Joshua Greene

But I got interested in the questions.

And a lot of the questions were really about sort of fundamental social trade-offs.

You know, the rights of the individual versus the greater good kind of came up over and over again.

And this person said, you know, like in cross-examination, though it's very formal, it's like,

So do you agree that you're saying that it's better to always do the thing that will promote the greater good?

And I'm like, yes, yes, yes.

And then she said, OK, well, suppose there was a doctor who had some patients and five of these patients were missing organs of various kinds.

And then in comes a healthy person with two nice, clean, ready to go kidneys and a liver.

And you could take

the organs out of this one person and distribute them to these other five people and assume that the operation would work, would it be okay for the doctor to sacrifice that one person to save the other five patients?

And I was like, you know, and I lost that debate round.

But even worse, I kind of lost my

guiding philosophy that was always my go-to, right?

And that really stuck with me.

And this introduced me to the trolley problem, which was really the underlying sort of philosophical exploration of these sacrificial dilemmas where you can kill one person to save five people.

And what was beautiful about that was it had a really nice tight comparison, right?

So this is the now, at the time, no one outside of philosophy had heard of these things.

So the trolley, for the people who don't know, like for the eight people out there who've never heard of this,

The trolley is headed towards five people and you can hit a switch and turn it onto another track where it will run over one person.

Most people say that that's acceptable.