Trolley problem

Philippa Foot's version of the thought experiment, now known as the "trolley driver", ran as follows: A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to classical utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all). This fact makes diverting the trolley obligatory. An alternative viewpoint is that since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death when otherwise no one would be responsible. An opponent of action may also point to the incommensurability of human lives. Under some interpretations of moral obligation, simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this is the case, then doing nothing would be considered an immoral act. == Empirical research ==

In 2001 the psychologist Joshua Greene and colleagues published the results of the first significant empirical investigation of people's responses to trolley problems. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they demonstrated that "personal" dilemmas (like pushing a man off a footbridge) preferentially engage brain regions associated with emotion, whereas "impersonal" dilemmas (like diverting the trolley by flipping a switch) preferentially engaged regions associated with controlled reasoning. On these grounds, they advocate for the dual-process account of moral decision-making. Since then, numerous other studies have employed trolley problems to study moral judgement, investigating topics like the role and influence of stress, emotional state, impression management, levels of anonymity, different types of brain damage, physiological arousal, different neurotransmitters, and genetic factors on responses to trolley dilemmas. Trolley problems have been used as a measure of utilitarianism, but their usefulness for such purposes has been criticized. In 2017 a group led by Michael Stevens, a YouTuber also known as Vsauce, performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment. Subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage they believed to be real (but was pre-recorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Five of the seven participants did not pull the lever. Survey data The trolley problem has been the subject of many surveys in which about 90% of respondents have chosen to kill the one and save the five. If the situation is modified where the one sacrificed for the five was a relative or romantic partner, respondents are much less likely to be willing to sacrifice the one life. A 2009 survey by David Bourget and David Chalmers shows that 68% of professional philosophers would switch (sacrifice the one individual to save five lives) in the case of the trolley problem, 8% would not switch, and the remaining 24% had another view or could not answer. Criticism In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational. In her 2017 paper, Nassim Jafari Naimi lays out the reductive nature of the trolley problem in framing ethical problems that serves to uphold an impoverished version of utilitarianism. She argues that the popular argument that the trolley problem can serve as a template for algorithmic morality is based on fundamentally flawed premises that serve the most powerful with potentially dire consequences on the future of cities. In his book On Human Nature (2017) Sir Roger Scruton criticizes the usage of ethical dilemmas such as the trolley problem and their usage by philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer as ways of illustrating their ethical views. Scruton writes, "These 'dilemmas' have the useful character of eliminating from the situation just about every morally relevant relationship and reducing the problem to one of arithmetic alone." Scruton believes that just because one would choose to change the track so that the train hits the one person instead of the five does not mean that they are necessarily a consequentialist. As a way of showing the flaws in consequentialist responses to ethical problems, Scruton points out paradoxical elements of belief in utilitarianism and similar beliefs. He believes that Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment definitively disproves hedonism. In his 2017 article The Trolley Problem and the Dropping of Atomic Bombs, Masahiro Morioka considers the dropping of atomic bombs as an example of the trolley problem and points out that there are five "problems of the trolley problem", namely, 1) rarity, 2) inevitability, 3) safety zone, 4) possibility of becoming a victim, and 5) the lack of perspective of the dead victims who were deprived of freedom of choice. In a 2018 article published in Psychological Review, researchers pointed out that, as measures of utilitarian decisions, sacrificial dilemmas such as the trolley problem measure only one facet of proto-utilitarian tendencies, namely permissive attitudes toward instrumental harm, while ignoring impartial concern for the greater good. As such, the authors argued that the trolley problem provides only a partial measure of utilitarianism. ==Applicability in legal reasoning==

The trolley problem has been widely discussed in legal theory as a means of exploring how law distinguishes between intentional harm, omission, and necessity. In criminal law, the scenario illustrates the tension between utilitarian and deontological approaches to culpability: while a utilitarian might justify diverting the trolley to minimise deaths, legal systems often treat deliberate killing as impermissible regardless of the net outcome. This distinction reflects the act–omission doctrine, under which a failure to prevent harm is generally less blameworthy than actively causing it. In English common law, courts have traditionally rejected the defence of necessity in cases involving the deliberate taking of life, even where doing so would save others. The leading precedent is R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), in which shipwrecked sailors were convicted of murder after killing a cabin boy to survive. The decision is often cited as a legal analogue to the trolley problem, emphasising that moral calculations of greater good do not justify intentional killing under the law. In tort law and regulatory policy, however, trolley-like reasoning appears in cost–benefit analyses where harm is balanced against risk reduction—such as in product design, environmental regulation, or accident prevention. The U.S. decision in United States v. Carroll Towing Co. (1947) articulated a formula weighing the burden of precautions (B) against the probability (P) and gravity (L) of potential harm (B < PL), effectively institutionalizing a utilitarian calculus within negligence law. More recent legal discussions have introduced the Trolley Problem into the legal regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles. As autonomous driving technology advances, legal scholars have begun to focus on how vehicle decisions in unavoidable collision scenarios are coded, and the potential legal liabilities that such coding may trigger. == Related problems ==

The basic Switch form of the trolley problem also supports comparison to other, related dilemmas: The Fat Man Resistance to this course of action seems strong; when asked, a majority of people will approve of pulling the switch to save a net of four lives, but will disapprove of pushing the fat man to save a net of four lives. This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases. One possible distinction could be that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that one may take action that has bad side effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong. So, the action is permissible even if the harm to the innocent person is foreseen, so long as it is not intended. This is an argument which Shelly Kagan considers (and ultimately rejects) in his first book The Limits of Morality. The Fat Villain This variation is similar to The Fat Man, with the additional assertion that the fat man who may be pushed is a villain who is responsible for the whole situation: the fat man was the one who tied five people to the track, and sent a trolley in their direction with the intention of killing them. In this variation, a majority of people are willing to push the fat man. Unlike in the previous scenario, pushing the fat villain to stop the trolley may be seen as a form of retributive justice or self-defense. == Implications for autonomous vehicles ==

Variants of the original "trolley driver" dilemma arise in the design of software to control autonomous cars. A platform called Moral Machine was created by MIT Media Lab to allow the public to express their opinions on what decisions autonomous vehicles should make in scenarios that use the trolley problem paradigm. Analysis of the data collected through Moral Machine showed broad differences in relative preferences among different countries. Other approaches make use of virtual reality to assess human behaviour in experimental settings. However, some argue that the investigation of trolley-type cases is not necessary to address the ethical problem of driverless cars, because the trolley cases have a serious practical limitation. It would need to be a top-down plan in order to fit the current approaches of addressing emergencies in artificial intelligence. Automotive engineers also often argue that the preferable solution is to try to avoid the dilemma entirely: to program the car to obey applicable traffic laws and practice defensive driving at a safe speed and with adequate following distance for road conditions, so that the brakes and/or steering can be applied in time to prevent any collision. Also, a question remains of whether the law should dictate the ethical standards that all autonomous vehicles must use, or whether individual autonomous car owners or drivers should determine their car's ethical values, such as favoring safety of the owner or the owner's family over the safety of others. In 2016 the German federal government appointed a commission to study the ethical implications of autonomous driving. The commission adopted 20 rules to be implemented in the laws that will govern the ethical choices that autonomous vehicles will make. Relevant to the trolley dilemma is this rule: 8. Genuine dilemmatic decisions, such as a decision between one human life and another, depend on the actual specific situation, incorporating "unpredictable" behaviour by parties affected. They can thus not be clearly standardized, nor can they be programmed such that they are ethically unquestionable. Technological systems must be designed to avoid accidents. However, they cannot be standardized to a complex or intuitive assessment of the impacts of an accident in such a way that they can replace or anticipate the decision of a responsible driver with the moral capacity to make correct judgements. It is true that a human driver would be acting unlawfully if he killed a person in an emergency to save the lives of one or more other persons, but he would not necessarily be acting culpably. Such legal judgements, made in retrospect and taking special circumstances into account, cannot readily be transformed into abstract/general ex ante appraisals and thus also not into corresponding programming activities. … == See also ==