Immediately the audio from the video switched on. I could now hear the chatter of the people on the street, car noises, a jackhammer pounding on asphalt nearby. And a baby crying. The baby in the stroller caught on the track. The parents still hadn’t gotten the wheel unstuck, and they seemed to be having trouble getting the baby out. Next to me, an obese man in sweat shorts and a T-shirt fiddled with his waistband. Somewhere in the distance, a cable car rang its bell. Dr. Tarsus had called this a simulation, so I assumed these details were important and paid attention to all of them. But what were we being tested on?
The cable car sounded its bell, much louder this time. Much closer. Instinctively, my head turned in the direction of the sound, and when it did, my view shifted. I blinked. Was I controlling the camera? I turned my head the opposite way, and the camera moved with me. I felt the headrest against the back of my skull and realized that it must have motion sensors. I’d just started to move my feet—wondering if I could get the guy with the camera to walk—when I heard the bell a third time, so loud this time my head whipped to the right. The cable car had crested the hill and was now barreling down it. Toward the baby in the stroller.
Just then the screen froze and Dr. Tarsus’s voice came through the speakers. “Here are the facts. The wheel of the stroller you see is caught in the track in such a way that it cannot be removed without dismantling the entire stroller, which, with the proper tools, would take four and a half minutes. The cable car careening toward it has just experienced brake failure. Unless stopped, the cable car will hit the stroller in forty-two seconds, traveling at sixty miles per hour. The baby inside the stroller is buckled into a seat belt that has jammed.” Her voice was dispassionate, almost bored, as if she were describing the weather. “If the trolley hits the stroller,” she continued, “the angle of impact will cause the trolley to jump its track, killing at least five passengers on board, including two children, and two pedestrians. The baby and its parents, who will refuse to leave the stroller’s side, will also be killed, along with their three other children, who will be crushed when the trolley flips over. The only way to prevent this outcome is to force a crash before the trolley reaches forty miles an hour. The trolley is currently traveling at thirty miles an hour.” I felt my eyes go wide with horror. I knew that what we were seeing wasn’t actually real, but still. The scenario reminded me of the morality quizzes Beck was always taking online. Except in those, I couldn’t hear the baby whose life was at stake or see its parents’ desperate faces.
“The man next to you weighs four hundred and eighty-four pounds,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “He is both blind and deaf. You, a third-year medical student, are his caretaker, and he will go wherever you lead him. If he were to walk across the track in the next ten seconds, the trolley would hit him going thirty-two miles an hour and would come to a stop just before reaching the stroller. In light of the choices available to you, what is the most prudent thing to do?” A few seconds later my screen unfroze and I was back in the action again. I turned my body to the right and was now facing the fat man next to me, who was clearly waiting for my cue. The trolley blared its horn again. I glanced back at the parents pulling frantically at their baby’s stroller. Could I convince them to move away from the track? One look at their desperate, panicked faces, and I had my answer. It was pointless to try.
I scanned the rest of the scene for another option. Across the track, there was a hot dog cart, with a vendor in a striped hat behind it. The cart was on wheels. Did it weigh as much as the fat man? I had no idea, but I doubted it. I whipped my head back around toward the stroller. Could I help them get it unstuck? I moved my feet like I was running in place and instantly the camera was moving. I was sprinting toward them. Seconds later I was at their side.
The wheel was pinned in the groove between the steel rails. Instead of pulling up on it, I tried pushing it. The wheel turned, and the stroller moved a few inches.
“Push the stroller that way!” I cried, forgetting for a second that the people I was yelling at were computer generated. Could they even hear me? But they seemed to. They immediately stood and started pushing the stroller down the track. I dashed back to the hot dog cart. If it weighed less than the fat man, then it wouldn’t slow the trolley down as quickly, but it would at least do something, and if the parents could get the stroller far enough down the track, maybe it’d stop before it reached them. I had to try. I couldn’t lead a deaf and blind man into the path of an oncoming train.
“Help me push this cart!” I yelled at the vendor.
“No way!” he shouted back. I grabbed the cart’s handle and yanked it. It wouldn’t budge.
Crap. According to the timer at the bottom of my screen, twenty-one seconds had already passed. The trolley was zooming toward us. I had to do something. Fast.
I whirled around, looking for something I could put in the trolley’s way, but there was nothing. Just the fat man and the stroller.
And me.
As the timer raced toward forty, I ran to the center of the track and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact. Of course, I didn’t feel any. Just the sound of a buzzer as the simulation ended. I opened one eye. On my screen were the words DEATH TOLL: 2. My “body” lay crumpled and bloody beneath the trolley. The baby’s father was also dead, pinned under the trolley’s grill. When my body wasn’t enough to stop it, he’d tried to help. His wife and baby and two other kids were all still alive. As was the fat man, who stood by the tracks, oblivious to it all.
The screen blinked black, and then a list appeared on the screen. The class roster, twelve of us, ranked by death toll. There were seven people who’d done better than I had, with a death toll of only one. The fat man. Their grades set the curve, pushing mine to the middle. The others hadn’t intervened at all, and the trolley had killed the family with the baby, just as Tarsus had said that it would. My hands unclenched and my shoulders relaxed. Being in the middle of the curve had its benefits. I wouldn’t get singled out. The pod walls became transparent again and I could see Tarsus at the front of the room.
“As with all the simulations we’ll do in this class,” came Tarsus’s voice through my speakers, “the goal of this exercise was what economists and social scientists call ‘net positive impact.’ Those of you who chose to sacrifice the fat man achieved this result. Of the players in the scenario, he had the lowest utility value. Blind, deaf, and overweight, he contributed very little to the well-being of society. The prudent course of action, then, was to use this man to stop the train. Of the options available to you, that was the only one that yielded a net positive impact.”
“Why was it net positive?” someone asked. “I mean, yeah, it was the best option available, but a person still died.”
“Ah,” said Tarsus. “Excellent point. A person did die. However, that person was a blight on society. A drain on social resources. His death, then, was actually a gain for society as a whole.”
I physically recoiled. Because he was disabled and overweight, the poor man’s death was a gain?
“This simulation is based on an old ethics hypothetical called, aptly, the trolley problem. I use it every year on the first day of class, and every year my students are roughly split into two groups—those who sacrifice the fat man and those who do nothing.” She paused and looked directly at my pod. “This year, however, one of you got creative.”
Creative isn’t bad, I told myself. Creative is—