From: The Atlantic
Is One of the Most Popular Psychology Experiments Worthless?
The Atlantic:
Harvard University justice professor Michael J. Sandel stood before a lecture hall filled with students recently and presented them with an age-old moral quandary:
“Suppose you’re the driver of a trolley car, and your trolley car is hurtling down the track at 60 miles an hour. You notice five workers working on the track. You try to stop, but you can’t, because your brakes don’t work. You know that if you crash into these five workers, they will all die. You feel helpless until you notice that off to the side, there’s a side track. And there’s one worker on the side track.”
The question: Do you send the trolley onto the side track, thus killing the one worker but sparing the five, or do you let events unfold as they will and allow the deaths of all five? (Most people, for what it’s worth, say they would turn.)
Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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