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The trolley problem is a moral thought experiment involving a trolley on course to kill some number of people. The trolley can be redirected or stopped with varying consequences and with a known benefit depending on the variation of the problem itself.
Introduction
The trolley problem is a moral dilemma used first by philosophers starting in 1967 and then adopted by psychologists to examine moral thinking in humans (Cathcart 2013). The original problem was made by Philippa Foot in a philosophical paper about abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. The problem was presented as multiple variations of a scenario in which someone had to make a choice of killing one to save five. The template scenario involved flipping a switch to change the tram to a different track. These scenarios were intended to enact the doctrine of the double effect, where good consequences with bad side effects are approvable as long as the bad side effects were not intended...
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References
Bleske-Rechek, A., Nelson, L. A., Baker, J. P., Remiker, M. W., & Brandt, S. J. (2010). Evolution and the trolley problem: People save five over one unless the one is young, genetically related, or a romantic partner. Journal of Social Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 4(3), 115–127.
Cathcart, T. (2013). The trolley problem, or would you throw the fat guy off the bridge?: A philosophical conundrum. New York: Workman Publishing Company.
Foot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Oxford Review, 5, 5–15.
Gold, N., Colman, A. M., & Pulford, B. D. (2014). Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems. Judgment and Decision Making, 9(1), 65–76.
Greene, J. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. New York: The Penguin Press.
Navarrete, C. D., McDonald, M. M., Mott, M. L., & Asher, B. (2012). Virtual morality: Emotion and action in a simulated three-dimensional “trolley problem”. Emotion, 12(2), 364–370. doi:10.1037/a0025561.
Singer, P. (2005). Ethics and intuitions. The Journal of Ethics, 9, 331–352.
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Randazzo, G. (2016). Trolley Problem, The. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_472-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_472-1
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