
Empirically-informed Responses to the Trolley Problem
Yale professor Tamar Gendler continues her course Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature with a lecture on the Trolley Problem, the puzzle of why it seems permissible to divert a runaway trolley onto a track that kills one to save five, but impermissible to push a man onto the tracks to achieve the same result. Gendler walks through three non-classical responses that try to reconcile these conflicting intuitions: Judith Thomson's revised analysis of the switching case, Joshua Greene's empirical work on the neuroscience of moral judgment, and Cass Sunstein's account of moral heuristics. The lecture tracks how each thinker's method, from conceptual analysis to brain imaging to behavioral economics, shapes their conclusions about the case, showing how empirical findings can be brought to bear on a classic philosophical dilemma. Chapter markers divide the session into a recap and three response segments.