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 ...

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.

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 ...

The Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene is an expert in “trolleyology,” the self-effacing way he describes his research into the manifold variations on the “trolley problem.” The basic form of this ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...