The Trolley Problem

Or: political immaturity

Leftist activists who believe that victory is a function of moral rectitude and sufficient commitment to the cause have utterly failed to engage with the political history of the United States. Specifically, no cause in U.S. history was more righteous than the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of Jim Crow, and no one can doubt the personal commitment of African-Americans to these causes. Nevertheless, these cause took centuries to get has far as they have, and the work is still not finished. The self-evident justness of your cause has far too little to do with your ultimate success. It does have much to do with whether you persist in the face of failure, and with your willingness to try new tactics.

Those unwilling to change tactics do not take their moral imperatives seriously. Or, more likely, they are politically immature, still believing that sky daddy with give them what they are entitled to, because the world is just and personal rectitude is all that is rewarded.

I keep thinking about undergraduate enthusiasm for the trolley problem, this scenario where ethical intuitions are supposedly turned on their head. It’s almost as if this is their first encounter with the idea that ethical contradiction is possible.
Meanwhile for Black adolescents, the moral conundrum of The Talk is a mandatory course, the impossibility of squaring one’s self-preservation, one’s essential human dignity, what one owes to one’s family and local community, and the long-term cause of one’s people. When white U.S. political thinkers consider this, they see it as unfortunate, but rarely as something they can learn from.

Moreover, implicit in the ideology of whiteness is the idea that the good life is one where one is protected from such paradoxes, never having to learn these terrible lessons. But moral paradoxes are essential to the nature of power, and thus finding contingent solutions to these unfair problems is precisely the work of living in community. It takes moral and political sophistication to prevent the exploitation of this contingent and compromised situation in order to accumulate wealth and power. And so, the commitment to innocence and the failure to reckon with the paradox guarantees the advance of greater political injustice.

All utopian political ideologies feature thus immaturity. It’s what makes them utopian. What I personally don’t understand is why it is felt to be a utopia not to have to reckon with the incommensurability of others’ specific needs and deserts. Why is that desirable? Do we all wish we were alone in the universe?