Trolley Problem

Also found in: Wikipedia.

A hypothetical moral dilemma:
(1) If person A allows a speeding trolley to continue along its path—i.e., does not act—multiple people will be killed
(2) If person A instead causes one person’s death—i.e., does act—multiple people are saved; therein lies the dilemma: passively allow multiple deaths, or actively kill one—i.e., commit homicide—but save many

References in periodicals archive ?

The problem resembles philosopher Philippa Foot's most famous ethical thought experiment - the trolley problem. Imagine you are driving a trolleybus.

Why human drivers will have to be banned

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.

Selling AI: The Case of Fully Autonomous Vehicles: Advocates' claims about potential lives saved with self-driving vehicles are a misleading attempt to steer the discussion of traffic safety away from alternative approaches

The classic trolley problem thought experiment in ethics puts us in control of a lever which controls the tracks.

Bandersnatch: Sartre, freewill and beyond the 'Black Mirror'

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.

Amoral Machine or a Moral Machine?

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.

Driverless Cars Offer New Forms Of Control 6 No Wonder Governments Are Keen

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.

Ethical issues could put brakes on driverless cars

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.

What Will Be Human in the Future?

I argue that, though illuminating, Thomson's current take on the Trolley Problem is mistaken.

THOMSON'S TROLLEY PROBLEM

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.

Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them

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.

Driven to a dilemma: the moral issue of how a driverless car will respond to split-second, life-and-death situations is something that requires much more thought

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.