How Can One Lead a Moral Life in Modern Times

By By Lucia Rodriguez Bai

Life is all fun and games until someone puts you in the driver’s seat of a trolley car, barreling down the tracks towards five workers, and asks you if you would pull the lever that would divert the trolley onto a track with only one worker. What would you do?

This is the trolley problem, a thought experiment seemingly designed to either reveal your moral tendencies or haunt you for the rest of your life. I recently saw it again in our core-mandated Ethics in Public Policy class. Safe to say, it has come back to haunt me once more with a vengeance: Outside of this thought experiment, what kind of moral impact do I want to make in the real world once I graduate from SIPA?

If you’re a utilitarian sympathizer like me, you’d probably argue for pulling the lever to avoid the deaths of five people, even if this means consciously killing one person. In other words, you would focus on the consequences of the action, which in this case would maximize the common good and minimize harm. However, being a practicing utilitarian in real life is hardly as easy as pulling an imaginary lever.

Leading a utilitarian life was undoubtedly more straightforward in ancient Greece or China than it is today. Those civilizations did not have to grapple with the increasing interconnectedness of our globalized, capitalistic world, where we’re one purchase away from indirectly financing harms done on the other side of the planet.

Nonetheless, many of us still strive to lead moral lives. A few friends of mine exercise their morality with dietary restrictions that minimize our food industries’ harm to the environment and livestock. Some people refrain from streaming subscriptions to avoid supporting tax-avoiding billionaires. Others give up their free time to volunteer at non-profit organizations. I support the small-scale actions we may take in our daily lives to try to lead a moral life, and I won’t be making any arguments to invalidate them.

That being said, if we limit our moral initiatives to our personal lives, does that not leave a big moral gap in our professional lives, where much of our influence on the world is concentrated? What if we led professional lives in service of deconstructing the very structures that make our personal moral contributions pertinent in the first place?

Simon van Teutem, a politics PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, reflects on the disappearance of once-idealistic and brilliant college graduates into fields like finance, management consulting, and corporate law—the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent,”, as he calls it. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s idea of Moral Ambition urges us to bring our moral compasses into our professional lives and put our labour into service for a better world.

According to the 2025 Beyond Columbia survey, almost 20 percent of Columbia College students identified finance as their top post-graduation field, and almost 10% said consulting. Some of the most sought-after hiring organizations were Amazon, Bank of America, BCG, and Goldman Sachs, along with other major players in finance and consulting. Some of these companies have avoided copious amounts of corporate tax, modelled the “reimagination” of a disputed territory, or are downright financially costly to society.

If you don’t want to end up in this Bermuda Triangle after your time at SIPA, I would strongly encourage you to look into Bregman’s School of Moral Ambition, which funds fellowships that help bright, once-idealistic graduates and mid-career professionals make a positive impact and tackle the world’s most pressing issues.

While I do agree with both van Teutem and Bregman on their observations and calls to action, I also understand why some graduates go into these often lucrative fields. Some may have student loans to pay off or elderly parents to support. Not everyone has the financial privilege to take on a low-paying, do-gooder job.

And this is the qualm, right? Many of the jobs that are morally ambitious about solving the world’s biggest problems, like climate change or poverty, are low-paying. From personal experience, I can say that I was only able to accept my first morally fulfilling internship because I could count on my parents’ financial support. Holding—and I would argue wanting—a morally ambitious job is too often a privilege dependent on one’s life circumstances.

Being Columbia students, we are part of an elite institution. And I know SIPA students think about the impact they’re going to have in the world after graduation; we are surrounded by people who left careers in finance or consulting because they want to do something else, something better. So, you’re back in the driver’s seat of the trolley car: Which path will you choose once you leave SIPA?