MAIN POINTS
Morality claims to be based on trying to bring about the best but:
We continually have to act without the knowledge needed - this is pragmatism
We ignore how each of us has a malicious side that may latch on to a necessary evil we do
We ignore that our fragility can let evil corrupt us even if we think our intentions are good
We imagine God supports all this.
It is shameful to reinforce those unavoidable evils using God. We need clear focus instead of making things worse with using God as clutter.
UNAVOIDABLE EVIL CORRUPTS
Being forced to commit an unavoidable evil can corrupt because it breaks the moral rules that shape your identity. When you act against your own ethical standards, many things happen quickly:
Moral injury and guilt. You experience shame and cognitive dissonance — your actions conflict with your self-concept as a good person. That emotional pain is aversive and hard to live with.
Rationalization and self-deception. To reduce the pain, you start telling yourself comforting stories: “it had to be done,” “the ends justify the means,” or “they weren’t truly innocent.” Those justifications aren’t neutral— they reframe wrongdoing as acceptable.
Euphemism and compartmentalization. You rename or isolate the act (“collateral damage,” “necessary sacrifice”) and keep it mentally separate from the rest of your life, which lets you act inconsistently without immediate collapse of self-image.
Desensitization and normalization. Repeatedly accepting or explaining away harm lowers your emotional responses and expands what you consider permissible, so small concessions become larger ones.
Slippery slope to further wrongdoing. Once you’ve rewritten your moral rules to accommodate one evil, future bad acts become easier to justify. Trust, empathy, and integrity erode.
Social feedback loops. If peers, institutions, or rhetoric validate your excuses, the self-deception becomes socially reinforced — making correction harder.
To commit a necessary evil, is attempting to curtail an evil. If we try to control evil, we do not convince for evil by definition does not tolerate being controlled. And to quarantine it is to say, "We are okay with evil as long as we put that wall around it." We have evil inside of us.
In short: unavoidable evil produces psychological pressure to resolve the conflict; the quickest fix is self-deception. Over time those fixes reshape your moral map, weaken restraints, and make ongoing corruption much likelier. Lies are about protecting something toxic and bad here - and lies lead to lies. The lying to yourself and potentially others starts the minute you commit the act.
THE ARGUMENT
Consider this.
The train is coming.
You are in charge of the lever and thus in charge of what track the train goes along.
There is one person on the sidetrack.
There are a hundred children on the main track.
Do you pull the lever and divert the train so that the person walking on the side track will be killed?
Do you let the train go along and kill the children?
Imagine another version of that where you have to push someone on the track to divert the train and save the children.
I'd add that God supposedly has the right to take life and thus to ask you to do it.
GOD
The claim that one life matters more than many isn't exactly very natural to us, so many argue that God has put that instinct in us that we must not kill an innocent person. They prop that up with, "You shall not murder."
Religion would say that if you push you are putting yourself in the place of God who alone should decide when a person should live or die. It is possible that even secularists who think the same way about how the right to life matters, are harbouring some kind of subconscious leaning towards God or magical thinking.
What if God delegated you right to push? Nobody would have the right to condemn you for they cannot prove you were defying God instead of co-operating. They have to either validate your choice or be agnostic or neutral.
REALLY NO CHOICE
If you say you have no choice but to send the train at the one person, is it really true?
The reality is that 999 out of a 1000 people will pull the lever if we are talking about ordinary people on the main track and one ordinary person on the side track.
999 out of a 1000 will NOT pull if it is the killer child abuser on the main track.
We see that those who say one life matters as much as hundreds do not really value lives and persons as much as they say. To say that is making a very big claim - do we really think anybody is that saintly?
OUR RELIGIOUS CONDITIONING
Is it right or wrong to pull the lever or push? Should we just call it one of those things and say we do not know? If it is good whatever we do, then good can be a terrible thing.
We are forced into a callous calculation of human worth — and there is no escaping its moral cost. Callousness feeds callousness. The idea of morality being based on wisdom and other good things is out.
Moralists lie about this and all the time they say that one life is as valuable as many for life is life.
They know that there is something psychopathic or disturbing if you redirect the train to save many. They will feel you are evil if you reason, "I know one life matters as much as ten but I just make it my policy to select saving the ten lives."
And they will still sense something psychopathic in sacrificing many for one. Our instincts want us to put many lives before one.
Either way it is arbitrary.
We must realise here that if we were pulling a lever to kill him we feel less murderers than if we pushed him. Our psychology is lying to us. Our prayers, religions and society surely have also helped it to lie. Evil is somehow devious and helped by devious people - and if lies are happening you never know how they will protect and further evil.
GOD TROLLEY PROBLEM
There is the thought experiment that if there is a large man, you might push him in front of a train to stop it from killing a child.
Remember the doctrine that God can become man, and has done in Jesus Christ? Remember the suggestion of Islam that Muhammad is a prophet chosen by God to be the seal of the prophets?
This is hinting that if the man is God or his messenger, then we can weigh him as mattering more than the child. After all, children are only God's creations. So we cannot push him, even if we could if he were just ordinary Arthur who lives down the road. This takes the trolley problem to a new level, a very dark and scary one indeed.
EVIL FEEDS
The issue is that if you save one for many or many for one you are still working with evil. Unavoidable evil is still evil. It will still lead to your corruption when you remember that like everybody else, you have actual and potential evil in you - most of it is subconscious. Because there is unrelated evil in you, it will use and feed on this well-meaning and terrible choice you made. God incarnate or his prophet being involved does not change that. If God or God belief were a safeguard against evil, it would change it.
HELL TROLLEY
Christianity and Islam teach that despite the will of God, some people shut him out forever and spend eternity in Hell.
A machine must send one person to Hell to save a million others.
You choose which path—does morality provide guidance?
FINALLY
The trolley problem brings out how we in fact lie about “We don’t play God.” Rubbish. Believer or not, you take the divine throne yourself. Talking about God only says, "I want God to be like this or that. I only worship one who has my values." It is yourself you believe in. It is not God.
Our love and goodness are not as squeaky-clean as we want to think and want others to think. That goodness is what we offer to God which shows that we think he is as morally dubious as us and we don't truly want a proper loving God but one that is on our side even if it is wrong.
The trolley scenarios show that those who enjoy their morality are often hypocrites. If morality is horrific, there is nothing to celebrate. God embodies that attitude; that is why some worship Him as the source of goodness and righteousness.
APPENDIX
Why not capture a healthy or dying person so that their organs might be harvested to save the lives of one child or ten children? Say there really is no other way? Say there is no alternative to letting the child or children die horribly?
We wonder if the reason we would not agree with the person being taken is that e could be seen as offering ourselves for that purpose! Or we could be the ones taken. That may be unlikely but it shows how selfish we are - for we don't even want a small risk of that happening to us.
Religion would add that we open the door to a way of thinking that can be too easily abused. They think there is a slippery slope. While it is true that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, we see from observation that people do take advantage. If there is a God it is up to people to ask him for help to keep them good in the face of temptation and it is up to him to help. So observation does not count. The fact is that it is nobody's problem if the help is there and people are not taking it.
Is the killing by itself the problem or the slippery slope? If both then what is the biggest concern? If the killing is just wrong then is killing in self-defence wrong? If the circumstances raise a slippery slope issue then unless killing is wrong in the first place this would not matter. This shows there is incoherence here.
APPENDIX
You can divert the out of control train.
Or you can let it stay on course.
Ten people will die either way.
There is a lever with which you can divert.
Miraculously, if you divert nobody will suffer but they will die.
And if you do not divert they will suffer an agonising death.
Think about that.
Now go over the scenario again. There is an addition to it. What if the person in some strange science world is the lever? What if the person dies if you use him as a lever - using him kills him? Or what if the person will die naturally in seconds if not used as a lever?
Another. You are forced to push a person against your will. You have two tracks to push him unto which will kill him. Push him on one track and it derails a trolley that will kill people tied to the track. Track 1: 2 people who are going to self-destruct in 5 seconds anyway die. Track 2: 1 person who is going to self-destruct in 10 dies.