![]() Most remain secluded in the ivory tower, while a handful, like the simultaneously-dead-and-alive Schrödinger’s cat or the Prisoner’s Dilemma, escape the realm of the academic to become powerful cultural mainstays-not always for well-understood reasons.Ĭuriously, the first thinkers to popularize and analyze the trolley problem were women- in general, rare voices in philosophy. Thought experiments have been essential in scholarly discourse since the ancient Greeks and Romans. It has helped them try to answer profound questions-how do we act, and how should we? But in its fifth decade, is the trolley problem starting to show its age? In the past 40 years it has occupied the attention of brilliant minds, from academic ethicists to moral psychologists to engineers. (If you’ve never heard of it before, try this.) Puzzling, ridiculous, and oddly irresistible, this imaginary scenario has profoundly shaped our understanding of right and wrong. This haunting choice is a variation of the “trolley problem,” an iconic philosophical thought experiment. ![]() Do you pull a switch to divert the trolley onto another track, where only one man works alone? Or do you do nothing? A runaway streetcar is hurtling towards five unsuspecting workers.
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