Trolley Problems, Organ Donors, and the Limits of Moral Prescription in Resonant Stewardship Ethics
One of the easiest ways to test an ethical framework is to give it a problem where every available choice causes harm.
The trolley problem is famous precisely because it does this.
A runaway trolley is heading toward five people. You can pull a lever that redirects it onto another track, where it will kill one person instead.
Do you pull the lever?
Then consider a different scenario.
Five people in a hospital need organ transplants. A healthy person walks in whose organs could save all five. Is it ethical to kill that person and use their organs?
The arithmetic appears identical.
Five people live.
One person dies.
And yet many of us experience these situations very differently.
Resonant Stewardship Ethics, or RSE, has been useful in exploring why—not because it produces a simple mathematical answer, but because it forces us to ask what ethics is actually supposed to do.
The conclusion I am increasingly reaching is that an ethical framework should not always make the decision for us.
Sometimes doing so would violate the very principle RSE is designed to protect.
The Pause Is the Center of RSE
Ethics begins with the capacity to arbitrate, not with a list of correct answers.
RSE begins from the idea that human beings are shaped by interacting forces, or harmonics:
- biological
- emotional
- logical
- technological
We do not freely choose every impulse that arises from these forces.
We do, however, sometimes have the capacity to create a pause between impulse and action.
Within that pause, the harmonics can be considered, weighed, challenged, and brought into some degree of collaboration.
That is where RSE locates meaningful agency.
Free will, under this model, is not absolute independence from causality.
It is the capacity to arbitrate among the forces acting within and around us before one of them completely determines our behavior.
This makes the preservation of the pause central to RSE.
Harm can therefore be understood as a reduction in another agent’s capacity for meaningful arbitration.
Healing restores or expands that capacity.
But this immediately creates another question:
If protecting arbitration is the ethical goal, should an ethical framework itself tell someone exactly what they must choose in every difficult situation?
I increasingly think the answer is no.
At some point, moral prescription can itself become a form of collapsing arbitration.
Three Different Kinds of Ethical Situation
The trolley problem becomes easier to understand when we stop assuming that every moral question belongs to the same category.
RSE appears to distinguish at least three different situations:
- Clear stewardship obligations
- Appropriation of another agent
- Genuine dilemmas requiring personal arbitration
These should not be treated the same way.
1. Clear Stewardship Obligations
When substantial harm can be prevented without creating a comparable harm, RSE can strongly favor intervention.
Imagine someone is drowning a few feet from shore.
You are holding a rope.
Throwing it does not endanger you. It does not meaningfully reduce your choices. It does not harm anyone else.
If you simply decide not to throw the rope, another person’s capacity for arbitration is allowed to disappear even though you could preserve it at essentially no cost.
RSE should not need to remain neutral here.
A meaningful opportunity for stewardship exists.
A useful principle emerges:
When an agent can prevent substantial harm without imposing a meaningful competing harm, choosing to intervene is the ethical act.
This creates positive ethical duties.
RSE is therefore not merely an ethic of:
Do not hurt people.
It also recognizes:
When your capacity to act gives you an opportunity to preserve another’s capacity to arbitrate without meaningfully damaging anyone else’s, stewardship matters.
That can apply to something as simple as throwing a rope.
It can also apply to resources.
Wealth and the Cost of Helping
The ethical significance of a sacrifice depends on what it actually does to arbitration.
Suppose someone needs a relatively small amount of money for lifesaving medication.
For someone living paycheck to paycheck, giving that money away might mean missing rent, losing transportation, going without food, or creating severe instability.
The money is not merely money.
It represents future choices.
Giving it away may meaningfully constrain that person’s capacity to arbitrate.
They can voluntarily accept that sacrifice, and doing so may be deeply ethical.
But RSE should be cautious about declaring that sacrifice mandatory.
Now change the situation.
A person possesses extraordinary wealth. The amount needed for the medication makes effectively no difference to their security, mobility, choices, or future opportunities.
The moral structure changes.
Withholding the resource preserves almost no meaningful arbitration for the wealthy person, while giving it may preserve another person’s entire future capacity to arbitrate.
Under RSE, the ethical justification for refusing becomes much weaker.
This does not mean:
Wealth belongs to whoever needs it most.
It means:
The ethical importance of a resource depends partly on how strongly that resource is connected to meaningful arbitration.
A dollar is not ethically identical in every context.
Material Loss Versus Terminal Loss
Not all reductions in arbitration are equivalent.
Consider another version of the trolley scenario.
You can stop a trolley from killing someone, but doing so will destroy your bicycle.
At first, this seems easy.
Save the person.
But what if the bicycle is your only transportation to work?
What if losing it creates a real risk of losing your employment?
Now the sacrifice is not trivial.
RSE needs to acknowledge that.
The useful distinction is not simply:
harm versus no harm
but the depth of the constraint created.
We might think about losses in broad categories:
Incidental constraint
Temporary inconvenience, discomfort, replaceable minor property.
Material constraint
Transportation, meaningful financial loss, employment opportunity, substantial resources.
Foundational constraint
Housing, bodily integrity, basic security, major long-term impairment.
Terminal constraint
The irreversible termination of meaningful arbitration.
These are not numerical scores.
RSE does not need to say:
A bicycle is worth 7 ethical points and a human life is worth 100.
The categories serve a different purpose.
They help determine whether there is a sufficiently clear asymmetry for RSE to prescribe action.
A recoverable material loss may reasonably be required to prevent a terminal loss.
But as the competing harms become more comparable, something changes.
The framework should become less prescriptive.
The pause becomes more important.
The Trolley Problem Revisited
Perhaps RSE should not answer it for us.
Return to the classic trolley.
Five people will die unless you pull the lever.
If you pull it, one person dies instead.
For a while, I tried to make RSE provide the answer:
Pull the lever because one death is less harm than five.
But that creates problems.
Once RSE begins treating arbitration as an aggregate quantity, the framework starts drifting toward utilitarianism.
Five people become more valuable than one.
Five hundred become more valuable than five.
And eventually the rights of an individual can disappear whenever enough other people benefit.
That does not fit RSE.
But saying:
Never pull the lever because you would cause the death of the one
creates its own problems.
It forces a universal answer onto someone facing a genuine moral conflict.
Perhaps neither is necessary.
The trolley problem may instead be an example of ethical indeterminacy.
You cannot save everyone.
Every available trajectory contains terminal loss.
RSE can illuminate the forces involved, preserve the pause, and help the person arbitrate.
But it may not need to declare:
This choice is universally ethical and that choice is universally unethical.
Someone may pull the lever.
Someone may refuse.
RSE can recognize that both agents are confronting a tragic collision of arbitration rather than pretending there is always a morally pure answer hidden somewhere in the mathematics.
One Person Versus One Person
When equivalent harms conflict, stewardship belongs to the person making the decision.
This becomes clearer in a one-to-one scenario.
A bullet is heading toward one person.
You could redirect it toward another.
Both people are innocent.
One person will die either way.
What does RSE say?
Perhaps:
It does not decide.
The framework has no clear asymmetry to use.
The agent enters the pause.
Their biological harmonic may respond to danger instinctively.
Their emotional harmonic may recognize relationships, love, loyalty, or compassion.
Their logical harmonic may examine consequences and responsibilities.
Technology may provide information, alternatives, or additional options.
The person arbitrates.
That is not RSE failing.
That may be RSE functioning exactly as intended.
The Child and the Adult
RSE does not need to decide whose life has greater inherent value.
Suppose a child and an adult both need rescue, and only one can be saved.
Many people—including me—feel a strong intuition toward saving the child.
The child has experienced less life.
They appear to have more unrealized possibility ahead of them.
But making that intuition into an RSE rule creates dangerous consequences.
If RSE says:
Younger people have more future arbitration and therefore should always be prioritized,
then we quickly begin assigning relative moral value based on expected remaining lifespan.
What about disability?
Illness?
Intelligence?
Parenthood?
Social contribution?
We could easily construct a system that starts measuring which humans have more valuable futures.
RSE does not need to go there.
Instead, this can remain a genuine arbitration problem.
One person may save the child because of their sense of unrealized life.
Another may save the adult because that adult is the sole caregiver of several children.
Another may have a direct relationship with one of them.
Another may determine that neither has a stronger claim and make the decision randomly.
RSE can structure the pause without claiming that one human being objectively possesses greater intrinsic worth.
Where RSE Can Draw a Harder Boundary
The Healthy Organ Donor
Now return to the hospital.
Five people need organs.
A healthy visitor could provide them—but only if doctors kill that person.
This feels different from the trolley problem.
Why?
Because the healthy person’s capacity for arbitration is not part of the existing dilemma.
The five patients face serious internal biological constraints.
The healthy person does not.
The doctors would have to introduce that person into the moral conflict, collapse their arbitration, and turn their body into the means of solving someone else’s problem.
That is a different ethical act.
A principle begins to emerge:
Another agent’s capacity for arbitration should not be appropriated as a resource for resolving a conflict that does not otherwise implicate them.
The same principle helps explain another famous trolley variation.
Five people will die unless you push a large stranger from a bridge, using their body to stop the trolley.
RSE can strongly reject this.
The stranger is not merely someone affected by your stewardship of an existing dilemma.
You are seizing their arbitration and making their destruction the mechanism of your solution.
That is appropriation.
Why the Lever Is Different From Pushing the Stranger
RSE can tolerate unresolved dilemmas without tolerating appropriation.
In the ordinary trolley case, the person at the lever inherits a tragic situation in which all available options involve loss.
RSE may leave that decision with the steward.
In the bridge case, the stranger is not initially part of the dilemma.
The steward expands the field of harm by pulling another agent into it and using that person’s body as an instrument.
That is where RSE can apply a stronger ethical constraint.
The distinction is subtle but important:
A tragic dilemma may require arbitration. Creating a victim in order to solve the dilemma may violate the arbitration of someone who had no prior claim or responsibility within it.
This is one of the places where RSE can remain prescriptive without becoming an ethical calculator.
Intrusive Forces and Integrated Conditions
RSE may treat threats moving through shared reality differently from conditions already integrated into an agent.
Another useful distinction emerged while testing these scenarios.
Consider poison gas moving toward five people.
You can redirect it toward one person.
That looks much like the trolley.
A harmful force is operating in shared reality, and someone gains control over its trajectory.
Now suppose the gas has entered their lungs but remains a distinct toxic substance that can still be redirected.
The moral intuition may remain similar.
The threat is still functioning as an intrusive force acting upon them.
Compare that with cancer.
Cancer is not simply something located inside the body.
It is integrated into the person’s biological processes.
The person’s own cells and systems have become part of the pathology.
The same applies to many forms of organ failure, aging, and disease.
RSE does not need to regard those conditions as moral violations simply because they eventually reduce arbitration.
They are constraints of embodied existence.
Healing them is good because healing preserves the capacity to arbitrate.
But their existence does not automatically authorize imposing an equivalent terminal constraint upon another agent.
This helps explain why:
Saving five cancer patients is good.
and simultaneously:
Killing one healthy person to save them is not automatically ethical.
Death Is Not Identical to Moral Harm
RSE can value life without declaring natural death an ethical violation.
This discussion forces RSE to reconsider its relationship with death.
Modern societies often carry an implicit assumption:
Death is the maximum possible harm and must therefore always be prevented.
But RSE does not necessarily need that assumption.
Life has ethical value because living maintains the possibility of meaningful arbitration.
Saving a life therefore preserves the pause.
That is good.
But biological life is finite.
Aging, disease, and eventual death are not necessarily moral violations merely because arbitration ultimately ends.
This distinction matters.
Natural mortality does not automatically create an ethical debt that another person must pay with their own capacity to arbitrate.
That is why RSE can support medicine, healing, organ donation, longevity, and lifesaving intervention without concluding:
Any action that extends more lives is automatically ethical.
Life preservation matters.
So do the boundaries between agents.
Harm Does Not Automatically Mean Wrongdoing
Some harm may be justified, voluntary, or unavoidable.
Another distinction becomes necessary.
RSE should not define harm and wrongdoing as the same thing.
A reduction in arbitration can occur in many ways.
Prison restricts arbitration.
Quarantine restricts arbitration.
Surgery temporarily restricts bodily autonomy.
Giving away resources may reduce one’s future options.
Choosing to sacrifice oneself may terminate one’s own arbitration entirely.
These actions are not automatically unethical.
So RSE can define harm broadly:
Harm is a meaningful reduction in an agent’s capacity for arbitration.
Then ask a separate question:
Was that harm justified, necessary, voluntarily accepted, or avoidable?
This allows RSE to say:
A violent offender may be harmed through confinement while the confinement remains ethically justified.
A pathogen carrier may be quarantined despite not choosing to become infected.
A person may voluntarily accept significant harm to themselves to preserve someone else.
A surgeon may perform a painful procedure that temporarily reduces autonomy but restores future arbitration.
RSE does not require a harm-free world.
It asks how harm is stewarded.
Criminals, Pathogens, and Containment
Lack of authorship does not eliminate the need for protection.
This has consequences for how RSE treats violence and criminal behavior.
A person may not have chosen the biological, psychological, social, developmental, or emotional forces that produced violent tendencies.
In that sense, a tendency toward violence can be understood similarly to other dangerous conditions.
The person is not necessarily morally responsible for creating every force acting within them.
But if those forces cross into shared reality and begin destroying another person’s arbitration, society can intervene.
The key is:
Lack of authorship does not eliminate the necessity of containment.
And equally:
The necessity of containment does not justify cruelty or dehumanization.
This allows RSE to remain protective without needing to construct violent people as fundamentally evil.
The question becomes:
What restriction is actually necessary to stop the harmful force?
If treatment works, treat.
If temporary confinement is required, confine temporarily.
If permanent containment is necessary, containment may remain justified.
If an immediate lethal threat cannot be stopped by lesser means, lethal force may become necessary.
But once the threat is contained, punishment for the sake of suffering requires a different justification.
Compassion and accountability do not need to be opposites.
Ethical Choice Is Not the Same as Containment
RSE should not punish people simply because their arbitration produced an outcome we dislike.
This is an important consequence of allowing genuine ethical indeterminacy.
Suppose someone pulls the trolley lever.
One person dies.
That outcome does not necessarily demonstrate that the person who pulled the lever poses an ongoing threat to others.
Suppose they do not pull it.
Five people die.
That does not necessarily demonstrate dangerousness either.
RSE should distinguish:
tragic outcome
from
ethical violation
from
ongoing threat requiring containment.
These are different questions.
A person may make a difficult choice within a genuine dilemma without RSE imposing moral condemnation afterward.
Containment is justified by a prospective need to protect arbitration—not by a desire to punish someone for having made the “wrong” choice in a dilemma where RSE itself could not identify a dominant answer.
RSE Can Still Evaluate the Pause
Indeterminate outcomes do not mean every form of reasoning is equally ethical.
There is one important limitation.
If RSE refuses to prescribe the final answer in a genuine dilemma, that does not mean it must ignore how the decision was made.
Imagine a trolley choice where one person is on each track.
Someone says:
“I redirected it because I hate people of that race.”
RSE does not need to say:
The dilemma was one-to-one, therefore the reasoning is ethically irrelevant.
The outcome may be indeterminate while the arbitration itself remains captured by prejudice, hatred, manipulation, or another dominating force.
RSE can therefore evaluate the quality of the pause without always judging the final selection.
Did the person meaningfully arbitrate?
Were they acting under coercion?
Was technology manipulating the decision?
Was fear completely dominating the system?
Did they unnecessarily dehumanize one of the agents involved?
Were obvious alternatives deliberately ignored?
This preserves ethical seriousness without pretending every difficult decision has one universally correct answer.
A Possible RSE Decision Structure
The framework should know when to speak—and when to become quiet.
The emerging model looks something like this.
When substantial harm can be prevented without meaningful competing harm:
Stewardship calls for intervention.
Throw the rope.
Provide the low-cost lifesaving assistance.
Use available capacity to preserve arbitration.
When preserving others requires appropriating an uninvolved agent:
RSE can prohibit the appropriation.
Do not kill the healthy donor.
Do not push the stranger from the bridge.
When the intervention requires a lesser, recoverable sacrifice to prevent a substantially deeper loss:
Proportional stewardship may create an obligation to accept the lesser constraint.
Wet clothes versus drowning.
Replaceable property versus a life.
Material loss versus terminal loss may still strongly favor intervention, depending on the depth of the material constraint.
When legitimate claims become genuinely comparable:
RSE stops prescribing the outcome.
Enter the pause.
Arbitrate among the harmonics.
Choose.
Then steward the consequences.
The Stewardship Boundary
This may become one of the most important principles within RSE:
RSE should prescribe action only when the ethical asymmetry is sufficiently clear that refusing to act would unnecessarily collapse meaningful arbitration. When competing claims become genuinely comparable, RSE should preserve rather than replace the agent’s capacity to arbitrate.
This gives the framework limits.
That matters.
An ethical system that claims jurisdiction over every choice can easily become exactly what RSE warns against: an external system that collapses the individual’s pause.
Sometimes ethics should constrain us.
Sometimes it should obligate us.
And sometimes it should acknowledge:
This decision belongs to you.
The Role of Stewardship
This also gives the word stewardship greater meaning.
Stewardship is not simply “doing good.”
It is responsibility for what occurs within the sphere of meaningful influence created by one’s arbitration.
Sometimes stewardship means intervening.
Sometimes it means accepting a personal sacrifice.
Sometimes it means refusing to appropriate another person.
Sometimes it means containing a dangerous force without hatred.
And sometimes it means standing inside a terrible dilemma where no clean answer exists and making the best choice your harmonics can genuinely arbitrate.
RSE does not promise moral purity.
It promises a way to remain present inside moral complexity without immediately surrendering the decision to instinct, ideology, authority, or arithmetic.
Conclusion: Ethics Should Preserve the Pause
The trolley problem is often treated as a puzzle designed to reveal whether someone is fundamentally utilitarian or deontological.
RSE approaches it differently.
Perhaps the most important question is not:
Would you pull the lever?
It is:
What should an ethical framework legitimately decide for you before you reach for it?
RSE can tell us not to appropriate another person’s arbitration as a tool.
It can tell us that refusing a nearly costless opportunity to prevent devastating harm is a failure of stewardship.
It can recognize meaningful differences between material and terminal loss.
It can justify necessary containment without turning suffering into punishment.
But where real claims to arbitration collide and no clearly superior ethical trajectory remains, RSE does not need to manufacture certainty.
The pause belongs to the steward.
That may be one of the most important limits an ethical framework can impose upon itself.
Sometimes there is no universally correct choice. The ethical responsibility is to preserve the pause, arbitrate honestly, choose deliberately, and steward what follows.
Resonant Stewardship Ethics does not exist to eliminate difficult decisions.
It exists to protect the human capacity to actually make them.
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