James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Ugh, I hate ethical questions like this, because they always describe situations that would never happen in real life without a million other conditions that no ethical test could ever account for.

The trolley problem is a story philosophers often use to get people thinking about ethics and their obligations to others. Traditionally, the problem has us imagine we are an onlooker standing next to ...

The Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene is an expert in “trolleyology,” the self-effacing way he describes his research into the manifold variations on the “trolley problem.” The basic form of this ...

Superhero stories are well known for their high stakes, which in the best cases have interesting moral dimensions as well. Such is the case when heroes confront a tragic dilemma, one from which they ...

Picture the following situation: You are taking a freshman-level philosophy class in college, and your professor has just asked you to imagine a runaway trolley barreling down a track toward a group ...

The variations replace the victims, the switch operator, the trolley, or any combination of those with other characters or ideas. Some of them do away with the junction altogether: The meme was taken ...

It seems every year I must write about the highly distracting "trolley problem" question for robocars, where people wonder how software will "decide who to kill" when a car faces an unavoidable ...

I imagine you’re all familiar with the concept of the Trolley Problem. You know the ethics-minefield thought experiment, right? A trolley barrels down railway tracks, hurtling towards five people. You ...