Trolley Problems

“Down by the Riverside,” the second tale in Uncle Tom’s Children, builds on the foundations of “Silt,” with the Great Mississippi River Flood (1927) serving as their common context. While Wright draws on immersed situational perceptions, his calculated response addresses general rather than particular issues. This approach responds well to Parfit’s philosophical call for a wide value-based objective theory of morality. To support this call, Parfit employs two of the major tools introduced to twentieth-century philosophy for weighing moral options: game theory and trolley problems. Game theory has been usefully employed by literary theorists, but trolley problems, to which philosopher Philippa Foot gave birth in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” have not, as the remainder of this chapter explores.