LAUSR

In one study, Joshua Greene and colleagues have offered a solution to the notorious trolley problem. Rising from the armchair from which trolleyological research has traditionally been carried out, they have conducted experiments to find out which principles govern our intuitions in trolley dilemmas. They found that deontological intuitions are triggered by the conjunction of two factors. One factor is personal force. A dilemma involves personal force if “the force that directly impacts the other is generated by the agent’s muscles” (e.g. when one pushes the heavy person off the footbridge). The other factor is the intention to kill the victim as a means to saving the other people (as in the footbridge case) rather than as a side-effect (as in the standard switch case, in which hitting a switch redirects the trolley onto another track).