Omni Brain

The trolley problem is redefined in Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?

Consider the following case:

On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones,who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphan's bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things.

There are other funny factors involved in this moral reasoning problem, read the rest. Plus, a nonphilosopher's annotated version since:

All the people who really appreciate this spent at least five years in philosophy graduate school. Most of their laughter would be dismissed by mental health professionals as an hysterical symptom of some coping mechanism, one desperately trying to reconcile them to their fates as professional philosophers. You, however, can go on with your relatively normal life (I say relatively because you are surfing the web instead of something less geeky) and still get some of the jokes in this article by reading the Nonphilosopher's Explanation Page.

I wasn't able to access the original paper online; Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem by Judith Jarvis Thomson, 59 Monist 204 (1976), reprinted in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory, Harvard University Press, (1986). But, here's a related recent study available in a free PDF: Consequences, Action, and Intention as Factors in Moral Judgments: An fMRI Investigation, Borg et al, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006).