The Trolley Problem: Intuition and Emotion
I wrote a blog, which you can find here, about the Trolley Problem. If you haven’t read the blog yet, the Trolley Problem is a psychological or philosophical debate about what to do when you’re faced with this idea of who to save. Is it better to save 5 people from being hit by the trolley or 1 person?
To give you a very quick summary, I used the blog to offer the idea that it really isn’t much of a debate at all because what’s meant to be will be. Death is simply a neutral transition point. Everybody comes in with their own life path and set of themed experiences they are meant to have. Anybody that isn’t meant to have a certain experience simply won’t have it. We are not obligated to save each other, regardless of what the construct of human morality might suggest. Morality is subjective and changeable given the right circumstances anyway. The idea that there is only one right answer or that everybody should have the same moral belief system are warped human perceptions. From a logical perspective, the Trolley Problem is nothing more than a human constructed problem that isn’t really a problem at all.
What I wanted to add for my Substack followers are the ideas of intuition and emotion. The Trolley Problem is completely hypothetical. There is no room for intuition or emotion in a hypothetical problem. However, when scenarios are real we may feel called or drawn to do certain things. Sometimes, we may be called to help other people. When that happens, it’s perfectly okay to act on your intuition or emotion in the moment.
The problem with the hypothetical scenario is that it’s a trap of sorts. There is no way to truly determine what one would do given that circumstance. From that place, if we apply some philosophy and some spiritual truth we can come to a pretty easy conclusion that there is no problem to solve.
By taking out intuition and emotion, we’re simply looking at it from a logical place. But when our logical place is based on warped perceptions of death, experience, and morality, we create a problem that doesn’t exist. If we’re going to be truly logical about something, then we have to be able to see it clearly. To see it clearly we have to understand that the truth is not painful. If your perception is causing you pain that means you’re not seeing it clearly. When we remove all the warped perceptions, we see that there is no problem, we can simply allow the experience to play out.
What we ultimately have to trust, is that if we were in a situation like this we would do what we felt was right in the moment. The underlying belief is that whatever decision we make in the moment is the one that was meant to be made. If we’re in a position where we could intervene, we would still have to trust that it will play the way it’s meant to. Whatever choice we make was how it was meant to play out. Whether we choose to allow it to happen or save some people, it doesn’t matter because that will end up being the right choice. There is no wrong choice, ever.
Every experience serves a purpose in human reality. Somebody will always get something from it. There is always something positive or good to be found in every experience no matter how awful or horrific you feel it is. When you see and interpret experience from this place, it allows you to accept experience as just a thing that happens. It’s always going to be okay because there is never anything wrong. There are no mistakes, even in circumstances such as the Trolley Problem. Things happen as they are meant to. Let yourself off the hook. It’s not your job to protect people from their life experience or death. Neither are bad. They are just things that happen.
Have you ever felt a strong pull to do or say something? If so, what did you do or say and how did it turn out?
Love to all.
Della