In Widow’s Bay, the Real Monster Is Utilitarianism

[Spoiler Alert: This article contains some pretty significant spoilers about the show Widow’s Bay. It’s a good mystery show. If you haven’t seen it but want to, I’d recommend waiting to read this article until you’ve finished the entire series. If you have seen it, or don’t care to see it but still want to read an article about it, well, then proceed.]

“You ever heard of the trolley problem?” 

“You mean back in ’42 when we tried to build one and all the workers disappeared?” 

The above is an exchange in the season finale episode of Widow’s Bay, the new horror-comedy on Apple TV that concluded its first 10-episode run last month. 

In the scene, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), the mayor of the cursed New England town of Widow’s Bay, is in the house of his elderly assistant Ruth (K Callan). 

Loftis has come to believe that when Ruth dies, a centuries-old hex that’s inflicted endless horrors on the island’s inhabitants will at last be lifted. With a supernatural storm on its way, the mayor has decided to expedite the process by killing Ruth. 

But when confronted with the reality of dispatching the kindly old woman, Loftis starts to lose his nerve. To steady himself for the grizzly deed, he invokes the age-old thought experiment known as the trolley problem.

Widow’s Bay works on a lot of levels. The show manages to be both very funny and very scary as it tells the story of a small town mayor trying to kickstart the tourist economy of an isolated island community beset by a parade of horror movie tropes: haunted hotels, masked slashers, clown killers, succubi, etc. 

The trolley problem conversation between Loftis and Ruth in the finale ties everything together with a decent amount of philosophical depth. 

It’s in that conversation that the true monster in the show is revealed: utilitarianism. 

For the unfamiliar, the classic thought experiment asks you to imagine a runaway train barreling down the tracks on which five people are standing. You could do nothing and let the train kill the five people. Or you could pull a switch and divert the train onto a separate track where it will only kill one person. 

Would you pull it? 

The answer most people will land on is yes, of course you should. Diverting the train will kill one person, but save five. Someone is going to die regardless. The right thing to do is to ensure as few people die as possible. 

That solution gels pretty well with a consequentialist worldview, which says that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences. An action that leads to one person dying is preferable to an inaction that leads to five people dying. 

It’s also an answer that Christian moralists could agree with. 

Pulling a lever isn’t an intrinsically evil act. If the object of pulling the lever is to save multiple lives, it’s permissible to do so, even if, as a consequence, it kills one person who otherwise wouldn’t have died. 

One can see why Loftis would reach for the trolley problem as he steels himself for killing an innocent old woman. The consequence of doing that is that many more people would be spared death at the hands of a killer clown, or whatever other supernatural monsters the island will throw at them. 

Under a specifically utilitarian worldview, which posits that the morality of an act is determined by its impact on the sum total of human happiness, the answer is even easier. 

Not only would more people be spared the island’s horrors, but the only person who needs to die to make that happen is an elderly woman with only so many quality-adjusted life years left in her. 

There is, in fact, a modifier to the classic trolley problem that wrestles more directly with the choice Loftis faces. 

Instead of standing at a switch watching the train barrel toward the five people, imagine you and a fat man are standing on a bridge running over the tracks. You could do nothing and watch the five people die. Or you could throw the fat man onto the tracks. He’d die, but the five people would be saved. 

This modifier doesn’t change anything for the arch-utilitarians. It’s still five lives vs. one. The violence of throwing a man onto the tracks isn’t inherently different than pulling a switch. It’s the consequence that matters. 

The Christian moralist would disagree. Pushing an innocent bystander onto the tracks is an intrinsically evil act. It’s impermissible, even if it produces some happy consequences. 

Ultimately, Loftis lands on this Christian perspective as well. The show suggests that’s the correct answer to the trolley problem. 

The curse the mayor is trying to lift was the result of a pact its patriarchal founder, Richard Warren, made with the devil to save the original settlers of the island from starvation during a harsh winter. 

Loftis believes he can lift that curse by killing Ruth. What he realizes is he’d simply be striking another devil’s bargain by offering another blood sacrifice for the greater good of Widow’s Bay. 

While the trolley problem is a useful thought experiment for teasing out different moral worldviews, it fails as a helpful guide to real-world decision making. 

It’s rare that our moral dilemmas are as clear-cut as the hypothetical lever puller. Usually, we can’t say for sure what the ultimate consequences of our actions will be. That’s particularly true of political leaders making decisions for whole towns, states, and countries. 

Better to do nothing and avoid causing immediate, knowable harm than to pull a lever and hope the wider consequences are generally positive. 

Widow’s Bay is well aware of this limitation of the trolley problem. 

Generations of the island’s leaders took it upon themselves to do evil things in the name of a greater good. By playing with dark forces beyond their control, they corrupt themselves while arguably failing to produce that greater good in the long run.  

For plot reasons we don’t have to get into, Loftis’ killing of Ruth wouldn’t, in fact, have lifted the curse. His evil act would have been for nothing. 

Ultimately, a humility about our own ability to right the world is what leads Ruth to reject the consequentialist answer to the trolley problem. She wouldn’t even pull the lever. 

“The runaway trolley is life. The lever is me. You can’t control the bad things that happen in life,” she says. 

It’s a lesson politicians, whether mayors of cursed fictional towns or leaders of whole countries, would do well to absorb.