Throwing a Bomb on a Person Versus Throwing a Person on a Bomb

TLDR

Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where it would kill only one person, following utilitarian guidelines to minimize victims, yet most would not consider it moral to kill a visitor in a hospital to save five patients. The study aimed to identify a novel factor underlying conflicting moral intuitions. The authors conducted two experiments to pinpoint this factor. Moral judgments favor utilitarian prescriptions more when the intervention targets the agent of harm rather than the potential victim, showing that the locus of intervention shapes moral intuitions.

Abstract

Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where the trolley would kill only one person. In this situation, people seem to follow the guidelines of utilitarianism by preferring to minimize the number of victims. However, most people would not consider it moral to have a visitor in a hospital killed to save the lives of five patients who were otherwise going to die. We conducted two experiments in which we pinpointed a novel factor behind these conflicting intuitions. We show that moral intuitions are influenced by the locus of the intervention in the underlying causal model. In moral dilemmas, judgments conforming to the prescriptions of utilitarianism are more likely when the intervention influences the path of the agent of harm (e.g., the trolley) than when the intervention influences the path of the potential patient (i.e., victim).