Imagine that you’re a rude teen hanging near some trolley tracks, kicking around rocks, when you look up and notice that five people are tied to the tracks. A trolley suddenly appears, careening ...

Should the driver of a crashing car be allowed to swerve into your lane and kill you, if she calculates that doing so would save her life? What if she'd die, too, but would save the lives of a ...

A version of this essay first appeared in Vox on June 8, 2016. A recent article in the Huffington Post huffs about the “ifnexplicable” and “absurd” popularity of a trolley-problem-memes page created ...

Picture the following situation: You are taking a freshman-level philosophy class in college, and your professor has just asked you to imagine a runaway trolley barreling down a track toward a group ...

I imagine you’re all familiar with the concept of the Trolley Problem. You know the ethics-minefield thought experiment, right? A trolley barrels down railway tracks, hurtling towards five people. You ...

The variations replace the victims, the switch operator, the trolley, or any combination of those with other characters or ideas. Some of them do away with the junction altogether: The meme was taken ...

You know the drill by now: A runaway trolley is careening down a track. There are five workers ahead, sure to be killed if the trolley reaches them. You can throw a lever to switch the trolley to a ...

Ugh, I hate ethical questions like this, because they always describe situations that would never happen in real life without a million other conditions that no ethical test could ever account for.

There is an old thought experiment called the Trolley Problem that’s become central to the development of autonomous cars. In the context of self-driving cars, it sets up a scenario where an ...

Among the many lessons “The Good Place” tried to teach us, along with how to be “good” and what we owe to each other, was how to make a difficult decision when there is really no good choice. The ...

You are walking through a rail yard when you notice a runaway trolley careening your way. Directly in its path are five people, bound and lying across the tracks. They will die if nothing is done.