Pulling the Lever in a Subway Problem

Eleven years earlier, while riding Boston’s Red Line, Jeff Kaufman saw a passenger shouting that his arm was trapped in a closing train door. As the train began moving and other passengers called for the emergency brake, nobody pulled it, so Kaufman ran to the brake and stopped the train. The passenger then freed his arm, though his bag remained outside. At the time, Kaufman believed the man risked losing his hand; later accounts from nearby riders suggested only the bag had been caught. The incident left him shaken and became a way to examine how moral thought experiments differ from urgent decisions in the real world.

The central lesson is that real moral choices involve uncertainty about what is happening and what each option will cause. A delay might cost thousands of passengers time, but doing nothing might not avoid the delay: an injury could prompt someone to stop the train anyway, with worse consequences. Emergencies also leave little room for the extended reasoning imagined by textbook dilemmas. Kaufman notes that singling out one bystander to act did not work, while the “Unilateralist’s Curse” offers a partial explanation for why one person’s judgment can impose costs on everyone. In this case, however, several passengers also urged action; conflicting views were difficult to communicate and assess under pressure. The experience reinforced the need to make decisions robust to misreading a situation.