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A tram is running out of control. Five people are on the track ahead. You are standing next to a lever. Pull it, and the tram turns onto a side track where one person is standing. Do nothing, and five die. Pull, and one dies.
That is the trolley problem. You have probably heard it in a classroom, a podcast, or an argument at a kitchen table. It is one of the most searched questions in philosophy, and almost nobody searches it because they are facing a real tram. They search it because they already know the feeling. Somebody is going to lose, and you are the one holding the lever.
Here is what most versions of the puzzle never tell you. A real high priest once ran that exact sum about a real man. And the man on the side track did something no trolley problem allows for. He chose to be there.
What Is the Trolley Problem?
The puzzle began with a British philosopher named Philippa Foot in 1967. Her version was slightly different from the one that gets passed around. In her essay she imagined the driver of a runaway tram, who can only steer from one narrow track onto another. Five men are working on one track and one man on the other. Whoever is on the track he enters will be killed.
Foot was not writing about trams. She was writing about a much older question: is there a moral difference between the harm you cause and the harm you allow? Her tram was a way to make the question sharp.
Then an American philosopher named Judith Jarvis Thomson picked it up. She gave it the name “the trolley problem,” and in a 1985 paper in the Yale Law Journal she made two changes that turned a footnote into a famous puzzle. First, she moved you off the tram. You are no longer the driver. You are a bystander next to a switch. Second, she added a new version. Now you are standing on a footbridge over the track, and the only way to stop the tram is to push a large man off the bridge into its path. He dies. The five live.
The maths is the same in both cases. One life against five. But most people who hear the two versions say yes to the switch and no to the push, and philosophers have spent decades asking why those feel so different. That gap is the whole reason the trolley problem is still alive.
The Philosopher Who Changed Her Mind
Here is the part that rarely makes it into the podcast version.
Thomson spent most of her career holding that the bystander may pull the lever. Then, in a 2008 paper called “Turning the Trolley,” she took it back. She came to think the bystander should not turn the trolley after all.
Her reasoning was simple, and it is worth sitting with. If you turn the tram onto the one worker, you are using him. You are making his body the thing that saves the other five. And he never agreed to that. He was just doing his job on a quiet track. In her view, turning the tram is not so different from pushing the man off the bridge. In both cases you reach into someone else’s life and spend it to balance your sum.
Thomson did not argue that the bystander must let the five die with a clear conscience. She argued something narrower and harder: that the one on the side track has rights too, and that nobody gets to cancel those rights just because the numbers look good.
Notice the question that the trolley problem never asks in any of its forms. It never asks the one on the side track what he thinks. He is a number. He is the small number. He is the cost of the good outcome.
Hold onto that. Because two thousand years ago, a council ran this exact calculation, and for once we know what the man on the side track said about it.
A High Priest Ran the Trolley Problem in John 11
The scene is in the Gospel of John, chapter 11, right after Jesus has raised a man named Lazarus from the dead in a village near Jerusalem. The news spreads. People are believing in Him. And the religious leaders in the city panic.
John records what they said to each other:
“Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.” (John 11:47-48, KJV)
Read that as a trolley problem, because that is what it is. The tram is Rome. The five on the track are the nation, the temple, the whole fragile arrangement that let the people worship in peace under an occupying empire. And one man is standing on the side track.
Then the high priest, Caiaphas, stands up and says the quiet part out loud:
“Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” (John 11:49-50, KJV)
One man dies. The people live. It is expedient. It is a cold, clean sum, made by one official under enormous political pressure. It is worth saying plainly that Caiaphas was one powerful man making a political calculation, not a stand-in for a whole people. Anyone who has ever sat in a meeting where a human being got reduced to a line item knows exactly what kind of room this was.
And the sum worked, in a way. John adds one line: “Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death” (John 11:53, KJV). The lever was pulled. By the time of the trial, John reminds his readers who it was: “Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people” (John 18:14, KJV).
If the story ended there, it would be the darkest answer the trolley problem ever got. A good man used as a cost. The small number, spent.
The One Man on the Track Spoke Up
But the story does not end there, and here is the detail the trolley problem has no room for.
One chapter earlier, before the council ever met, Jesus had already spoken about His own death. And He did not describe it as something being done to Him.
“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” (John 10:18, KJV)
Read those two speeches side by side. Caiaphas says: it is expedient that one man should die. Jesus says: no man takes my life from me. The high priest thinks he is spending a number. The number has already decided to spend Himself.
That is the variable the trolley problem never includes. Consent. Thomson’s late worry was that the one on the side track never agreed to be used. In this story, the one on the track says, in effect, I am not being used. I am giving.
And there is one more thing He does that is easy to read past. On the night He is arrested, surrounded by soldiers, Jesus tells them who He is and then says: “if therefore ye seek me, let these go their way” (John 18:8, KJV). He is talking about His friends. The one on the side track makes sure the tram hits nobody else. He does not just accept the lever. He clears the track behind Him.
John even notes that Caiaphas said more than he knew. His words, John says, were a kind of prophecy, “that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:51-52, KJV). The calculation that was meant to protect one small arrangement ended up gathering people from everywhere. The lever was pulled for the wrong reasons. The one on the track turned it into the right ones.
This is the same shape the Bible had been drawing for centuries. On the ancient Day of Atonement, one goat carried the people’s confessed sin away for good. The idea of one taking the weight for many was never new. If that history is new to you, the piece on what the scapegoat actually meant is a good next step. What was new in John 11 was that the one carrying it walked onto the track on purpose.
You Have Sat in Both Seats
Here is where this stops being a puzzle and starts being about your week.
You have been Caiaphas. Not in the big dramatic way. In the small, daily way. Somebody had to be the one who got less so that your plan could work. The coworker you let take the blame. The sibling who got the short end so that family peace could hold. The friend you quietly dropped because keeping them was costing you. You ran the sum, it came out in your favour, and a person became a number. If you carry guilt about that, it is because some part of you knows that is exactly what happened.
And you have been the one on the side track. Someone else did the maths, and you were the cost. You were the one who could be cut. The one who did not get asked. If you carry bitterness, this is usually where it lives: not in being hurt, but in being spent, used to balance somebody else’s books.
The trolley problem leaves you in whichever seat you are sitting in. The Gospel does not.
To the one holding the lever: the person you spent was never a number to God. And the One who was spent by the most powerful council in the land did not answer it with a counter-calculation. He answered it with “let these go their way.” God’s love for you does not run through a sum where you have to come out ahead. It was given, not calculated. That is the only kind of love that can meet guilt without flinching.
To the one on the track: what was taken from you was taken. That was real, and nobody should tell you otherwise. But the One who knows that seat better than anyone did not stay on the track as a victim of someone else’s expedience. He turned the same track into a gift. That is what God does with the places where you were used. Not by pretending it did not happen, but by refusing to let the lever have the last word.
There is one more thing to notice about which seat you were actually in. In the trolley problem, you are always the bystander. In John’s story, you are not. You are among the five. Someone stepped onto the track so that you would not be hit, and He did it knowing your name, not as a number. You were not saved by accident. You were chosen.
If you have been ranking people against each other lately and want to see what is really driving those choices, the free What Are My Core Values? assessment takes about three minutes and tends to show you the sum you have been running without noticing it.
A good place to start:
The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day
A simple way to notice God in ordinary moments, even on the days life feels like a calculation.
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Actions to Take
- Name the sum you are running. Take a scrap of paper or your phone notes and finish this sentence honestly: “Right now I am quietly deciding that ______ is the one who can be cut.” Then write one more line: have they been asked? That takes two minutes, and most people find the name comes faster than they would like.
- If you are the one who got cut, say the verse out loud. “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” Then notice the difference between taken and given. You cannot change what was taken. You can decide what you will give from here, which is the one thing the lever can never control. Write the name of the person who did the maths, and under it write: “This was not the last word.”
- Clear the track for somebody today. Find one small hit that is about to land on someone else and take it instead. Cover the shift. Absorb the blame for the shared mistake. Let the other person have the easier job. Do it without announcing it. That is “let these go their way” at the size of an ordinary Tuesday.
Journaling Prompts
- Which seat have you been sitting in more this year, the one holding the lever or the one on the side track? What would the other person in the story say about it?
- Where in your life did something that was done to you for someone else’s convenience later turn into something good? What changed, and who changed it?
A Prayer
God, I have done the maths on people. I have let someone be the cost so that my life would work, and I have been the cost in someone else’s plan, and both of those still sit in me. Thank you that Jesus was not spent by a council but gave Himself on purpose, and that He counted me among the ones He stepped onto the track for. Take the guilt where I pulled the lever and the bitterness where I was on the track, and show me who I can clear the track for this week. Amen.
Discussion Question
Judith Jarvis Thomson spent decades saying you may pull the lever, then changed her mind and said you may not. Do you think a thinker changing their answer late in life makes their final answer more trustworthy, or less? Leave a comment and tell us where you land.
Share This
- The trolley problem never asks the one on the side track what he thinks. Turns out there’s one story where he answered. “No man taketh it from me.” Read this. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-themes/the-trolley-problem/
- Did you know the philosopher who NAMED the trolley problem changed her mind in 2008 and said you should NOT pull the lever? Her reason is the whole point of John 11. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-themes/the-trolley-problem/
- A high priest once said “it is expedient that one man should die for the people.” That is the trolley problem, two thousand years early. The twist is what the one man said back. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-themes/the-trolley-problem/
Questions and Answers
What is the trolley problem?
The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. A runaway tram is heading toward five people on a track. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track, where it will kill one person instead. The puzzle asks whether it is right to actively cause one death in order to prevent five. It was first posed by the philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, and it was named and expanded by Judith Jarvis Thomson, most famously in a 1985 paper.
Who invented the trolley problem?
Philippa Foot, a British philosopher, introduced the original version in a 1967 essay. Her version involved the driver of a runaway tram choosing between a track with five workers and a track with one. Judith Jarvis Thomson later gave the puzzle its name, changed the driver into a bystander at a switch, and added the “footbridge” version, in which the only way to stop the tram is to push a large man into its path.
Did Judith Jarvis Thomson change her mind about the trolley problem?
Yes. For most of her career Thomson held that a bystander may pull the lever to divert the tram onto the one person. In a 2008 paper titled “Turning the Trolley,” she reversed that view and argued that the bystander should not turn the trolley, because doing so uses the one person on the side track as a means to save the others, and that person never agreed to it.
What does the trolley problem have to do with the Bible?
In John 11:49-50, the high priest Caiaphas argues that “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” That is the same one-for-many calculation the trolley problem describes. The difference is that in John 10:18 Jesus says of His own life, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” The man on the side track was not being spent against his will. He chose to be there.
What did Caiaphas mean when he said one man should die for the people?
Caiaphas, the high priest in Jerusalem the year Jesus was crucified, was making a political calculation. He feared that Jesus’s growing following would provoke Rome to destroy the temple and the nation. His solution was to have one man killed to protect the many. The Gospel of John adds that Caiaphas said more than he knew, because Jesus’s death would in fact gather together “the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:52).
