Abortion

The trolley problem was already the most famous parable in modern moral philosophy, and then came The Good Place. The Good Place was a smart, funny TV series about ethics, with some eschatology thrown in. Suddenly my first-year students—in fact, even random people on the street—seemed to know about trolleys, fat men on bridges, and the rest. Of late, the trolley problem has become so popular it has threatened to jump the shark. The mistaken lesson some viewers got from it was, ‘What is so great about the trolley problem is that there is no right answer.’ Or so said Chidi Anagonye, who is the Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy on the show. No, no, no; the problem has a right answer. With apologies to Professor Anagonye, what is so great about the trolley problem is how it pushes you to keep talking with others until you have a chance of finding the answer. He is right the answer is disputed, but this is not quite the same as having no right answer. Perhaps what he meant to say is that the trolley problem is open textured. By this I mean that the problem doesn’t presume knowledge, in advance, for which specific features matter morally. The story engages lots of features so that, over the course of the telling and listening and debating, the relevant right-making and wrong-making features emerge. If Chidi meant that, I agree. So too would the original author of the problem, Phillipa Foot.