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Most subjects said they’d flip the switch. Very well, they were told, but now suppose yourself on a bridge that crosses the track. A fat man shares the bridge with you. You could shove him off the bridge and onto the track, which would halt the trolley, costing him his life but saving five others. Or you could let the tragedy take its course. Most of the subjects said they’d let the fat man be, even though—and whoever was laying out the trolley problem on the radio was emphatic about this—the two situations were essentially the same: one life versus five.
So why the difference? What I heard on the radio was that the people who would flip the switch but let the fat man be could not say why. They were obeying no principle they could put their finger on.
But Sunday I came across the trolley problem in the New York Times Book Review, where it was discussed in a review of two new books: Would You Kill the Fat Man?, by David Edmonds, and The Trolley Problem; Or, Would You Throw the Fat Guy off the Bridge, by Thomas Cathcart. Apparently I’d missed some details.
Should you kill the fat man? Follow this link and take the quiz—a series of questions that ask how you’d respond to a version of the trolley problem. (Here it’s a runaway train threatening a total of six persons who simply cannot get off the tracks in time.) After a series of questions that ask in a general way about your moral sensibility, the quiz gets down to brass tacks.
