Would you kill a fat man? The task of the trolley: what is good and what is bad?

The train without brakes rushes into five people tied to rails. If the train is not stopped, all five will die. You are standing on the railway bridge and with horror, see not what is happening. But next to you is an unfamiliar fat man: if you drop it from the bridge, he will certainly die, but his body will stop the train and save the lives of five people. Would you kill a fat man?



This question may seem strange, but this is just a variation of the riddle, over which moral philosophers prayed for half a century, and recently it began to occupy neuro -scientists, psychologists and other thinkers. In this book, David Edmonds, co -author of the bestseller "Kocherga Wittgenstein", tells the story of how and why philosophers were engaged in this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the "problem of the trolley". Along the way, he offers a fascinating and cognitive tour of the history of moral philosophy. Most people would consider the murder of a fat man wrong. But why? In the end, taking the life of one, you could save the lives of five. As Edmonds shows, the answer to this question is much more complex and important than it may seem at first glance. In fact, our answer says a lot about our ideas about the correct and wrong