Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem

Trolleys and Double Effect in Experimental Ethics

“…Why is it permissible for the bystander to divert the trolley onto the one workman by pressing the switch while it is not permissible for the bystander to stop the trolley by pushing the fat man off the bridge? This is the so-called Trolley Problem, resulting from Judith Jarvis Thomson's (1976Thomson's ( & 1985 adaptation of an example from Philippa Foot (1967). If it is permissible to intervene in the so-called Bystander at the Switch scenario while it is not permissible to intervene in the so-called Fat Man scenario, then the Trolley Problem arises and we must explain the moral difference between these two cases.…”

“…ii "I believe that the traditional principle of double effect, despite problems of application, provides a rough guide to the extension and character of deontological constraints, and that even after the volumes that have been written on the subject in recent years, this remains the right point of convergence for efforts to capture our intuitions" (Nagel 1986: 179). iii Foot originally suggested that we explain the trolley case in terms of the difference between positive and negative duties (1967); her proposal was refuted by Thomson (1976Thomson ( & 1985, which in doing so introduced the Trolley Problem as we know it today. Please see my book Ethics Without Intention for details on the history of this debate (Di Nucci 2014).…”

How not to test for philosophical expertise

“…Here we can look at detailed results for one of these tests (there are others). Some subjects saw an ordering of cases like this: a 12 See, among many, Foot (1967), Thomson (1976), Quinn (1989), Unger (1996), Kamm (2000), Thomson (2008), and Liao (2009). Switch-type case followed by a Push-type case, then a Bad Moral Luck Case followed by a Good Moral Luck case.…”

“…So SC tested whether their subjects rated Trolley-type and Footbridge-type cases equivalently. They varied 11 The Footbridge case (Thomson 1976) resembles the Trolley case in that it involves bringing about the death of one person to save five, but it differs in that the agent must physically push the one person in front of the oncoming vehicle, rather than flipping a switch to direct danger toward a person.…”

“…In one form or another, it dates (at least) to Thomas Aquinas. It is explicitly discussed in many contemporary papers in normative ethics, including the modern classics from which the Trolley problem itself originates (Foot 1967;Thomson 1976). 15 It is very likely to appear in any introductory course taught by professors of normative ethics; it features prominently in standard texts.…”