Trolley Problem Analysis

The trolley problem is a made-up scenario that could happen in many instances where a person must make an intuition decision to save either five lives or one. The trolley problem at hand is about engineering self-driving cars. The scenario is whether the self-driving car will crash into a building and kill the passenger and owner or the car which would only be one person, or to swerve and hit and kill five other random bystanders. Views on what to do vary between various types of people’s beliefs; utilitarian, Kaintains, and myself all have different views on what to do when designing the car on what to do in a trolley problem situation. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, utilitarian are types of people that believe a theory that aims …show more content…
To make the most people happy it would mean to save the most amount of lives possible in any given situation. If a utilitarian were to be engineering a self-driving car they would make them in the way of saving the most people’s life in the case of an accident or scenario. In a trolley problem scenario of choosing to drive the owner into a building to crash and die or to swerve and hit five others they would program the vehicle to run into the wall. By running into the wall, it saves the lives of five others even though it kills the owner, ultimately only killing one person. In their eyes saving more is more morally correct and acceptable. The Utilitarian view only focuses on the results of the outcome when determining what to do is good or bad. This initially means the general outcome in events is all the potentially matters to a utilitarian. Some might say this idea is troubling because potentially it means to cause murder to one person to save five others, but the utilitarian’s will argue that the most lives is saved and that is all that matters when deciding if being morally right or wrong is being calculated. As a utilitarian engineering a …show more content…
This means that Kantian’s determine if an action is right or wrong based on the motives and intention of the action, despite the outcome. If a Kantian were to be designing a self-driving car and it came to a scenario where they would have to hit five people walking across the street in front of them, or swerve into oncoming traffic and most likely kill the passenger and owner of the car only one person. The Kantian would most likely hit those five, and keep going. It sounds wrong to say but the Kantians would have no motives behind if they had an accident by hitting people who started to j-walk the street. The Kantian had nothing against those people and no motives to kill them so they would be off the hook and morally okay with the fact they hit and killed those people because their was no motive, and or bad intention behind it. Whereas, if the car were to be designed to swerve and kill the passenger there would be intention knowing that they were killing the owner of the vechile and choosing the j-walkers over them, that gives motive, that give making a choice as to where if they keep driving as they would and try and stop but if