trolley problem

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a thought experiment in moral philosophy, introduced by Philippa Foot and elaborated by Judith Jarvis Thomson, that poses the question: is it morally permissible to divert a runaway trolley from a track where it will kill five people to a track where it will kill one; the scenario tests the intuitive tension between consequentialist reasoning (divert to minimise deaths) and deontological constraints (it is wrong to use one person as a means to save others); Thomson's footbridge variant — pushing a large person off a bridge to stop the trolley — elicits different intuitions from the same utilitarian logic, suggesting that how harm is caused matters morally, not just its aggregate magnitude; the trolley problem has become a touchstone of experimental moral psychology and AI ethics discussions about algorithmic decision-making in autonomous vehicles