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Trolley problem
The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form
of the problem is this:

You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or

otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are The trolley problem: should you pull
standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the the lever to divert the runaway
lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track and the trolley onto the side track?
five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is
a single person lying on the side track. You have two choices:

1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on

the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track
where it will kill one person.
Which is the most ethical choice?

The modern form of the problem was first introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967,[1] but also extensively analysed by
Judith Thomson,[2][3] Frances Kamm,[4] and Peter Unger.[5] However an earlier version, in which the one person to be
sacrificed on the track was the switchman's child, was part of a moral questionnaire given to undergraduates at the
University of Wisconsin in 1905,[6][7] and the German legal scholar Hans Welzel discussed a similar problem in 1951.[8]

Beginning in 2001, the trolley problem and its variants have been used extensively in empirical research on moral
psychology. Trolley problems have also been a topic of popular books.[9] The problem often arises in the discussion of
the ethics of the design of autonomous vehicles.

Contents
Original dilemma
Related problems
The fat man
The fat villain
The loop variant
Transplant
The man in the yard
Empirical research
Survey data
Implications for autonomous vehicles
In popular culture
Criticism
See also
References
External links

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Original dilemma
Foot's original structure of the problem ran as follows:

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain
crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the
community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed
only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another
in which a pilot whose airplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less
inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver
of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working
on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case
of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both examples the exchange is supposed to be one
man's life for the lives of five.[1]

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).[10] An alternate 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
deciding to do nothing would be considered an immoral act if one values five lives more than one.

Related problems
The trolley problem is a specific ethical thought
experiment among several that highlights the difference
between deontological and consequentialist ethical
systems. The central question that these dilemmas bring
to light is on whether or not it is right to actively inhibit
the utility of an individual if doing so produces a greater
utility for other individuals.

The initial trolley problem also supports comparison to Five variants of the trolley problem: the original Switch,
other, related, dilemmas: the Fat Man, the Fat Villain, the Loop and the Man in
the Yard

The fat man

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will
pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat
man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track,
killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

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.[11] This has led to
attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.

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One clear distinction is 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 is an argument which Shelly Kagan considers (and ultimately rejects) in The Limits of
Morality.[12]

A claim can be made that the difference between the two cases is that in the second, you intend someone's death to
save the five, and this is wrong, whereas, in the first, you have no such intention. This solution is essentially an
application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that you may take action which has bad side effects, but
deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong.

Another distinction is that the first case is similar to a pilot in an airplane that has lost power and is about to crash into
a heavily populated area. Even if the pilot knows for sure that innocent people will die if he redirects the plane to a less
populated area—people who are "uninvolved"—he will actively turn the plane without hesitation. It may well be
considered noble to sacrifice your own life to protect others, but morally or legally allowing murder of one innocent
person to save five people may be insufficient justification.

The fat villain

The further development of this example involves the case, where the fat man is, in fact, the villain who put these five
people in peril. In this instance, pushing the villain to his death, especially to save five innocent people, seems not only
morally justifiable but perhaps even imperative.[13] This is essentially related to another thought experiment, known as
ticking time bomb scenario, which forces one to choose between two morally questionable acts.

The loop variant

The claim that it is wrong to use the death of one to save five runs into a problem with variants like this:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people and you can divert it onto a secondary
track. However, in this variant the secondary track later rejoins the main track, so diverting the trolley
still leaves it on a track which leads to the five people. But, the person on the secondary track is a fat
person who, when he is killed by the trolley, will stop it from continuing on to the five people. Should
you flip the switch?

The only physical difference here is the addition of an extra piece of track. This seems trivial since the trolley will never
travel down it. The reason this might affect someone's decision is that in this case, the death of the one actually is part
of the plan to save the five.

The rejoining variant may not be fatal to the "using a person as a means" argument. This has been suggested by
Michael J. Costa in his 1987 article "Another Trip on the Trolley", where he points out that if we fail to act in this
scenario we will effectively be allowing the five to become a means to save the one. If we do nothing, then the impact of
the trolley into the five will slow it down and prevent it from circling around and killing the one. As in either case some
will become a means to saving others, we are permitted to count the numbers. This approach requires that we
downplay the moral difference between doing and allowing.

Transplant
Here is an alternative case, due to Judith Jarvis Thomson,[3] containing similar numbers and results, but without a
trolley:

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A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die
without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant
operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a
routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible
with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would
suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy
organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?

The man in the yard

Unger argues extensively against traditional non-utilitarian responses to trolley problems. This is one of his examples:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You can divert its path by colliding
another trolley into it, but if you do, both will be derailed and go down a hill, and into a yard where a
man is sleeping in a hammock. He would be killed. Should you proceed?

Responses to this are partly dependent on whether the reader has already encountered the standard trolley problem
(since there is a desire to keep one's responses consistent), but Unger notes that people who have not encountered
such problems before are quite likely to say that, in this case, the proposed action would be wrong.

Unger therefore argues that different responses to these sorts of problems are based more on psychology than ethics –
in this new case, he says, the only important difference is that the man in the yard does not seem particularly
"involved". Unger claims that people therefore believe the man is not "fair game", but says that this lack of
involvement in the scenario cannot make a moral difference.

Unger also considers cases which are more complex than the original trolley problem, involving more than just two
results. In one such case, it is possible to do something which will (a) save the five and kill four (passengers of one or
more trolleys and/or the hammock-sleeper), (b) save the five and kill three, (c) save the five and kill two, (d) save the
five and kill one, or (e) do nothing and let five die.

Empirical research
In 2001, Joshua Greene and colleagues published the results of the first significant empirical investigation of people's
responses to trolley problems.[14] 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 judgment, investigating topics like the
role and influence of stress,[15] emotional state,[16] impression management,[17] levels of anonymity, [18] different types
of brain damage,[19] physiological arousal,[20] different neurotransmitters,[21] and genetic factors[22] on responses to
trolley dilemmas.

Survey data
The trolley problem has been the subject of many surveys in which approximately 90% of respondents have chosen to
kill the one and save the five. [23] 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 their life.[24]

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A 2009 survey published in a 2013 paper by David Bourget and David Chalmers shows that 69.9% 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.[25]

Implications for autonomous vehicles

Problems analogous to the trolley problem arise in the design of autonomous cars, in situations where the car's
software is forced during a potential crash scenario to choose between multiple courses of action (sometimes including
options which include the death of the car's occupants), all of which may cause harm.[26][27][28][29][30] A platform called
Moral Machine[31] 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. Other approaches make use of
virtual reality to assess human behavior in experimental settings.[32][33][34][35]

In 2016, the government of Germany constituted an ethical commission that addressed the implications of
autonomous driving.[36] As a result, the commission defined 20 rules for autonomous and connected driving, which
will be obligatory for upcoming laws regarding the production of autonomous cars.

In popular culture
In an urban legend that has existed since at least the mid-1960s, the decision must be made by a drawbridge keeper
who must choose between sacrificing a passenger train or his own four-year-old son.[37] There is a 2003 Czech short
film titled Most ["Bridge" in English] and The Bridge (US) which deals with a similar plot.[38] This version is often
given as an illustration of the Christian belief that God sacrificed his son, Jesus Christ.[37]

In the 2010 video game Fable 3, one of the earliest moral choices players make involves having to choose to execute
either their childhood sweetheart or a crowd of protesters. If a decision is not made within a certain period of time, the
king announces that the player has five seconds to make up their mind, "or they all die."

In 2016, a Facebook page under the name "Trolley Problem Memes" was recognised for its popularity on Facebook.[39]
The group administration commonly shares comical variations of the trolley problem and often mixes in multiple
types of philosophical dilemmas.[40] A common joke among the users regards "multi-track drifting", in which the lever
is pulled after the first set of wheels pass the track, thereby creating a third, often humorous, solution, where all six
people tied to the tracks are run over by the trolley.[41]

The trolley problem is mentioned in season 5 episode 8, "Tied to the Tracks", of Orange Is the New Black. It is also
discussed in the last two season 3 episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It also forms the major plot premise of
season 2 episode 5, "The Trolley Problem", of The Good Place.[42] A trolley problem experiment was conducted in
season 2 episode 1 of the YouTube Red series Mind Field, presented by Michael Stevens.[43]. Various versions of the
trolley problem were presented to the students in season 1 episode 7, "Swimming Lessons", of Netflix original series
Greenhouse Academy.

It's also featured prominently on Prey (2017 video game) as part of the decision making during the prologue/tutorial
phase. Its use is not trivial and it serves as a working metaphor for the rest of the game.

Criticism
In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass,[44] 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.[45]

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Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs go even further and assert that the thought experiment is
not only useless but downright detrimental to human psychology, opining that to make cold calculations about
hypothetical situations in which every alternative will result in one or more gruesome deaths is to encourage a type of
thinking that is devoid of human empathy and assumes a mandate to decide who lives or dies. They also question the
premise of the scenario, asking, "If am forced against my will into a situation where people will die and I have no
ability to stop it, how is my choice a “moral” choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror
show I’ve just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all?"[46]

See also
Consequentialism The Case of the Speluncean Explorers § Similar real
Deontology cases
Experiments in Ethics, a book Sophie's Choice
I, Robot The Cold Equations
Lifeboat ethics Tunnel problem
Omission bias Violinist (thought experiment)
Principle of double effect Virtue ethics

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External links
Should You Kill the Fat Man? (http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/fatman/Default.aspx)
Forced-choice decision-making in modified trolley dilemma situations: a virtual reality and eye tracking study (htt
p://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00426/full)
Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things? (http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm)
The Trolley Problem as a retro video game (http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/trolleyproblem/TrolleyProblem.html)
Trolley Problem – Killing and Letting Die (http://www.jamesrachels.org/killing.pdf)
The Trolley Problem is Fundamentally Flawed (https://andrewpegoda.com/2017/03/28/the-trolley-problem-is-fund
amentally-flawed/)
Trolley Problem Memes Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TrolleyProblemMemes/)
Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-vari
ations)

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