How Do the Fantastic Four Solve the Trolley Problem?

The Fantastic Four refuse to accept Galactus's terms and instead claim their agency.

Updated July 28, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Superhero stories are well known for their high stakes, which in the best cases have interesting moral dimensions as well. Such is the case when heroes confront a tragic dilemma , one from which they cannot emerge “with clean hands.” This usually takes the form of having two missions from which they must choose: For example, save this person or that person, but not both. (These are often known as “Sophie’s Choice” situations, after the popular book and movie in which a mother must choose which of her two children to save.)

The Fantastic Four are no exceptions to this—and given the galactic size of their typical adventures, the stakes are much higher than they would be for Spider-Man or Daredevil. In the comics, Marvel’s first family regularly has to choose between worlds or entire universes to save. 1

In the comics, the responsibility for this choice usually falls to Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, the genius of the group. In the new movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps , it is Susan Storm-Richards, the Invisible Woman, who declares that they will overcome the tragic dilemma that emerges when Galactus the Devourer comes to Earth to consume the planet and all life on it. Through her example, we see another common feature of superhero stories: refusing to accept the tragic dilemma itself.

WARNING: Mild spoilers for the movie ahead.

All Aboard the Fantastic Trolley

The most well-known tragic dilemma is the trolley problem . In the classic presentation, a trolley with faulty brakes is racing toward a broken portion of track, which will cause the trolley to crash, killing all five passengers aboard. A bystander has the opportunity to throw a switch that will divert the trolley to another track before it crashes—but the innocent person on the other track won’t have time to move if the trolley is diverted, and will be killed.

The trolley problem is a thought experiment that, among other things, tests moral intuitions by presenting a particular tragic dilemma and asking: Would you act to kill one person to save five?

Other variants of the trolley problem test these intuitions in different ways. For instance, suppose you’re a surgeon who has five patients, each of whom needs a different organ transplant to survive. After waiting as long as you can for available organs, you look at your healthy young nurse and ask yourself, “Should I kill my nurse and harvest the five organs I need to save my patients?” If you favored throwing the switch in the first scenario but recoil at the thought of sacrificing the nurse, you have to ask yourself what makes the two scenarios meaningfully different? 2

In the movie, after the Silver Surfer makes the presence of Galactus known, the Fantastic Four fly to his ship to confront him. There, the Devourer tells them he will spare the Earth and all its inhabitants if they give him their son Franklin, with whom Sue is pregnant , because Galactus can already sense that the child possesses incredible cosmic power. Reed and Sue refuse, naturally, and they manage to escape Galactus’s ship and return to Earth, where crowds of people are anxiously awaiting news of their defeat of the existential threat.

When Reed tells the anxious civilians not only that they failed to defeat Galactus but also why, they recoil. This is natural as well: They wonder what makes baby Franklin’s life worth more than the billions of lives on Earth. In other words, they're mad that the Fantastic Four refused the pull the switch, as there are billions of "passengers" in this version, and it was their only son on the other "track."

This quickly turns the crowd against the Fantastic Four, who return to their home in the Baxter Building to ponder the dramatic change in public opinion regarding them. But without telling the rest of the group, Sue walks into the crowd with Franklin in her arms to introduce him to the people who wanted him sacrificed to Galactus.

The pivotal moment comes when she tells the crowd, “I will not sacrifice my son for this world, but I will not sacrifice this world for my son.” With these words, Sue proclaims the Fantastic Four’s intent to refuse the terms of Galactus’s offer altogether. They are not willing to give up either Franklin or the people of Earth. Instead, they commit to finding another way to save the Earth—and to see how they do it, if they do it, you’ll have to watch the movie.

Denying the Tragic Dilemma

As usually presented, tragic dilemmas like the trolley problem have only two options; there is no third way out. Certainly, this is the choice a superhero’s foes like to present: “You have to choose, Spider-Man: save either your precious Mary Jane or this busload full of schoolchildren, mwa ha ha! ” But one of the hallmarks of a superhero is that they find a way to rise above the tragic dilemma, refusing to accept the terms of the “deal,” and finding their own solution that saves everybody. 3

The Fantastic Four: First Steps adds two unique elements to this. One is Reed’s admission that not only did they fail at first to solve the trolley problem Galactus gave them, but the “one person on the other track” they chose to save was their own son. This introduces a personal element to the trolley problem: having a connection to the person on the other track.

The other is that Sue justifies this choice before refusing to accept the consequences of it as Galactus determined them. (In the standard trolley problem, few ever ask who’s to blame for the trolley’s brakes failing or the broken track, but here we know who is behind everything.) 4 On behalf of the group, she asserted control of the situation, denying Galactus’s authority to set the terms of “the deal” unilaterally and proclaiming that no one would die as long as the Fantastic Four are there. That’s something we all can aspire to do, even if we are never bitten by a radioactive spider, transformed by a mystic hammer, or enveloped by cosmic rays—even though it might help sometimes.

I discuss several of the Fantastic Four’s encounters with tragic dilemmas in the comics, as well as the other ethical concepts in this post, in my new book, Ethics of the Fantastic Four . (For my thoughts on the new movie, see here .)
The original scholarly presentations of the trolley problems are in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices , ch. 2, and Judith Jarvis Thompson, Rights, Restitution, & Risk: Essays in Moral Theory , chs. 6 and 7. Recent popular treatments include David Edmonds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong , and Thomas Cathcart, The Trolley Problem, or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge: A Philosophical Conundrum . (Another variant has an overweight man on a bridge that the bystander can push onto the tracks, stopping the trolley but killing the man.)
This is one way to understand why the conclusion to the film Man of Steel was so disappointing to many fans: Superman failed to find a way out of his tragic dilemma when this is what Superman does . (See more on this here .)
This is similar to the things that make Batman’s repeated interactions with the Joker different from the standard trolley problem, as I explain in chapter 6 of my book Batman and Ethics .

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Mark D. White, Ph.D., is the chair of the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.