Joshua Greene

No, I love the way that they dramatized it.

Although it's interesting, and this is sort of part of the pop culture meme of Trolley is really just the Switch case.

And it's often just kind of a platform for like, in the board game, like, it's just, do you care more about this or more about that?

Would you...

Kill your dog in order to save 10 people.

What about Hitler?

But as a cognitive scientist and neuroscientist, the really interesting thing is the contrast between the switch case and the footbridge case.

but they kind of managed to make the switch case very footbridgey by kind of really sort of dramatizing the horror of running somebody over.

And then my other favorite thing about that is like, there's a movie theater in the background on the street.

And the movie that's showing is called bend it like Bentham, which I thought was, was absolutely brilliant.

So people have looked at this with the trolley stuff.

And my recollection is that there's a trend where people who are more politically conservative are more likely to say that it's wrong to push the guy off the footbridge, et cetera.

But it's not a very strong case.

I think the much more salient thing is that there's much more here that we have in common that divide us.

That...

Your typical conservative and your typical liberal are going to be feeling the same internal tension about these things, thinking it's better for five people to be alive and one dead than the reverse.

And it sure does feel wrong to push somebody off of a footbridge.

Like that's universal, right?

And then there's like a little tendency of a trend.

And maybe it's because people who are more conservative or more religious, they're more likely to trust their intuitions and less likely to kind of question it.