Trolley Thought Experiment

Example(s):
See: Neuroethics, Living High and Letting Die, Self-Sacrifice, Person Objectification.

References

(Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trolley_problem Retrieved:2015-10-10.
- The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills 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 correct choice?
  The problem was first introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967,^[1] but also extensively analysed by Judith Thomson, ^[2] ^[3] Peter Unger, ^[4] and Frances Kamm as recently as 1996, and has also been revisited in 2015 (Larman and Oates). ^[5] Outside of the domain of traditional philosophical discussion, the trolley problem has been a significant feature in the fields of cognitive science (e.g. ) and, more recently, of neuroethics. It has also been a topic on various TV shows dealing with human psychology.

↑ Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) (originally appeared in the Oxford Review, Number 5, 1967.)
↑ Judith Jarvis Thomson, Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem, 59 The Monist 204-17 (1976)
↑ Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Trolley Problem, 94 Yale Law Journal 1395–1415 (1985)
↑ Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
↑ Francis Myrna Kamm, Harming Some to Save Others, 57 Philosophical Studies 227-60 (1989)

(Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007) ⇒ Michael R. Waldmann, and Jörn H. Dieterich. (2007). “Throwing a Bomb on a Person versus Throwing a Person on a Bomb Intervention Myopia in Moral Intuitions." Psychological science 18, no. 3
- QUOTE: Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where the trolley would kill only one person. In this situation, people seem to follow the guidelines of utilitarianism by preferring to minimize the number of victims. However, most people would not consider it moral to have a visitor in a hospital killed to save the lives of five patients who were otherwise going to die. We conducted two experiments in which we pinpointed a novel factor behind these conflicting intuitions. We show that moral intuitions are influenced by the locus of the intervention in the underlying causal model. In moral dilemmas, judgments conforming to the prescriptions of utilitarianism are more likely when the intervention influences the path of the agent of harm (e.g., the trolley) than when the intervention influences the path of the potential patient (i.e., victim).

(Thomson, 1976) ⇒ Judith J. Thomson. (1976). “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem.” In: The Monist, 59(2).
- QUOTE: Morally speaking it may matter a great deal how a death comes about, whether from natural causes, or at the hands of another, for example. Does it matter whether a man was killed or only let to die? A great many people think it does: they think that killing is worse than letting die. And they draw conclusions from this for abortion, euthanasia, and the distribution of scarce medical resources. Others think it doesn’t, and they think this is shown by what we see when we construct a pair of cases which are so far as possible in all other respects alike, except that in one case the agent kills, in the other he only lets die. So, for example, imagine that
  (1) Alfred hates his wife and wants her dead. He puts cleaning fluid in her coffee, thereby killing her.
  and that
  (2) Bert hates his wife and wants her dead. She puts cleaning fluid in her coffee (being muddled, thinking it’s cream). Bert happens to have the antidote to cleaning fluid, but he does not give it to her; he lets her die. [3]

(Philippa et al., 1967) ⇒ Philippa Foot. (1967). “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect." Oxford Review, Number, 5.
- QUOTE: One of the reasons why most of us feel puzzled about the problem of abortion is that we want, and do not want, to allow to the unborn child the rights that belong to adults and children. When we think of a baby about to be born it seems absurd to think that the next few minutes or even hours could make so radical a difference to its status; yet as we go back in the life of the fetus we are more and more reluctant to say that this is a human being and must be treated as such. No doubt this is the deepest source of our dilemma, but it is not the only one. For we are also confused about the general question of what we may and may not do where the interests of human beings conflict. We have strong intuitions about certain cases; saying, for instance, that it is all right to raise the level of education in our country, though statistics allow us to predict that a rise in the suicide rate will follow, while it is not all right to kill the feeble-minded to aid cancer research. It is not easy, however, to see the principles involved, and one way of throwing light on the abortion issue will be by setting up parallels involving adults or children once born. So we will be able to isolate the “equal rights” issue and should be able to make some advance...