Trolley Problem Research Articles

Ethos of evolutionary societal complexity

Consideration of the ethos component makes it possible to give a whole range picture of the essence of social arrangement at different stages of the evolution of communities. The living elements of Western and Eastern governance traditions presented in the cases display a great variety in the configuration of the coexistence of formal institutions and informal practices, which reveals an irreducible variability of the spectrum of social complexity. Attempts to artificially unify the governance environment are based on a project vision of reality, which, when in contact with the initial conditions of reform, can lead to counterproductive results and bounce back on the personal fate of decision-makers. In this regard, the problem of the ethos of the reformer's personal responsibility in conjunction with the continuity and cyclicality of the political process becomes highly relevant. Ethos in politics fits into the gap between the individual and the public — the gap in which choice is born. This formulation of the ethos issue creates the possibility of its two-vector consideration — from top to bottom and from bottom to the top. The first vector implies a deterministic need to make a decision in a situation that is represented in the literature as a «trolley problem» — a scalable choice based on a quantitative (good for the majority) or qualitative (value of an individual fate) criterion. A prerequisite for the cognitive «trolley model» is the configuration of the situation in such a way that inaction choice is not an ethically neutral alternative: it equates to a choice that is fully amenable to normative analysis, taking into account the consequences of such a decision for an individual and / or collective subject. The second vector of studying the ethos component in politics concerns the often contradictory sequence of steps in decision-making by an individual subject who has delegated the right to govern to a collective level subject. The problems of this analytical spectrum are presented in the «principal-agent» theory (M. Pollack) and are based on the role of information asymmetries. A principal delegating managerial authority to an agent assumes that the agent has more qualifications and expertise to make decisions in favor of the principal. After the conclusion of the «social contract of delegation», the agent does not always use these information asymmetries in order to benefit the principal. The described collisions, arising in the course of evolution in the ethos component of complex societies, significantly increase the difficulties in predicting the course of development of the immediate and distant consequences of current events, thus intensifying the dependence on the sole and collective subjects of political decisionmaking.

Moral judgment, decision times and emotional salience of a new developed set of sacrificial manual driving dilemmas.

The growing interest in the subject of moral judgment in driver and autonomous vehicle behavior highlights the importance of investigating the suitability of sacrificial dilemmas as experimental tools in the context of traffic psychology. To this aim a set of validated sacrificial trolley problems and a new set of trolley-like driving dilemmas were compared through an online survey experiment, providing normative values for rates of participants’ choices; decision times; evaluation of emotional valence and arousal experienced during the decision process; and ratings of the moral acceptability. Results showed that while both sets of dilemmas led to a more frequent selection of utilitarian outcomes, the driving-type dilemmas seemed to enhance faster decisions mainly based on the utilitarian moral code. No further differences were observed between the two sets, confirming the reliability of the moral dilemma tool in the investigation of moral driving behaviors. We suggest that as moral judgments and behaviors become more lifelike, the individual’s moral inclination emerge more automatically and effectively. This new driving-type dilemma set may help researchers who work in traffic psychology and moral decision-making to approach the complex task of developing realistic moral scenarios more easily in the context of autonomous and nonautonomous transportation.

The Trolley Problem and Intuitional Evidence

The Trolley Problem and Intuitional Evidence

THE TROLLEY META-PROBLEM

For many years, philosophers have argued about the Trolley Problem – but they've also argued about whether the problem ought to interest us. According to some, the artificiality of the situations means that they involve no complicating factors – and so we ought to take our intuitions about them especially seriously. According to others, though, the artificiality of the situations means that our intuitions about them are meaningless. I hereby name the puzzle of why our intuitions about this differ the ‘Trolley Meta-Problem’. The story that follows illustrates this problem – and the Trolley Problem itself – in a humorous way.

Autonomous vehicles and moral judgments under risk

Some criticize the data-driven study of driverless car ethics for relying on deterministic crash scenarios where the focus should be on minimizing the occurrence of accidents instead. Indeed, decisions in road traffic are taken in the domain of risk. A relevant ethical question is, however, whether autonomous vehicles should actually minimize an accident’s probability or rather balance the accident’s probability and severity. While ethicists’ introspections might lead them to different conclusions, a participatory paradigm in ethics demands to include laypeople’s intuitions into the societal debate. In three online studies, we found that the mere minimization of accident probability in ethical dilemmas does not correspond to the views of our sample. Our participants favor a balanced consideration of accident probability and severity. This remains true even if the underlying dilemma is based on a more realistic scenario of allocating minor risks among road users. Our findings furthermore illustrate that trolley problems may be informative for autonomous vehicles and emphasize the importance of transparency if manufacturers and the public do not agree on guiding principles in road traffic.

Instrumentos de Dilemas Morais Utilizados para Avaliar Julgamento Moral: Revisão Sistemática

orality is an essential element of the human being, who, on many occasions, needs to face complex and stressful decisions. Techniques with moral dilemmas are considered a standard methodology in moral judgment studies. One of the traditional dilemmas is the “Trolley Problem”; using it as a model, sets of moral dilemmas were developed and adapted to diff erent research objectives, but there is no consensus regarding its psychometric properties. Similarly, assessment instruments with moral dilemmas have been developed: the Moral Judgment Interview and the Moral Competence Test are some of the best known. The aim of this study was to investigate the assessment instruments with moral dilemmas, used to assess moral judgment, in surveys conducted between 2010 and 2020, period with a signifi cant increase in publications on this topic. For this, a systematic review of literature was carried out using the PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and PsycInfo databases, following the PRISMA protocol. 354 studies were found, of which 8 were selected, containing the following instruments: Moral Competence Test (MCT), Moral Judgment Test (MJT), Moral Sense Test (MST), Moral Thinking and Communication (MTC) and Moral Judgments of Sport Managers Instrument (MJSMI). It is also important to consider that 90 of the excluded studies contained varied sets of dilemmas. In conclusion, in this analysis, few studies using assessment instruments were found and the predominant use was of sets adapted to the objectives of each research.

Development of Cheating Dilemma as a Thought Experiment in Assessing the Student’s Ethical Decision Making

Thought experiments give each individual the opportunity to critically evaluate, examine their knowledge, and come up with the best possible solution while keeping in mind societal ethical norms and the implications of their actions. Given that students are continuously confronted with ethical decision-making throughout their studies, new thought experiments may be devised to assist them in assessing and improving their decision-making abilities. New Cheating Dilemmas have been constructed by taking into account numerous ideas such as utilitarianism, right-based theory, the doctrine of double effect, and employing components of the well-known thought experiments like the Trolley Problem and Fat-Man Problem. In this study, the Self-Cheating and Peer-Cheating dilemma tests were established to see if they provide the same chances for thought experiments to be employed in the academic integrity issue of cheating for students. Factors influencing college students' ethical decision-making in reaction to cheating have been explored. Various variants of the developed cheating problems were analyzed using the duty and consequentialist framework. The findings result in actions and policies that will be designed to improve awareness regarding the importance of academic integrity for students

Trolley Problem Applied

Even a dog can tell if he was tripped over or kicked. Would entrepreneurs know? To slow down the progress of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many states have taken restrictive measures, including the closing of private businesses. Are entrepreneurs therefore entitled to compensation? The answer is not obvious. In this paper, I suggest a solution which follows from a si mple test inspired by the famous trolley dilemma, asking whether the state used entrepreneurs as instruments (means) to slow down the pandemic. I argue that entrepreneurs were not “used” that way, which is why they possess no moral claim to compensation for the harm caused by the closure. However, I do argue for at least a moral claim of theirs to satisfaction. For the possible disruption of their relationship with other citizens, rather than for the monetary damage they were forced to bear.

The Effects of Parental Care Motives and Time Constraints on Trolley Problem Decision-Making: A Virtual Reality Study

The Effects of Parental Care Motives and Time Constraints on Trolley Problem Decision-Making: A Virtual Reality Study

Creating and Redirecting Threats

AbstractIn the third volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit argued that the distinction between imposing a newly created threat on someone and making what threatens some people instead threaten someone else has no genuine moral significance. This article's central thesis is that although there is much to learn from Parfit's arguments, they are ultimately unsuccessful at establishing that the redirected versus newly created threats distinction is morally irrelevant. In particular, I show that my Causal Sequences Principle specifies this distinction in such a way that it is immune to Parfit's objections against the Redirection Principle. It follows that any moral theory that can provide a sound rationale for the Causal Sequences Principle can solve the trolley problem.

Is There a Foreign Accent Effect on Moral Judgment?

Recent studies have shown that people make more utilitarian decisions when dealing with a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. Emotion, cognitive load, and psychological distance have been put forward as explanations for this foreign language effect. The question that arises is whether a similar effect would be observed when processing a dilemma in one’s own language but spoken by a foreign-accented speaker. Indeed, foreign-accented speech has been shown to modulate emotion processing, to disrupt processing fluency and to increase psychological distance due to social categorisation. We tested this hypothesis by presenting 435 participants with two moral dilemmas, the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma online, either in a native accent or a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 184 native Spanish speakers listened to the dilemmas in Spanish recorded by a native speaker, a British English or a Cameroonian native speaker. In Experiment 2, 251 Dutch native speakers listened to the dilemmas in Dutch in their native accent, in a British English, a Turkish, or in a French accent. Results showed an increase in utilitarian decisions for the Cameroonian- and French-accented speech compared to the Spanish or Dutch native accent, respectively. When collapsing all the speakers from the two experiments, a similar increase in the foreign accent condition compared with the native accent condition was observed. This study is the first demonstration of a foreign accent effect on moral judgements, and despite the variability in the effect across accents, the findings suggest that a foreign accent, like a foreign language, is a linguistic context that modulates (neuro)cognitive mechanisms, and consequently, impacts our behaviour. More research is needed to follow up on this exploratory study and to understand the influence of factors such as emotion reduction, cognitive load, psychological distance, and speaker’s idiosyncratic features on moral judgments.

Question wording and attitudinal ambivalence: COVID, the economy, and Americans' response to a real‐life trolley problem

AbstractObjectiveAs the coronavirus pandemic raged throughout 2020, political leaders faced a difficult choice: Should strict social distancing guidelines be maintained until the threat posed by COVID‐19 was diminished enough for citizens to return to their regular activities? Or was the economic disruption caused by the pandemic something that was, according to President Trump, "worse than the problem itself"?MethodsWe analyze data from a 2020 survey of registered voters.ResultsDemocrats were more likely than Republicans to resolve the tradeoff in favor of maintaining social distancing over rebuilding the economy. More importantly, we find that when faced with this moral dilemma (measured by one's choice between a utilitarian vs. a deontological approach when confronted with a real‐life "trolley problem"), many citizens from both sides of the partisan aisle were of two minds on the subject.ConclusionAmericans are ambivalent about the appropriate government response to COVID‐19.

Individual and Environmental Correlates of Adolescents' Moral Decision-Making in Moral Dilemmas.

While extensive research has been conducted on adults’ judgments in moral sacrificial dilemmas, there is little research on adolescents. The present study aimed at: (1) adding further empirical evidence about adolescents’ moral decisions (deontological vs. utilitarian) in sacrificial moral dilemmas and (2) investigating how these moral decisions relate with gender, school grade, emotional traits (callous-unemotional traits), context-related experiences (perceived parental rejection and community violence exposure), and moral-related factors (moral disengagement and universalism value). A sample of 755 Italian adolescents (54.7% females; Mean age=16.45, SD=1.61) attending the second and the fifth year of secondary school took part in the study. Two sacrificial trolley-type dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) were presented. In the “switch” scenario (impersonal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to hit a switch to save five people killing only one person. In the “footbridge” scenario (personal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to push a large man off a footbridge saving five persons. For each scenario, participants had to indicate whether the proposed action was “morally acceptable” or not. Data were analyzed performing generalized linear mixed models. Our results showed that: (1) Adolescents were more likely to indicate as admissible to hit the switch rather than to push the large man; (2) male adolescents, compared to females, were more likely to say it was morally acceptable to intervene in the footbridge dilemma, whereas younger adolescents said it was morally acceptable both in the switch and the footbridge situations; and (3) higher levels of callous-unemotional traits, perceived parental rejection, and moral disengagement, on the one hand, and lower levels of universalism, on the other hand, were associated to higher admissibility to intervene in the footbridge scenario. Higher community violence exposure was associated with a lower propensity to intervene in the switch scenario. Overall, the present study expands the research on sacrificial dilemmas involving a sample of adolescents. The findings support previous studies concerning the role of emotions in making moral decisions but, at the same, open new perspectives regarding the role of contextual experiences and moral-related factors.

Individual differences in moral judgment predict attitudes towards mandatory vaccinations

Skepticism about the efficacy and risks related to Covid-19 vaccinations has become a politicized issue. In response, some politicians have proposed policies (such as imposing vaccine passports) aimed at increasing public vaccination rates. The response has been mixed. In the current study (N = 266), we examined the role of conservatism and moral judgments in accounting for these differences. Results from data collected between January and March 2021 showed that increased levels of conservatism and deontological processing (i.e., having a stronger D-process) were associated with less agreement to a government-imposed Covid-19 vaccine mandate. However, participants who made utilitarian responses to traditional switch and footbridge dilemmas reported greater agreement towards the same mandate. These results are consistent with prior findings showing political divides surrounding Covid-19 and indicate that individual differences in moral judgment predict opinion about a significant and current real-world issue.

Moral Dilemmas, Ethical Particularism, and Dewey’s Continuum of Normative Inquiry

Departing from hypothetical dilemmas and drawing on examples from law, this paper offers a pragmatist account of normative induction that characterizes moral particularism and generalism as stages of inquiry into ethical problems, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Pragmatism’s response to analytical moral theory lies in understanding the transformative nature of John Dewey’s social continuum of inquiry. The continuum is unrecognized in the analysis of hypothetical dilemmas, like the trolley problem, but can clearly be seen in studies of law. Real moral dilemmas represent actual conflicts, of which the dimensions emerge through experience and the solution cannot be addressed through the analysis of cleverly balanced moral puzzles. Repeated over time, real problems drive the consensual formation and revision of social practices and the predication of general moral rules and principles. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” propositionally, and that it is descriptively “shapeless.” It fails to recognize that real moral problems occur in a continuum, and at first encounter a shapeless particularist context of seemingly unlimited non-moral properties. Normativity is driven by repetition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than a Dancian retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and accompanying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology.

The Trolley Problem and the Nature of Intention: Implications for Social Work Ethi

Archives > Volume 18 (2021) > Issue 2 > Item 08 DOI: 10.55521/10-018-208 Frederic G. Reamer, Ph.D.*Rhode Island Collegefreamer@ric.edu *Full disclosure: Frederic G. Reamer is a member of the JSWVE editorial board. JSWVE uses an anonymous review process in which authors do not review their own work, reviewers do not know authors’ identities and authors […]

Teaching moral reasoning: Why and how to use the trolley problem

ABSTRACT This article describes a teaching plan for a discussion-driven introduction to moral reasoning and explains its philosophical and pedagogical rationale. The teaching plan consists of a sequence of thought experiments that build on one another, and ends with participants addressing some morally complex, real-life issues. The plan rests on extensive experience teaching moral reasoning in several different professional learning environments. The main contribution of this article is practical. The goal is to equip educators with a pedagogical approach and ready-to-use teaching materials. To this end, the article offers the methodological background, identifies learning objectives as well as pitfalls of teaching the trolley problem, and describes the pedagogy of the session.

Rational, emotional, or both? Subcomponents of psychopathy predict opposing moral decisions.

Recent research has documented a small but significant correlation between psychopathic capacities and utilitarian moral judgment, although the findings are generally inconsistent and unclear. We propose that one way to make sense of mixed findings is to consider variation in perspective‐taking capacities of psychopathic individuals. With this in mind, we had criminal offenders (n = 60), who varied in their psychopathy levels according to the Psychopathy Checklist‐Revised (PCL‐R), respond to common sacrificial moral dilemmas (e.g., trolley dilemmas) under different conditions. In a baseline condition, participants simply responded to the sacrificial moral dilemmas as is typically done in previous research. In an “emotion‐salient” condition, participants had to reason about the emotions of another person after solving moral dilemmas (deliberative processing). In the “emotion‐ambiguous” condition, participants saw images of people in distress, after solving moral dilemmas, but did not have to explicitly reason about such emotions (spontaneous processing). The four PCL‐R facets predicted distinct interference effects depending on spontaneous versus deliberative processing of hypothetical victim's emotions. The findings suggest that the use of a multi‐faceted approach to account for cognitive and moral correlates of psychopathy may help address previously mixed results. Implications and future directions for theory and research are discussed.

Digitalization of agriculture: A way to solve the food problem or a trolley dilemma?

The high potential of digital applications for agriculture generates enthusiasm about the future of food production. Some view the intelligence offered by digital tools as a way to solve the still pressing food problem. Nevertheless, social, ethical, political, cultural, and environmental concerns associated with digitalization loom large. In this article, using as a framework the artificial trolley dilemma – a situation in which one has to decide about the rightness of putting at risk someone trying to avoid some obvious and imminent noxious effects to a larger group of people – we present the promises and perils of agricultural digitalization. We also point out the need to develop new trajectories for the digital agricultural revolution that ensure the increase of food production without severe negative societal impacts. Although digitalization is sometimes viewed as a panacea for boosting the transition of agrifood production towards more sustainable paradigms, the trade-off may be complicated and requires in-depth analyses excavating the multiple rationales in digitalizing farming. Today, there is a need for science to prove that digitalization does have society-wide positive impacts. On the other side of the coin, the assessment and the estimation of the magnitude of the externalities that digital technologies may have require the development and application of robust evaluation methods. Finally, policies must emphasize the need to provide inclusive and open spaces for agricultural digitalization.

How Moral Expectancy Violations Influence Audiences’ Affective Dispositions Toward Characters

Affective disposition theory (ADT) explains that the moral judgments of character behavior inform dispositions toward characters. These dispositions bias moral judgments of characters’ subsequent behaviors and establish behavioral expectations. We used expectancy violations theory to help specify people’s dispositions toward characters. In study 1, we modified the footbridge dilemma to develop experimental stimuli and predictions. Studies 2 and 3 observed the disposition formation process longitudinally and validated our stimulus: a custom-built visual novel. Study 4 tested our predictions. Studies 2 through 4 used pre-registered hypotheses, sampling, and data analyses. Results demonstrated that the current disposition (positive vs. negative) changes how a novel (im)moral behavior affects that disposition. Schema-violating behaviors provoked larger mean differences in participants’ dispositions toward protagonists compared to antagonists. Specifically, people were hyper-scrutinous of moral paragons and entrenched despised characters in moral skepticism. Additionally, we observed differences in dispositions toward characters who did not act when they could (inaction).