Abstract
Questions of what a self-driving car ought to do if it encounters a situation analogous to the ‘trolley problem’ have dominated recent discussion of the ethics of self-driving cars. This paper argues that this interest is misplaced. If a trolley-style dilemma situation actually occurs, given the limits on what information will be available to the car, the dynamics of braking and tyre traction determine that, irrespective of outcome, it is always least risky for the car to brake in a straight line rather than swerve.
Highlights
Death and CertaintyAfter presenting their truck case, Nyholm and Smids quietly correct themselves:
Recent high-profile advances in self-driving car technology have prompted a wave of interest in the ethical implications of the design and deployment of these systems
This attention has coalesced around a set of ethical dilemmas which, especially in the popular imagination,1 are held to be broadly analogous to the trolley problem (Foot 1967)
Summary
After presenting their truck case, Nyholm and Smids quietly correct themselves:. One way in which this contextual critique applies to the self-driving car dilemma has already been described: the tunnel and tree cases fail to take into account that swerving towards the oncoming traffic lane is much less safe than swerving away from it Another is that car safety features and general design anticipate certain kinds of crash being more common or otherwise more important to design for than others. Aspects of the ethical situation more securely ‘right’ than a human in an emergencystop driving situation Since both arguments relate primarily to the obligations of the designers, it is not clear that they directly address the question of what the car should do. If Parfit is right, there are two kinds of moral question about a decision: one about which outcome is good and which bad, and the other, ‘less fundamental’, kind, which concern how a deciding agent should think about risk. What looks like a dilemma when both outcomes are well-known but ambiguously valued may look much simpler when one option is a known and relatively controlled harm but the other is difficult to predict and bears an open risk of disaster
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