“Security.”
“Listen hard. You are the President’s bodyguards, the T-men. I am with the Palestinian Suicide League. We have five volunteers who will all kill themselves unless you kill the President within the next hour. And we have five more volunteers who will kill themselves the next hour. Kill the President or we will carry out our threat.”

Hmmm. I found myself wondering if the 5 people who were on the track had deliberately placed themselves in a dangerous/risky position (for a thrill?). This affected my thinking about whether I could justify killing the one person on the side track whom I imagined to be an innocent bystander.

Son, we live in a world that has trolleys. And those trolleys have to be directed by men with switches. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Prof. Holbo? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your dead violinist and you curse Judith Jarvis Thompson. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: That a brain in a vat’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that trolley. You need me on that trolley. We use words like radical uncertainty, competing moral demands, the complexity of lived experience …we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up some pre-phylloxera claret and go live on a desert island. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to.

He’s not a moral philosopher; to the extent I understand his research into this question, his work can be described as a criticism of many of these types of introductory ethics examples. I think the hypothesis here is that rather than any dominant theory of ethics or morality, some more primitive reaction like proximity to suffering (homeless guy here vs. starving person 5000 miles away) or physical repulsion (physically killing vs. letting someone die without touching them) is what underlies people’s intuitions.

I doubt the guy’s conclusions are going to be ‘this proves that morality is about physically touching’; I suspect it probably underwrites a criticism of the limits of these kinds of introductory toy examples.

This is certainly an emotionally appealing explanation for my short-lived experience of said courses.

Pitkin has it right:
If you want to study people’s moral intuitions, you have to explore what practical heuristics people use for making decisions and what aspects of a situation are judged relevant. Not pick out a tiny subset of factors and conclude that if people don’t respond deterministically to those, they’re inconsistent or confused.

and this is a good point too: That’s IMHO what various commenters mean by saying the scenarios lack “context”—they lack social context, and social context is where our moral judgments come from.

Right. As several people said above, I based my calculation of the fine not on what the person’s life was “worth,” but what I thought would be an amount significant enough to hurt the wrongdoer, yet not so significant that they would go to great lengths to avoid paying it (bankruptcy, fake death and move to a new city, move abroad, etc.). The amount I put in that answer isn’t anything at all to do with whether I think it’s worse that a “little girl” got killed by a drunk driver or a “person” got killed by a bag of concrete. It has to do with “What amount will best accomplish the goal of punishing the wrongdoer, dissuading him/her and others from similar carelessness in the future, and actually having a realistic chance of getting paid?”

Other than that, my major objections to this quiz are a) forced, ludicrously unrealistic choices, b) no opportunity to discuss things with other people in the scenario (like the chemist-testing-her-poison/vaccine), and c) no acknowledgment that the ability to buy time is valuable, especially in high-pressure situations where another solution may emerge.

B) is particularly egregious, because the best real-life example I’ve seen in recent years were the doctors during Hurricane Katrina that were trying to make decisions about oxygen, medication, etc. for terminally ill patients. In many cases there one could ask the patient what they wanted to do.

This artificial world of individual moral actors who don’t have any social ties or context is just beyond stupid to me. I really don’t understand how abstracting problems out to this level tells us anything useful, or valuable, about what it means to be human and how to be a better one.

Damn damn damn damn damn. It would have been so beautiful.

No. A farmer asks a physicist to help him get his chickens to market – “what’s the most efficient way,” he asks, “to stack them in my cart?”
The physicist, with a gleam in his eye, replies, “first, imagine the chickens are spherical…”

After 1998, the joke lost some of its power. Back when it referred to one of the great unsolved mathematical mysteries, it was funnier that the scientist would elide a possibly-solvable concrete problem for an unsolvable but oh-so-interesting abstract one.