Trolley Car Blues: Of mules and men At first it seems a bit of stretch to put far fetched thought experiments with real world gritty blues, but that worry fades. Trolleys and trains loom large as themes in blues music, and of course in the actual production of the tracks and cars. Take Michael Sandel's presentation of a couple well know versions of the "trolley problem" as presented in his well know class on Justice at Harvard. One hub issue in the Trolley cases is how to compare the worth and value of a human life to other human lives, and how to determine costs and benefits, rights and obligations with that variable in mind when we make decisions which affect multiple lives in divergent ways. Sandel notes that we have a difficulty of finding a 'common currency' with which to represent the relative worth of multiple and diverse human lives. The traditional philosophical problem is called 'the problem of intersubjective utility compa...