What is a trolley dilemma?
A trolley is a small vehicle that, in hypothesis, travels on top of electricity such as a rail. Trolley dilemma refers to a problem situation that presents people with a broken trolley situation and determines if they can sacrifice a minority to save the majority. The trolley dilemma has two questions.
At this time, the results of a survey of respondents' brain activity are also interesting, and many people are known to make different judgments about two similar problems. It is said that numerous challenges to moral justification can be discussed.
The first instance
Five workers are working on a railroad track, and a trolley with a broken brake is running toward the workers. If you change the direction of this trolley, one worker will die. What would you do if you were in a situation where you had to change the direction of the trolley?→ In this case, 89% of people chose that it should be reversed.
American psychologist Joshua Green examined the respondents' brain activity and found that the frontal lobe area involved in rational and rational decision-making was activated.
The second case
You are watching the trolley run on the overpass. The trolley with a broken brake is running toward five workers. You have to stop the trolley by dropping something heavy, but there's only one fat person on the overpass. You can't stop a trolley if you fall off a land bridge because you're small, and you can definitely stop a trolley if you push a fat person.
So should a fat person be dropped down a land bridge? The trolley dilemma leads us to make different decisions with two problems with the same results. This trolley dilemma was further proposed by Judith Thompson, an American moral philosopher, Judith J. Thomson, in Example 1. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents to the problem said that a fat person should not be pushed down the overpass. Joshua Green's investigation of the respondents' brain activity with fMRI showed that this time, the area of the brain related to emotions, including the amygdala, was activated.
Why Trolley Dilemma
There is no clear reason why the trolley dilemma arises. However, when we see that the activated brain areas are different in the two dilemma situations above, the following possibilities are raised. In other words, apart from the deep philosophical consideration of what is right or wrong, when making ethical decisions in a dilemma facing real humans, there is a possibility to choose between the brain's rational judgment center and the emotional judgment center. The area of the brain has been shown to be activated.
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