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The question “Would you kill the fat man?” originates from the Trolley Problem – a thought experiment that explores morality. Specifically, the Trolley Problem creates morally complex scenarios that call for judgments as a means to explore the underlying rules that govern our moral instincts. David Edmonds wrote a book that explores this research called Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong (Edmonds 2013).
Introduction
Imagine you are standing on the side of a railroad track. Up ahead you see five men bound to the track with a train heading toward them. If you do nothing, the train will kill them. However, you can pull a lever which will cause the train to be redirected avoiding the five men. Unfortunately, on the redirected path, there is one man who is also tied to the track, and redirecting the train would kill him. What would you...
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References
Edmonds, D. (2013). Would you kill the fat man? The trolley problem and what your answer tells us about right and wrong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Edmonds, D., Duncan, S., & Armstrong, G. (2014). Would you kill the fat man? Maryland: Recorded Books.
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Greene, J. (2013). Moral tribes. Emotion, reason and the gap between us and them. London: Atlantic Books Ltd.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814.
Hume, D. (2012). A treatise of human nature. Massachusetts: Courier Corporation.
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Wysocki, A. (2016). Would You Kill the Fat Man?. 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_483-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_483-1
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