You’ve probably encountered the vexing “Trolley Problem” somewhere. Briefly, the Trolley Problem is a mental challenge that asks you to imagine a tough moral circumstance and then justify your decision to act or not.

In the standard version of the trolley problem, you are standing near a switch in a track along which a fast-moving trolley car is approaching. Ahead you can see a group of people standing on the track unaware that the trolley is approaching. For the sake of the question, you are unable to warn them to step aside. They will die if nothing intervenes.

You have the option to throw the switch, which will turn the trolley to another track. But there is one person standing there — also oblivious of the trolley and also certain to be killed.

So, what should you do? Should you do nothing? Or should you throw the switch? In the first case, you can claim to be innocent of the consequences, but five people will die. In the second, only one dies, but as a consequence of your choice.

The trolley problem is often discussed in philosophy courses and moral discussions. Its usefulness depends on a careful balance of the pros and cons of the choice. People discussing the trolley problem often fine-tune it by adding details that make it more and more difficult to weight the outcomes: Suppose one or more of the five people are guilty criminals. Suppose the lone person on the side track is a beautiful fair-haired child. How does that affect your decision?

In America today, a peculiar form of the trolley problem is being considered where the balance is cast aside. Consider:

Imagine you are standing near the switch on a trolley line, and you look ahead and see someone standing near a puddle of water. If nothing intervenes, the trolley will roll down the track and splash water on the person. But you can throw the switch, killing the person standing on the side track, thereby saving the first person from getting wet. Should you do it?

Or suppose there is a heavy object balanced atop the trolley that appears likely to fall soon. It is possible that the object will fall just as the trolley passes the person standing by the track and that it will possibly cause an injury. Again, you have the option to throw the switch, divert the trolley, and kill the person on the side track. Should you do it?

Surprisingly, the consensus answer in America, or for a large part of the American population is, ‘Absolutely Yes!”

It may be obvious that I am referring here to the justification of police shootings. The officer who killed George Floyd was convicted of murder in Minneapolis. But while that trial was going on, an officer in Columbus, Ohio, killed a teen-aged girl named Ma’Khia Bryant.

The shooting occurred while Bryant was arguing with two other girls in the front yard of a house. Bryant was quite clearly waving a knife around, yelling and acting aggressively.

The video that’s been made public doesn’t depict Bryant favorably. She seems like a brat, and I do not think I would like her. The evidence from the video shows that she should have been arrested. But here’s the point: The officer killed her dead, to stop her from . . . . what?

What she was actually doing was shouting. Was it right for the officer to kill her to stop her from shouting?

She was also waving a knife. Was it right for the officer to kill her to stop her from waving an object in the air?

She was threatening to inflict harm to one or both of the other girls. Was it right for the officer to kill Bryant to offset the chance of injury to the others?

Fact: possessing a knife, and brandishing a knife do not equate to any certain outcome. Knife wounds are rarely deadly and are more typically minor. A trained fighter can certainly kill quickly with a knife — if he or she acts with precision and stabs at a vulnerable spot. But Bryant was not trained, and was waving the knife wildly. That makes it likely that if she had used the knife against one of the other girls, the wound would have been minor.

It is false to say the officer saved a life that day. Rather, he inflicted certain death to eliminate the mere possibility of a (probably slight) injury.

Had the officer been a brave man, he would have tackled Bryant from behind and pushed her flat onto the grass. (Recall she is 15-year-old girl.) That would have neutralized the danger of her knife at the cost of a few grass stains on the front of her clothes. But he did not act with common bravery, because he is an American police officer with American police training. He did what he was trained to do, which was stand at a distance and shoot Bryant four times in the chest.

Public sentiment seems to be in the officer’s favor. Experts say he acted rightly and necessarily. According to experts cited in the Columbus Dispatch:

Although such shootings inevitably generate questions from the public about why an officer didn't use de-escalation techniques, or deploy a Taser or shoot the person in the leg, none of those options appeared to be available to the officer, both experts agreed.
"I don't know what the officer could have done differently," Stinson said. "Based on what I saw, there was no opportunity for the officer to de-escalate."
Scanlon said use of a Taser isn't an appropriate response "to a lethal-force situation," and police are trained to target only one thing when they shoot to protect themselves or others — "center mass" of the person they're trying to stop.

The officer certainly could have done other things. He could have, as I said, tackled the girl, he could have used a tazer. He could have stood back and watched what happened. That might seem too passive, but people wave knives around more than the actually use them. The fight could have ended in the next 10 seconds if the officer had not shot.

The quote cited above shows that police training and public sentiment agrees that it is always better for an officer to kill than for a citizen to misbehave. De-escalating is not an option, and center-of-mass is the only target.

And it is not only police advocates who think this way. In an article for The Atlantic, writer Conor Friedersdorf exhibits the same unbalanced logic:

We can mourn the tragedy of Bryant’s death without maligning a cop who had seconds to react and may have prevented the death of another Black teen. If we’re going to punish cops for preventing a potentially fatal attack—a scenario in which deadly force has always been accepted—we should inform them that we’ve altered our standards.

Friedersdorf is comfortable using the words, “may have prevented the death of another Black teen” to describe what the officer did. This, despite the clear fact that the officer killed another Black teen. In the next sentence, Friedersdorf doubles down, saying the officer prevented a potentially fatal attack — by killing the threat.

As I said above, Bryant was behaving criminally and needed to be subdued and arrested. I’m not defending her or saying she was innocent. She ought to be in jail.

But the officer killed her dead, to negate the possibility that she would carry out an attack that had a slight chance of being fatal. The officer looked at a situation that presented odds of death that were well below 50%, and chose to jack those odds up to 100% certainty.

America is a nation that agrees you should pull the trolley lever and kill the sidetrack bystander — if not acting means the other person gets wet.