The Trolley Problem

The Trolley Problem is an ethical dilemma which enquiries whether it would be right to sacrifice one person to save five others. It comes in various flavours but usually is introduced via two scenarios. In the first scenario, a runaway trolley [tram/train] threatens five people, and you can choose to either do nothing, allowing the five people to die, or pull a lever to redirect it onto a separate track which has only one person on it, saving the five but resulting in the one person being killed. In the second scenario, you are on a bridge and can stop the trolley by pushing a large stranger onto the tracks, again saving the five but at the cost of the large stranger. What would you do?

 Whilst many people might intuitively feel that it is better to save five and so would pull the level, they are more reluctant to actively push the large stranger: redirecting a trolley is one thing, but physically pushing someone seems more intense.

 There are various tweaks made to these scenarios such as what if the one person was one of your relatives.

 You might think that the Trolley Problem is one of those bizarre thought experiments dreamt up by philosophers but it has real-world relevance for helping us to think about how, for instance, we program autonomous cars: what rules should the AI in the car have if it faces a situation on the road in which various human lives are at stake?

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