Moses and the Trolley Problem

I want to follow up with yesterday’s insight, that the Mosaic law challenged almost none of the Israelites’ cultural assumptions.  It just asked them to be decent by their own lights.

And they failed.

You’ve heard of the famous Trolley Problem–a turgid thought experiment where you have to decide to switch a trolley off the tracks where it will kill 5 onto tracks where it will kill 1.

There was a Twitter Sage who pointed out that the real trolley problem we actually encounter in our lives is much simpler:

The choice is obvious, there is no real cost at all to throwing the lever and saving five, but the lever keeps not getting thrown.  Inconvenience, unwillingness to admit error, malice, not wanting to rock the boat… the lever keeps not getting thrown.

The Trolley Problem and all its ilk are cope.  They invoke an abstract world of tough ethical choices to distract us from the real world of easy ethical choices that we keep not making.

Whatever your complaints about the Mosaic Law, you should keep in mind, front and center, that it was too ambitious.