The Trolley Dilemma Would You Kill One Person To Save Five
The Trolley Dilemma Would You Kill One Person To Save Five
The Trolley Dilemma Would You Kill One Person To Save Five
Donate now
COVID-19 Arts + Culture Business + Economy Cities Education Environment + Energy Health + Medicine Politics + Society Science + Technology
It’s out of control and heading for five unsuspecting bystanders! Shutterstock
Author
Email Imagine you are standing beside some tram tracks. In the
Twitter 199 distance, you spot a runaway trolley hurtling down the tracks Laura D'Olimpio
Facebook 2k towards five workers who cannot hear it coming. Even if they do Senior Lecturer in Philosophy,
University of Notre Dame
LinkedIn spot it, they won’t be able to move out of the way in time. Australia
Print
As this disaster looms, you glance down and see a lever Disclosure statement
connected to the tracks. You realise that if you pull the lever, the
Laura D'Olimpio does not work for, consult,
tram will be diverted down a second set of tracks away from the own shares in or receive funding from any
company or organisation that would benefit
five unsuspecting workers. from this article, and has disclosed no
relevant affiliations beyond their academic
However, down this side track is one lone worker, just as appointment.
So, would you pull the lever, leading to one death but saving five?
Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and The University of Notre Dame Australia
expertise provides funding as a member of The
Conversation AU.
About us
The Conversation UK receives funding from
these organisations
This is the crux of the classic thought experiment known as the View the full list
Variations
Now consider now the second variation of this dilemma.
So, would you push the man on to the tracks, sacrificing him in
order to stop the tram and thereby saving five others?
Imagine you are a doctor and you have five patients who all need
transplants in order to live. Two each require one lung, another
two each require a kidney and the fi$h needs a heart.
Again, the consequences are the same as the first dilemma, but
most people would utterly reject the notion of killing the healthy
patient.
In the first trolley dilemma, the person who pulls the lever is
saving the life of the five workers and letting the one person die.
A$er all, pulling the lever does not inflict direct harm on the
person on the side track.
But in the footbridge scenario, pushing the fat man over the side
is in intentional act of killing.
They noted that the first version activates our logical, rational
mind and thus if we decided to pull the lever it was because we
intended to save a larger number of lives.
Not everyone answers the dilemmas in the same way, and even
when people agree, they may vary in their justification of the
action they defend.
In Eye in the Sky, military and political leaders have to decide whether it’s permissible to harm or kill one innocent person
in order to potentially save many lives. Bleecker Street Media
Donate now
Stephen Khan
Editor
Is there a moral centre Want to be popular? ‘Killer robots’ hit the Eye in the Sky movie
in our brain? You’d better follow road – and the law has gives a real insight into
some simple moral rules yet to catch up the future of warfare
Comments are open for 72 hours but may be closed early if there is a
high risk of comments breaching our standards.
Events
Exploring the psychology of veganism vs. non-veganism: Implications for climate change and the human-animal Relationship — Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
The Large Hadron Collider and the Hidden Universe — Portsmouth, Hampshire
More events
Privacy policy Terms and conditions Corrections and complaints Copyright © 2010–2020, The Conversation Trust (UK) Limited