WHO BUILT THE TRACK: Diachronic Responsibility, the Social Connection Model, and Why the Trolley Problem Cannot Locate the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus

The trolley problem has been analyzed as a synchronic problem since Foot (1967): one agent, one moment, one switch. Thomson (1976, 1985) distinguishes the driver — who has, in her own words, “previously directed the trolley” — from the bystander, who has not, and treats this prior positional difference as load-bearing; her 2008 reversal (“Turning the Trolley,” Philosophy & Public Af airs 36:4) goes further, concluding the bystander may not do what the driver may. Kamm’s most systematic treatment of the field (The Trolley Problem Mysteries, Oxford, 2020) organizes its opening lecture around exactly this question: “Who Turned the Trolley?” The literature has therefore always tracked who stands at the switch and what prior relationship they had to the emergency. It has never analyzed a case in which that prior relationship is not causal or positional but constitutive — a case in which the same psychological mechanism required to operate the switch is the mechanism that generated the asymmetric track layout in the first place. This paper argues that the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus (Huynh 2026a–u) describes exactly this case, and that no existing position in the trolley literature — Foot’s doctrine of double effect, Thomson’s doing/allowing distinction, Kamm’s principle of permissible harm, or utilitarian aggregation — locates it, because all four analyze the moment at the switch, not the window before the track was laid. The corpus’s F2 window (Huynh 2026a, 2026d) is that earlier window: the period during which governance actors could still have redesigned the track layout, before the Grief–Attribution–Legitimation–Concentration sequence (Huynh 2026a, 2026f) reaches a Concentration stage the corpus’s five paradoxes (Huynh 2026a, 2026i) establish is structurally resistant to redesign. The Governance Paradox (Huynh 2026e, 2026o) specifies why the governance actors positioned to redesign the track during the F2 window could not do so impartially: A5 — the neurological standing charge of constitutive attachment documented in Huynh (2026k, 2026l) — is the same mechanism driving both the demand that produced the asymmetric track layout and, later, the political pressure at the switch itself. The agent asked to pull the lever is not a neutral bystander, and is not simply “the driver” in Thomson’s causal sense. The agent is a co-architect of the track, present at both ends of the causal chain by the same psychological mechanism. The paper’s philosophical contribution is locating this case relative to the existing literature rather than inventing new vocabulary for it. Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility (2006, 2011) already supplies the correct general form: responsibility for structural injustice is forward-looking rather than backward-looking; it does not isolate a single perpetrator; it judges background conditions rather than isolated acts; and it attaches to all who contribute to the structural process, not only to whoever stands at the switch when harm materializes. Young’s model has never been applied to the trolley tradition specifically, and it does not, on its own, supply a mechanism explaining why forward-looking responsibility becomes most urgent at one dateable point rather than continuously. The corpus’s Symmetric Wound and F2 window supply exactly this: a formally specified window at which backward-looking liability-model analysis stops being adequate and Young’s forward-looking model becomes the only coherent frame. This paper’s contribution is narrow and specific: it extends the social connection model into the trolley tradition, using the corpus’s F2/A5/Governan