Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong

But it remains possible that the founders of trolleyology, Foot and Thomson, inadvertently pushed their trolleys down the wrong path.

These are Stakhanovite little hormones: they do tireless work in the brain and they’re interconnected.

Jesus Christ, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the novelist William Golding have all contributed to this debate.

As with the Fat Man, experimenters have tinkered with the variables, testing it with different stakes, on different ages, on both sexes, on twins, between different races and groups, in different places, even on animals

The phrase “win-win,” which derives from Game Theory, has entered popular parlance. The phrase “lose-lose-lose” has not.

An answer to why a person voted Democrat or Republican cannot be confined to an account of the neural pinball at work between the ears.

Our system of justice rests on the notion that humans are free to act, free to choose. We don’t hold a person responsible for an action that they were forced to perform. And the more we discover about the brain, and the more we can explain and predict action, the smaller and smaller becomes the space available for the operation of free will—or so it might seem.

“Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Perhaps we should be focusing more on shaping conditions than character.

THE MAN ON THE SPUR
was Einstein (or Stalin!),