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Philosophy · 11 questions

The Trolley Problem

Switch, footbridge, loop, and transplant. A higher percent means you were more willing to trade one life for several, including when the one is used as a means.

About this test

Philippa Foot put a runaway trolley in print as a problem about abortion and the doctrine of double effect: may you redirect a threat that kills five onto a track that kills one? Judith Jarvis Thomson added the footbridge, where you push a large person into the trolley's path, the loop, where the one person is the weight that stops the five from dying, and the transplant case, where a surgeon kills one healthy patient to save five. Greene and others later studied the psychology of these splits. The psychology is not the moral answer. These retellings are original. The percent is an outcome-first lean. Refusing the trade is a serious view.

Question 1 of 11

What this test asks
  1. A trolley will kill five people on the track ahead. You can pull a switch and send it onto a side track, where it will kill one. You did not start the trolley. No other option exists.
  2. There is no switch. You are on a footbridge. The only way to stop the trolley from killing five is to push a large stranger off, into its path. His body would stop it. He dies.
  3. The side track loops back onto the main line. If you switch, the trolley will hit one person and stop before it reaches the five. The one person is the weight that saves them. Without that impact, the five die.
  4. A surgeon can kill one healthy patient and use the organs to save five dying patients. The hospital will not be caught. The five are innocent. So is the one.
  5. The switch will save one hundred and kill one. Everything else about the original switch is the same.
  6. You can stop the five from dying only by sacrificing yourself. Nobody else can. The one-versus-five frame is now you.
  7. The one person on the side track is someone you love. The five are strangers. The mechanics are the original switch.
  8. If you do nothing, the trolley kills the five. Doing nothing is available. Is omission a different kind of act?
  9. A remote switch sits at a desk miles away. The effect is the footbridge effect: one stranger's body stops the trolley. You would press a button, not push.
  10. You may redirect the trolley only by steering it through a wall that collapses on one person who was never on a track. The five are saved. The collapse is the means of stopping it.
  11. Set aside what you could make yourself do. What are other people permitted to do in the original switch case?