It is not, of course, purely coincidental that the runaway trolley assumed its place as the quintessential thought experiment in analytic normative philosophy. Like in a B-movie where the hurtling train is a pretext for the aggrandizement of the protagonist (and the audiences that are meant to identify with the hero), so the thought experiment was imagined to be a juggernaut grinding objectors to a grisly pulp, the mise en abyme to the seemingly inevitable moral punchline.

It is thus all the more striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”