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Part front matter for Part I Autonomous Vehicles and Trolley Problems
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Published:September 2022
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Swerve right and kill one passerby or swerve left and kill two (or more) persons on impact? This seemingly simple question has occupied the attention of many bright minds for decades. It should not be seen as a surprise. Trolley-type scenarios, flourishing within scholarly publications since Philippa Foot’s seminal paper on the ethics of abortion, seem to bear a close structural similarity with collision situations that may be encountered by autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road. The leading assumption has been that analogical reasoning might be employed, enabling one to transfer important moral conclusions from simplified thought experiments to real-life situations. If, for example, the rightness of one’s choice in trolley-type scenarios depends on the maximizing strategy (i.e., save the most lives possible), then the same decision procedure can also be employed in richer, nonidealized conditions of everyday traffic.
Notwithstanding considerable efforts that came into the development and use of trolley-type scenarios, there has been a steadily growing consensus that our ethical reflections should move beyond these scenarios toward more realistic considerations. There are still some scholars defending the importance of trolleyology in the context of AV ethics, but many—maybe the majority—endorse some sort of Trolley Pessimism, according to which either there are not any relevant similarities between trolley and real-life road scenarios, or there are insurmountable technological challenges calling into question the very possibility of programming AVs to follow a set of ethical rules provided by programmers.
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