Trolley Problem Quotes

I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end.

Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”5

You probably learned in your high school civics course, as I did in mine, that the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. Well, I’m here to tell you this morning that this is not strictly true. The Court of Public Opinion is actually the highest court in the land.

Could the two constructs – psychopathy and utilitarianism – possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths.

Deontology states that there are certain things, like torture, that you just shouldn’t do.

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

When people consider the trolley problem, here’s what brain imaging reveals: In the footbridge scenario, areas involved in motor planning and emotion become active. In contrast, in the track-switch scenario, only lateral areas involved in rational thinking become active. People register emotionally when they have to push someone; when they only have to tip a lever, their brain behaves like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Moral Sense Test developed by Harvard psychologists in 2003 can be found online at: moral.wjh.harvard.edu

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

Being deluged with trolley problems is one of the professional hazards of modern moral philosophy.

Engineers working on self-driving cars have already begun to realize that the software is going to have to be programmed to solve certain kinds of trolley problems.

In so-called moral decisions, emotion always trumps reason.

The Trolley Problem (1967)

Sartre’s puzzle has something in common with a famous thought experiment, the ‘trolley problem’. This proposes that you see a runaway train or trolley hurtling along a track to which, a little way ahead, five people are tied. If you do nothing, the five people will die — but you notice a lever which you might throw to divert the train to a sidetrack. If you do this, however, it will kill one person, who is tied to that part of the track and who would be safe if not for your action. So do you cause the death of this one person, or do you do nothing and allow five to die? (In a variant, the ‘fat man’ problem, you can only derail the train by throwing a hefty individual off a nearby bridge onto the track. This time you must physically lay hands on the person you are going to kill, which makes it a more visceral and difficult dilemma.) Sartre’s student’s decision could be seen as a ‘trolley problem’ type of decision, but made even more complicated by the fact that he could not be sure either that his going to England would actually help anyone, nor that leaving his mother would seriously harm her.

Lately I've seen many references to the classic "Trolley Problem" which is designed to put people in scenario that invokes a moral dilemma. The point is to see how people react, their thought process and how emotions and visual imagery influence a moral judgment. It isn't about the choices. There has been a steady increase in papers written on this problem (with new variations) in the past few years, which is not surprising since the definition and role of Ethics in a digital world has become an important topic. It is broader than AI, though the accelerated use of AI has likely been a major catalyst for ethics research. One could say that an answer is to avoid being in a situation where you have a moral dilemma. The conventional ways we have looked at ethics in the past have been too singular in view and the increasing innovations in technology have made the singular view obsolete. The only way to break out of the box is by having ethics in AI being driven through collaboration among a diverse population.