For the poll, I chose “Do nothing and let the five people get hit.” That’s a horrible answer, and I think that these sorts of lifeboat-scenario questions are rigged so that the person expected to answer looks horrible either way. (And it’s no accident that the Joker’s antics in “The Dark Knight” are based on these philosophical lifeboat scenarios.)

If I choose to do nothing, and those five people are killed, my passivity in the face of the emergency is horrible. However, if I pull the lever, then I am very directly taking action to cause someone’s death. That is worse than passively letting Kitty Genovese die — it is taking direct action to snuff someone out. (Here, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt would say that I’m letting my amygdala control me.)

I would stay away from the lever, but spend the time trying to derail the trolly. Put rocks on the tracks or something … I have no idea what would work, but something might, and at least I’d be making a positive effort rather than the least-negative one. I mean what else would you do … stand next to the lever and watch as someone is killed?

I am going to let myself be sucked into this hole of doom question. Don’t hate me, I have no clue what the best answer is, and my answer is fairly subjective and has lots of holes, which is no good (just like the question!)

Aside from all of this mess of getting into this Saw-movie style situation, I am assuming I know how to work the lever and such other knowledge that would make this decision rely on me being the active party: I would throw it, based on the fact that I’d rather deal with the personal guilt of killing one person rather than the personal guilt of killing five. In this situation, I have the knowledge and ability to act. If I choose not to act, I create a net loss of four people (5-1=4), and while I could say “Oh no! five people died, but it is not my fault, I was paralyzed by fear and shock and it is not my fault that they died!,” I’ve dealt with human loss on a very personal level, and one loss has got to be easier to deal with than an immediate five. But, if the one person was someone I loved and valued, those other suckers tied up would be on the way to being ground-human-burger, and my level of guilt would be much lower. And if I knew all of them, I am glad I only have one child so far that I could put into this horrible hypothetical question. Also, note that guilt is an all encompassing word- it could include shame as well, but is meant to describe the whole human emotion of wanting to have done something differently that we subject ourselves to in these situations. I am moved to think this sort of situation occurs in some form when we deal with people trying to conceive- often you have to choose to abort some of the fetuses in order for the others, and you to live. These fetuses, I think, would have a very similar emotional weight in a person’s mind as a bunch of strangers tied to the rails. Probably more, since they are wanted, the parents have spent a great deal of time envisioning who they will be once born, products and items for their existence have already been invested in, and they are made out of your own super-awesome DNA, rather than some other human genetic code far removed from you.

Oh, questions like this drive me mad! I thought of another similar scenario, based on the idea of you being the only capable active party with the knowledge and ability: There is a house on fire. Four people are trapped in one room on the first floor, and one person is trapped in a separate room on the first floor. The rooms are equidistant from you. There are no windows. As a trained firefighter, it is your job to save lives. All the other firefighters are busy. Do you save the one person or the four?

There is a reason my crazy brother is a firefighter and I am a fashion designer… questions like this are real to some people. Often, they are people who put themselves in these situations. You cannot just shrug off this ‘trolley’ version situation because it leaves you with only two hard choices, as I am assuming that a third choice, such as the escapist version, “I’d derail it!” doesn’t answer the question that first responders like police, EMTS, and Firefighters, or soldiers and other professions dealing with unjust choices have to deal with, everyday. These people see the aftermath of this decision daily- and calling this situation easy might be true on some level- but only because those that enter similar scenarios are trained for it, and trained for the bodies.

Like some of the other commentators, I always ask questions about how I could possibly know such things in such situations; such things as “how do I know the lever works? How do I know what it will do? How do I know the trolley won’t stop?”

So I throw the lever and then try to derail the trolley. In the picture, the single person is closer to me, meaning I have a better chance of getting ahead of the trolley to derail it, and the throwing of the level means that the fallout from failing to derail it is lower.

I would follow James Tiberius Kirk’s lead – when he hacked the problem (the Kobayashi Maru test) to avoid it – and find an alternate solution.

Battlefield medical personnel face this type of problem while doing triage. For instance in a large group of casualties it might be possible to save one person with extensive surgery, but would result in several others dying due to lack of medical care or supplies. To make it more similar to the trolley conundrum, assume a severely injured patient is placed on the surgical table and the doctor realizes it will take extensive surgery and that five other patients waiting for care will die during the wait. Going on a first come-first serve basis for treating patients seems to put the surgeon in the same position as the would be trolley switcher. I would not fault the doctor for allowing the first patient to die while aiding other patients.

At the time of my response the poll seems to show that 25% would go ahead and treat the first patient. I wonder if the poll had been worded as a triage problem if the results would change much.