Coffee and Unpack: The Good Place - Trolley Problems We Actually Face

The show: The Good Place is a comedy about a woman who dies, wakes up in the afterlife, and realizes very quickly that she was NOT supposed to get in. To keep her cover, she recruits her soulmate, Chidi, a painfully indecisive ethics professor, to secretly teach her how to become a better person. That is pretty much all you need to know about the show.

The scene: At one point, Chidi tries to explain the classic trolley problem, the thought experiment where you have to decide whether to pull a lever and kill one person to save five. It escalates fast, gets ridiculous, and somehow still makes a real point about how impossible ethical decision-making actually is. (Link in the comments, watch it before we meet, it is a very short clip)

What we’ll actually talk about: We’re not debating trolleys. We’re talking about the smaller, quieter versions of that same dilemma that show up in regular life such as: who gets our time when everyone wants a piece of it, where our money really goes versus what we claim to value, who we stay loyal to even when it costs us, also maybe smaller things such as priorities at work and which priority is the “real” priority. No one’s pulling a lever, but we’re all making these calls constantly, usually on autopilot.

This is just another light discussion over coffee.