PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Trolley Problem, Philippa Foot

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHILOS 2YY3
• Professor: V Igneski

Document Summary

We can use what we figure out by thinking about a situation in later situations. You are driving a trolley, it"s going down the tracks, you notice that up ahead there are 5 people on the tracks. If you continue doing what you"re doing, you"re going to run over and kill those 5 people. But you notice up on the track that you can pull a switch your direction and only hit 1 person. You"re an amazing surgeon, any surgery you do is successful - you have 5 people who need transplants, and one healthy person in your clinic. If you kill the one healthy patient, you can save the 5. In the first case, most people would want to kill the 1 person instead of the 5 but in the second case, we might not want to kill the healthy person. In the transplant case, you"re actually doing the killing!