Graphic by Henry Barraclough
It’s moving down the cast-iron stalwart tracks. Ooh. This superbly carpentered and superbly welded actuator resides in my palm. Ah. What is one to do but ponder this immaculately formidable, ooh, situation? Five prosaic individuals, alongside a powerful, caring woman, whom I am the progeny of, bound to the tracks. Must I view this situation in a distinctly utilitarian image? Unh.
Although the deliberate redirection of harm toward a single individual in order to avert a greater catastrophe provokes profound moral revulsion, ah, ethical decisions are not made in a vacuum. Rather, they reverberate through dense networks of care and obligation. Eeh. This procedural reduction of persons to commensurable units of moral value stands in profound tension with the family life, ooh, wherein individuals are morally irreplaceable. Unh. In circumstances where inaction guarantees a quantitatively greater loss of life, the refusal to intervene does not preserve moral integrity, eeh; rather, it constitutes a failure of ethical accountability.
As each digit embraces this lever and the paradigmatic expression of coordinated social rationality… ooh, affordable… agh, accessible… AYE! light rail bounds nigher, I must exercise my superior cognition, pondering insurmountable questions, mounting them. Ooh. The questions stack: vertiginous, unanswerable; screaming for adjudication, unh, as the distance collapses and time liquefies. My cognition enters fugue state. Thought reaches critical mass, buckles inward, and detonates into pure abstraction–duty without object, utility without units, responsibility without refuge. Aahh.
The trolley is no longer approaching. It is arriving ooh, omnipresent, metaphysically punctual, eeh. And in that final convulsive instant unh, as reasoning achieves maximum capacity and intellectual effort peaks beyond sustainability, aye, clarity arrives at last – sudden, effervescent
UNH, GRANDMA. PULL THE LEVER.
