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⚖️ Morality & Ethics
Would you pull the lever?
5 escalating moral dilemmas with population data.
Rate how willing you'd be to act: 1 (absolutely not) to 5 (definitely yes).
1Pull a lever to divert a trolley — kills 1, saves 5.
2Push a large man off a bridge to stop a trolley — kills 1, saves 5.
3A doctor could harvest 1 patient's organs to save 5 others. Should they?
4Torture one terrorist to find a bomb that will kill 1,000 people.
5Allow a self-driving car to swerve into 1 pedestrian to avoid hitting 5.
6Sacrifice one person's privacy to prevent a crime that harms many.
7A lifeboat can hold 10 people. 15 are drowning. Choose who lives.
8Allow animal testing that causes suffering if it cures a human disease.
9Lie to save someone's feelings, even if truth would help them long-term.
10Break a promise to one person if it benefits many others.
The trolley problem and moral philosophy
Philippa Foot (1967) created the trolley problem to explore the difference between doing harm vs. allowing harm. Thomson (1985) added the footbridge variant.
How most people answer
- 87% pull the lever (divert trolley) — impersonal, indirect harm
- Only 10% push the man — personal, direct harm triggers moral emotion
- The organ harvest scenario: 97% say no — even though the math is identical
- Men are more utilitarian than women on average (Fumagalli et al. 2010)
What your score means
- Higher scores = more utilitarian — you prioritize outcomes (greatest good for greatest number)
- Lower scores = more deontological — you follow moral rules regardless of outcomes
- Neither is "right" — psychopaths score high on utilitarian dilemmas (Bartels & Pizarro 2011), but so do effective altruists
- fMRI shows the footbridge dilemma activates the amygdala (emotion), not just prefrontal cortex (reason)
Sources: Foot (1967), Thomson (1985), Greene et al. (2001, fMRI), Bartels & Pizarro (2011), MIT Moral Machine experiment.