Would you kill someone if it would save the lives of five others? This classic thought experiment is known as the trolley problem, and is taking on growing importance as we train self-driving cars to ...

Should the driver of a crashing car be allowed to swerve into your lane and kill you, if she calculates that doing so would save her life? What if she'd die, too, but would save the lives of a ...

In one case, they put the participants in charge of a speedboat and had them choose which of two groups of swimmers to save from drowning. While the practical results are the same—one group is saved, ...

Jay Donde (@Jay_Donde) is an attorney in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he practices privacy and data security law. To understand the trolley problem, first consider this ...

It seems every year I must write about the highly distracting "trolley problem" question for robocars, where people wonder how software will "decide who to kill" when a car faces an unavoidable ...

Superhero stories are well known for their high stakes, which in the best cases have interesting moral dimensions as well. Such is the case when heroes confront a tragic dilemma, one from which they ...

Among the many lessons “The Good Place” tried to teach us, along with how to be “good” and what we owe to each other, was how to make a difficult decision when there is really no good choice. The ...

Ugh, I hate ethical questions like this, because they always describe situations that would never happen in real life without a million other conditions that no ethical test could ever account for.

Superhero stories are well known for their high stakes, which in the best cases have interesting moral dimensions as well. Such is the case when heroes confront a tragic dilemma, one from which they ...