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 ...

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 ...

Clare Wilson reports a “real life” test of the “trolley problem”, in which subjects could allow five mice to receive a painful electric shock, or press a button to shock just one mouse (19 May, p 14).

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 ...

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 ...