Those who have spent an adequate amount of time on the Internet might have come across a cartoon depicting a man in front of a set of train tracks with a lever. The man is faced with the decision to move the train from a track with five people tied down to it to a track with one person tied down to it, or to let the train run over the group of five people. Whether it is dismissed it as a joke or a goofy political cartoon, the picture poses an ethical dilemma that has been subject to many philosophical studies.

Different mindsets generally choose different options. For example, someone who thinks as an utilitarian – one who tries to discover the best action (utility) – wants to avoid participation in an event with moral wrongs will not pull the lever. Pulling the lever would mean partial responsibility for the single death that occured, and through inactivity, wouldn’t have been responsible for the five deaths that would have occurred otherwise. The trolley problem doesn’t have one right answer, and as new variables are added into the mix, this becomes even more obvious.

The trolley problem was first introduced in a moral questionnaire given to students at the University of Wisconsin in 1905. The modern version was created by Philippa Foot in 1967 and has been exposed to many new scenarios and concepts. The first new situation is “the fat man.” In this version, there is only one track, with a train about to run over five people. There’s a bridge above the track. A bystander and a fat man are standing on the bridge. Instead of having the option to pull a lever, the bystander the option to push the fat man in front of the train to stop it. The next version is “the villain.” This variant includes the fat man, but this time he is the villain who tied the people to the track. This again presents the option to push him off, this time with more incentive. More examples of different events are “the loop variant,” “transplant” and “the man in the yard,” all of which have similar ethical questions and consequences.

Many dark jokes have risen after the trolley problem rise in popularity. One variant of the original has the lever pulled after the front wheels pass after the fork causing the train to drift on both sides, killing all six individuals.

With a total of six complicated scenarios for “The Trolley Problem,” one would think there are endless solutions. However, all of them have only two to three solutions. The endless aspect of these moral debates comes from the reasoning behind the answers, which can be as simple as “the villian” or much more complicated. With no right answers, the debate lives on.