The problem resembles philosopher Philippa Foot's most famous ethical thought experiment - the
trolley problem. Imagine you are driving a trolleybus.
As early as 2015, writers of various hues, including technology pundits, ethicists, philosophers, scholars, and journalists, began to debate the "
trolley problem" confronting fully autonomous vehicles.
The classic
trolley problem thought experiment in ethics puts us in control of a lever which controls the tracks.
If the vehicle is operated by a driverless operating system, then a computer has to respond to this version of "
trolley problem"-a classic ethical conundrum familiar to many armchair philosophers.
This is a variation of the (https://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111)
trolley problem , which dominates academic and popular thinking about the ethics of driverless cars.
In recent years, and specifically with regard to self-driving vehicles, the question has been phrased as the "
Trolley Problem." It runs like this: a trolley is running down the track toward five people.
Self-driving cars are programmed to make ethical decisions similar to the famous
trolley problem that presents a choice between doing nothing and killing five people or acting and killing one.
I argue that, though illuminating, Thomson's current take on the
Trolley Problem is mistaken.
Greene begins Part 2 with the ubiquitous
trolley problem. He wants to show how brains weigh the morality of sparing five lives from a death-destroying runaway trolley at the cost of losing one life by deliberately pushing a hefty trolley-stopping person in the path of death or passively moving a switch, which has the result of saving five passengers but killing a hapless person who happens to be on the switched-to track.
Consider the "
trolley problem." The modern form of the
trolley problem was articulated in 1967 by British philosopher Philippa Foot using this example: Imagine a runaway streetcar is racing toward five workers.
Sometimes while I'm driving to a store--well, Aunt Ava drives while I listen to music on my phone--I think about my philosophy class last spring, which I actually liked and kept attending after I'd quit the rest, and this thing we learned about called the
Trolley Problem. It's a famous conundrum involving whether you'd kill one person to save a bunch of others.