STEVEN POOLE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE
Between the 1960s and 1980s, the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote about a class of
Illustration konsume.me ethical questions that canonically became known as ‘trolley problems’. Think of a trolley-bus, or a tram, rather than a supermarket trolley. One of those is thundering, out of control, towards a fork in the tracks. You are standing by a switch in the points. If you do nothing, the trolley will continue on its path and kill five people tied to the tracks. But if you switch the tracks, the trolley will be diverted and kill only one person tied on the other side, thus saving the original five. Should you pull the lever?