The Trolley Problem

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma describes the results of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pose variations of the Trolley Problem to a bunch of strangers. For example:

…a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

They varied the scenario and the number of people one would save, and charted the results. (via waxy)