophical quandary about a trolley on the tracks barreling towards people who are tied to it. The crux of the problem is that it’s headed for five people who are tied to the tracks, and if someone is to pull the lever up ahead, they’ll switch to the track that only has one person attached to it, thereby killing one person instead of five. Sounds simple enough, right?

The left solved this problem ages ago. The left wing in America — and across the world — is a humanist enterprise that believes in reducing the total amount of human suffering in the world. Every avenue you can think of, from providing people with free access to food and access to work and electricity and water and shelter, is about reducing the amount of suffering that humans experience overall. It’s a very straightforward and simple way to describe humanism, a human centric belief system that sits at the heart of leftist philosophy the world over. So what's a leftist to do when faced with a trolley problem? They pull the lever, killing one person instead of five. It doesn’t matter what other attempts you make at making the trolley problem sound more difficult: there’s a simple mathematical equation that says that one person suffering is less than five people suffering, and one family losing a member is better than five families losing a member, so you pull the lever.

The right wing, on the other hand, hasn’t solved the trolley problem. They think it’s a serious moral conundrum preventing them from taking serious action and that there’s no right answer. Take transgender people, for example. What’s the right wing most concerned about when it comes to children transitioning? Detransitioners — which they love to use as a cudgel against transitioning services for children — people who end up coming to regret having transitioned at all and whose bodies were put through the medical machine to look different than what they could have with no medical intervention at all. Detransitioners by official estimates make up about 2% of all people who go through transition, according to a study done in Sweden that looked at people who chose to go back to the original gender on official documentation after undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. But this number is a little too small; it leaves out all the people who desist, which is to say people who get part way through the process and choose to quit half way. So we can assume the numbers are at least a little bit higher — let’s call it an even five times as many people — still putting the number at around 10%.

So let’s make it a trolley problem. Up ahead on the train tracks there are ten transgender children whose gender identity doesn’t match their bodies, and hurtling towards them is the transition train, which guarantees that they’ll be able to access transitioning services to match their gender identity and sex together in the future. If you allow the train to keep going, nine out of ten of those children will be saved — they’ll be allowed to transition — while one of them will become a detransitioner and regret the process. But if you pull the lever, nine of those children *won’t* be saved, while the one detransitioning child will never be put through the process, thereby saving them from the whole ordeal. This is what the right is so concerned about. This is why making it a trolley problem actually simplifies the whole issue. The right wing wants more human suffering in the world, and by any force of nature they’re going to try to get it. Meanwhile, people on the left already solved the issue — one detransitioner is nowhere near as bad as nine potentially suicidal trans kids — so they choose not to pull the lever. Simple as that. If the right winger chooses to pull the lever, they are by definition choosing to protect one kid instead of nine kids. They’re definitively protecting fewer children for the sake of a political agenda. Sound familiar?

Sam Harris is pretty famous for being a right wing thinker who put forward his own version of the trolley problem: there’s a bomb that’s going to go off somewhere and kill fifty people, and a terrorist knows the location of the bomb, so what’s the FBI and the CIA to do? Do they torture the terrorist, thereby potentially learning the location of the bomb, or do they choose to do nothing? Do they pull the lever on the torture trolley, or do they let it barrel straight into fifty lives? Seems like a slam dunk — torture one person to save fifty? You’d think any leftist worth their salt would immediately pull the lever and torture the terrorist, but it’s not that simple. See, Harris never actually asks whether or not torture works, and declassified FBI materials have suggested that torture tactics are actually very ineffective at extracting information, to the point that they extract false information in up to a third of cases while extracting no worthwhile information in another 40%. So what’s the chance that you pull the lever and the trolley still barrels into fifty people? Around 75%. Then when you’ve pulled the lever, you’ve tortured one person and killed fifty anyway. It’s usually better not to pull the lever.

The right has a really difficult time with probabilities and mathematics because they don’t understand either of them. Trying to come up with basic math to assist in our efforts to save as many people as possible involves doing some amount of arithmetic where people, regardless of how many people there are in the original equation, end up suffering and dying. That will always have to be factored in. Politics is, at its core, about deciding who lives and who dies; there are always factors that can be considered that can reduce the amount of human death or increase it depending on who’s doing the calculations, but at the end of the day, the right wing has no interest in finding the calculation that benefits the most people possible. They only want their own specific version of the calculation to be considered, regardless of whether or not the equation has taken every piece of information into consideration. Remember, the left has already solved the trolley problem — solved it, not come up with a partial solution — we already know what’s going to reduce the most human suffering possible just by looking at the equation and taking the equation to its logical conclusion. Whether it’s one death or five, nine dead trans kids or one trans kid with a double mastectomy, or one tortured terrorist with fifty potentially bombed suspects, the left is capable of taking the trolley problem and coming up with a definitive answer to the problem itself. We don’t consider it to be a great moral question because the arithmetic — basic math done by grade schoolers — usually exonerates our answer. Meanwhile, the right wing has themselves up in arms over the minority of the problem, insisting that sacrificing the majority of people is a better and smarter solution than protecting them from the tyranny of the minority.

And that’s really what it comes down to: that the right wing has always been in the minority, and they’re afraid of not being protected from the tyranny of the majority, so they always take the side of the smaller group. When you’re a right wing thinker, your belief system has to inform you that doing things for the majority of people is wrong and bad, even when it would benefit everyone including yourself. That’s why the right wing can’t solve the trolley problem. They’re not just bad at basic arithmetic, they want everything to be worse for everyone all the time because doing otherwise would be engaging in the tyranny of the majority, the opposite of what they believe in.

All their bluster about trans people being groomers and child predators holds very little sway to people who know that the majority of people out there don’t have any ill will towards children. Their belief that terrorists have to be tortured doesn’t hold a lot of merit when you look at the actual data about torture’s efficacy. And ultimately, killing one person is probably better than killing five, regardless of what they attempt to say about the importance of the people on the tracks.