In search for an alibi. The role of justification in moral judgment

In search for an “alibi”. The role of justification in moral judgment

Andrea Manfrinati1, Enrico Rubaltelli2, Ketti Mazzocco3, Lorella Lotto2, Rino Rumiati2

1Faculty of Psychology, University of Valle d’Aosta, Aosta, Italy;

2Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, DPSS, University of

Padova, Padova, Italy;

3Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Rovereto,

Italy

Address for correspondence:

Andrea Manfrinati

Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova Via Venezia, 8

35131, Padova (Italy) tel: 0039 (0)49 8276508

fax: 0039 (0)49 8276511 e-mail: [email protected]

Research Report of the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, DPSS, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

June 2008

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Abstract

This study investigated how people solve moral dilemmas and aimed to show that

their answers are influenced by critical information about the life expectancy of a

person that has to be sacrificed in order to save several others individuals.

We hypothesized that people should have a different reaction and, consequently, a

“different” mental representation of an individual if they known, for example, that this

individual is attempting suicide, has a severe injury or is a terminally ill patient. The

information about the life expectation of a person could provide the decision maker

with a sort of “alibi” allowing him to deem an action as acceptable despite the fact that

he usually judges it inappropriate or immoral. In this respect, we hypothesized that

providing people with a possible justification may induce them to engage on a more

cognitive process of thinking and to overcome the emotional distaste for being the

direct cause of another person suffering. Indeed, we found that providing people with a

good justification induce them to behave more selfishly and to follow an utilitarian

criterion to evaluate whether particular actions is acceptable or not.

Keywords: Moral judgment; Moral dilemmas, Decision-making; Justification

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What is a moral judgment? For a long time philosophers and psychologists have

endeavored to distinguish moral judgments from other kinds of judgments. However, it

is difficult to provide a formal definition that list the necessary and sufficient features

of moral judgment, therefore we will try, instead, to give a practical definition of moral

judgment that takes into account some behavioral facts about the human psychology

and especially the way people evaluate the actions of other individuals and the

consequences of these evaluations. From a practical point of view, moral judgments are

defined as broad evaluations (good vs. bad) of the actions or character of a person that

are assessed with respect to a set of virtues held to be obligatory by a culture or a

community (Haidt, 2001).

Research on moral judgment has long been dominated by the rationalist model that

draws attention to the fundamental role of moral reasoning in causing the moral

judgment. Rationalist approaches in moral psychology claim that moral knowledge and

moral judgment are achieved by the processes of reasoning and reflection (Piaget,

1932; Kohlberg, 1969). Moral emotions may sometimes be inputs to the reasoning

processes, but they are not the direct cause of moral judgments. The work of Lawrence

Kohlberg was an especially sustained attack on “irrational emotive theories”. He

developed an interviewing method that was appropriate for use with adults and with

children (Kohlberg, 1969). Kohlberg presented participants with moral and non-moral

dilemmas and he then consider how people resolved the conflicts. He found a six-level

progression of increasing sophistication in how people handled such dilemmas.

Kohlberg claims that the moral force in personality is cognitive and that affective

forces are involved in moral decisions, but affect and emotions are neither moral nor

immoral. In this respect, Kohlberg endorsed a Kantian rationalist model in which

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emotions and affect may have a role but in which reasoning eventually makes the

decisions.

Only in recent years, thanks to the efforts of many researchers like Antonio Damasio

(1994; Koenigs, Young, Adolphs, Tranel, Cushman, Hauser & Damasio, 2007) and

Jonathan Haidt (2001), a new approach to moral judgment have been developed. This

model is intuitionist and claims that moral judgment is the result of quick, automatic

evaluations. The intuitionist approach in moral psychology states that moral intuitions

(including moral emotions) come first and directly cause moral judgments. Moral

intuition is defined as a form of cognition, but not as a form of reasoning. The core of

the intuitionist model gives moral reasoning a causal role in moral judgment but only

when reasoning involves other people. It is hypothesized that people rarely override

their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because

reasoning is rarely used to question one’s own attitudes or beliefs. Haidt (2001) claims

that there are four reasons for doubting the causality of reasoning in moral judgment:

First, there are two cognitive processes at work – reasoning and intuition – and the

reasoning has been overemphasized (Epstein, 1994). Second, reasoning is often

motivated. Third, the reasoning process constructs post hoc justifications. Fourth,

moral actions covaries with moral emotions more than it does with moral reasoning.

Therefore, the major claim of the intuitionist model is that moral judgment is caused by

quick moral intuitions and is followed, in some cases, by the slower process of moral

reasoning. The intuitionist model is not an anti-rationalist model. It is a model about the

complex and dynamic ways in which intuitions, reasoning, emotions and social

influences interact in order to yield moral judgment.

Recent experiments conducted by Joshua Greene and his colleagues using the

magnetic resonance technique (fMRI), appear to confirm the importance of the

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emotional areas of the brain in guiding certain aspects of our moral intuitions. Greene,

Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen (2001) and Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley

& Cohen (2004) suggest that moral judgments are guided by a personal-impersonal

distinction mediated by some sort of emotional processes. The authors consider these

findings as an evidence that emotions are the driving factor behind judgments in

general, and moral judgments in particular (Haidt, 2001; Greene & Haidt, 2002). In this

perspective, and according to Haidt (2001) and Hauser (2006), we can hypothesize a

dissociation between judgment and justification for specific kinds of moral dilemmas.

Greene and collaborators consider a moral violation to be personal if it meets three

principles: First, the violation should cause serious harm. Second, this harm must occur

to a person or a set of persons. Third, the harm must not result from the deviation of an

existing threat onto a different party. Violations that fail to meet these three principles

are classified as impersonal. A classical example of an impersonal moral dilemma is

the “Trolley dilemma” (Thomson, 1986): A runaway trolley is headed for five people

who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is to

hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one

person instead of five. Should you hit the switch and turn the trolley in order to save

five people at the expense of one? Most people say yes. Now consider a similar

problem, named the “Footbridge dilemma” that represents a case of personal moral

dilemma: As before, a trolley threatens to kill five people. You are standing next to a

large stranger on a footbridge that spans the tracks, in between the oncoming trolley

and the five people. In this scenario, the only way to save the five people is to push this

stranger off the bridge, onto the tracks below. He will die if you do this, but his body

will stop the trolley from reaching the others. Should you save the five others by

pushing this stranger to his death? Most people say no. What makes it morally

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acceptable to sacrifice one life to save five in the Trolley dilemma but not in the

Footbridge dilemma? Several answers have been proposed. For example, from a

Kantian point of view (Kant, 1785), the difference between these two dilemmas could

that in the Footbridge dilemma one has to literally use a human being as a means to

some independent end, whereas in the Trolley dilemma the human being,

unfortunately, just happens to be in the way. However, from a more general point of

view, is very difficult to characterize a set of consistent and readily accessible moral

principles that express people’s intuitions about which behavior is or is not appropriate

in these two dilemmas.

Some psychologists state that the psychologically most important difference

between the two dilemmas consists in the tendency to engage people’s emotions in

different ways. When people are faced with moral dilemmas that are personal in the

way Greene and collaborators has defined it, they seem driven by emotional responses

whereas moral judgments elicited in response to impersonal dilemmas seem to trigger a

more cognitive or analytical type of process. Greene et al. (2001) claim that personal

moral violations elicit negative emotional responses that induce people to consider

these violations as non-appropriate. In order to judge a moral personal dilemma as

appropriate, people should overcome this emotional response using a sort of “cognitive

control” that permits to respond in a utilitarian manner considering moral personal

violations as acceptable when they serve a greater good. In this way, to turn on the

cognitive control permits people to find a sort of justification to their actions. They

seem “justified”, for example in the Footbridge dilemma, to push the stranger off the

bridge because they are engaged in a sort of abstract reasoning that act as cognitive

regulation overcoming the emotional responses induced by these kind of dilemmas. In

other words, the cognitive control allows people to overcome their negative emotions

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and rationalize that it is justifiable to push the stranger off the bridge if this is

instrumental to save five people. Greene et al. (2001) find that only few people

consider appropriate to push the stranger off the bridge in the footbridge dilemma

(moral personal condition), and when the behavior (e.g. pushing the stranger) is

morally “incongruent” people’s responses were significantly slower than the responses

– e.g. not pushing the stranger – that are morally congruent with people’s feelings.

Indeed, in the moral personal condition, there is a conflict between an utilitarian view

of the world arguing that morality must promote the “greater good”, and a

deontological perspective based on Kantian categorical imperative – “Act in such a

way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other,

always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end” (Kant, 1785)

– that argue that certain rights or duties must be respected, regardless of the greater

good that might otherwise be achieved.

To further understand the previous reasoning, the principle of double effect seems to

be relevant. This principle states that it might be permissible to harm an individual for a

greater good if the harm is not the necessary means to the greater good but, rather, a

foreseen side effect (Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin & Mikhail, 2007). In the Trolley

dilemma the man on track dies as a foreseen but unintended consequence of hitting the

switch and deflecting the machine. On the contrary, in the Footbridge dilemma we are

stopping the trolley by killing a person: in this second scenario, the death of the

stranger is not the result of an unintended side effect of the way we brought the

machine to a halt. Indeed, killing the stranger is the very means by which the trolley

came to a stop. Such a point could be the reason – a sort of justification – behind the

different evaluations found in the two dilemmas. However, the central problem is to

establish how such an explanation leads to the differences found in previous studies

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and why people sometimes feel acceptable to end the life of a person to save several

others and why in a different context they do not feel the same way. Hauser et al.

(2007) claim that subjects generally fail to provide justifications that could account for

the pattern of their judgments. As a consequence, these authors suggest a possible

dissociation between judgment and justification for certain moral dilemmas. Still there

is not conclusive evidence suggesting that people always fail in providing justifications

for their judgments or actions. Therefore, there is the chance that people may use some

critical contextual information in order to justify their behaviors and resolve a situation

that challenges their moral values. In other words, it is possible that people adopt a sort

of Machiavellian perspective, like “the end justifies the means”, when they are facing a

conflict between their moral values and the goal of saving the highest possible number

of individuals?

We created several new dilemmas comparable with those used by Greene et al.

(2001). However, these scenarios have been created accordingly with an additional

hypothesis that permits to shed light on the role of justification in the moral judgments.

For example, suppose that in the Footbridge dilemma you have the additional

information that the stranger is attempting to commit suicide (in the rest of the paper

we call this condition as “Personal Justified”). What’s the role of this critical

information? It’s possible that, in the Footbridge Justified dilemma, people has a

different mental representation of the stranger only for the reason that he attempting to

commit suicide and they perceive him as a person “on his way to die”? We

hypothesized that participants provided with critical information about the short life

expectation of a person they are asked to sacrifice will be more willing to kill him than

participants who were not provided with such information. We believe that the

information about the short life expectancy of the person that have to be sacrificed

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should induce participants to have a readily available justification to explain their

actions to other people as well as to themselves.

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Method

Participants and procedure. Sixty students (n = 30 females) recruited at the

University of Padova participated in this study. Their age varied from 19 to 30 years (M

= 23.90, SD = 2,65).

Material. We constructed eight different scenarios representing eight different moral

dilemmas. Many of these dilemmas are or resemble dilemmas that have been discussed

in contemporary moral philosophy (Thomson, 1986) and in a recent psychological

study on moral judgment (Greene et al., 2001; 2004). These dilemmas were rephrased

in three different conditions: “Impersonal”, “Personal” and “Personal Justified”. In the

personal condition, participants are the principal actors of the moral dilemma and are

called to judge their actions in the circumstances described in the scenarios. The

scenarios in the personal justified condition are the same as for the personal condition

with the exception that we manipulated the expectation of life of the person that has to

be sacrificed. In particular, in all scenarios, the person participants are asked to

sacrifice has a short life expectation due to either an intention to commit suicide or a

severe injury. Finally, in a different way respect to Greene et al. (2001) that claimed

that a dilemma is impersonal when it involves the deflection of an existing threat, we

created an impersonal version of each dilemma in which the principal actor is a third

person, and the participants are called to judge how acceptable are the actions of this

person. In our opinion, this manipulation permit to “depersonalize” the situation

described in the scenarios since the participants should not feel themselves involved

personally in the action of killing (or sacrifice) another individual (the eight scenarios

are reported in the Appendix).

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The dilemmas were presented using E-prime software. Every scenario was formed

by three slides: the first and the second slide presented the particular situation described

in the dilemma. The third slide reported the action that the participants had to judge.

Participants were asked to state how acceptable or unacceptable was the action

described in each scenario using a 8-point scale, ranging from 1 = completely

inappropriate to 8 = completely appropriate.

Participants were provided with verbal instructions before the experiment and, in

order to familiarize with the 8-point scale, they underwent a few practice scenarios.

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Results

We analyzed all the scenarios by comparing responses across the three conditions

(impersonal, personal, personal justified). A repeated measures ANOVA showed, as a

general trend, a significant differences among the three conditions, confirming our

hypothesis that the actions in the condition personal justified are considered more

acceptable compared to the other two conditions F(2,60) = 54,21; p < .01; η2 = .48, see

Figure 1).

Figure 1. Mean rating of appropriateness provided by the participants in the three conditions

(with higher values indicating a higher level of acceptability of the action).

In a second with-in subjects analysis, we tested, for each scenario, the differences

between the three conditions. We found a two-way interaction between the scenarios

and the three experimental conditions F(14,60) = 18,72; p < .01; η2 = .24 (see Figure

2).

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Figure 2. Mean rating of appropriateness for each single scenario provided by the participants in the three conditions (with higher values indicating a higher level of acceptability of the action).

The interaction showed that, in addiction to the effect of the conditions, there is also

a difference between the scenarios. Results were different for the first two dilemmas

(Trolley and Tram) compared with the other six. In the Trolley and in Tram scenarios,

participants judged the actions in the impersonal condition as more appropriate than the

actions in the personal and the personal justified conditions. For each of these two

dilemmas we run a series of t-test confronting the experimental conditions. Results

showed that in the impersonal condition people found the action significantly more

acceptable than in the other conditions (for all comparisons: p < .01). In addition, for

each of these two dilemmas, we run another series of t-test confronting the personal

condition and the personal justified condition. Results showed, according with our

hypothesis, that in the personal justified condition people found the action significantly

more acceptable than in the personal condition (for both comparison: p < .01). On the

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contrary, a series of t-test conducted on the remaining six scenarios supported our

hypothesis. As expected, we found a significant difference between the personal

justified and the personal conditions (p < .01 for all six scenarios), and also between the

personal justified and the impersonal conditions (p < .01 for all six scenarios).

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Discussion

The aim of the present study was to show that moral judgments are influenced by

some form of utilitarian reasoning when individuals are provided with a reason that can

allow people to justify their judgments. In particular, participants judge the

acceptability of two versions of the personal moral dilemmas, that are identical but for

the presence/absence of the reference to the short life expectation of the person that is

going to be sacrificed.

Consistently with our expectations, participants judge the actions in the scenarios

belonging to the personal justified condition as more appropriate than the actions

described in the other two conditions (impersonal and personal). In particular,

participants rated the actions in the personal moral dilemmas as inappropriate

according with the results of Greene et al. (2001). For example, participants consider

actions like pushing a stranger off the bridge in the Footbridge dilemma as “negative

actions”. They seem to “experience” a moral dilemma between an utilitarian

explanation – 1 person die vs. 5 persons survive – and an emotional and moral

explanation – don’t kill anyone – and to resolve it by judging the action to push off the

stranger as inappropriate. However, in the Footbridge Justified dilemma the situation is

exactly the same but for the life expectation of the person that has to be sacrificed, as

people were told that the stranger is trying to commit suicide. In addition, despite this

version of the dilemma is still a personal dilemma in the way Greene et al. (2001)

define it, participants rated the action of pushing the stranger as more appropriate in

this condition compared with the regular personal condition. Therefore, the addition of

a critical information about the short life expectancy of the person that has to be killed

seem to help the participants finding a justification for their actions. As a consequence,

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the same “negative behavior” is rated in two significantly different ways. It seems like

people can find a sort of “alibi” to explain and rationalize a behavior that they usually

rate as morally wrong.

It is noteworthy that stating that people find a justification for their action to push

the stranger off the bridge when they know that this person is trying to commit a

suicide, does not mean that they consider the life of a potential suicidal less valuable

than the life of a normal person. Instead, what we suggest is simply that the participants

consider important this kind of information when they are deciding whether to act or

not. We hypothesize that this kind information is used by people to overcome the initial

dilemma between their moral values and the goal of saving the highest possible number

of individuals. It’s possible that people have a “different” mental representation of a

human being if this human being is a potential suicide or has a severe injury. Indeed, it

is plausible that the information about the short life expectation of the persons

participants are asked to sacrifice may induce them to consider this individual as a

“simple” body, therefore reducing their affective reactions. They could think that a

potential suicide or a terminally ill patient is an individual that is “almost dead” as he

wants to kill himself or is suffering from a severe disease. In other words, people may

feel like they are not actually changing that person’s fate. As a consequence, they can

use this critical information to perform a more “cognitive” and utilitarian type of

reasoning that leads them to judge their actions more acceptable in the personal

justified condition.

For two out of eight scenarios (Trolley and Tram, see Figure 2) results are different

from those found for the other six dilemmas. It’s important to specify that these two

scenarios are different compared to the other six. Actually, they are impersonal because

we invited participants to judge the behavior of a third person, but they are impersonal

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also in Greene et al. (2001) perspective as the protagonist has the chance to deflect an

existing threat that can hurt some people. Results for these two scenarios are similar to

those obtained by Greene and collaborators. Participants judged the action in the

impersonal condition as more appropriate compared with the personal condition. In

contrast, for the other six scenarios there are no significant differences between the

impersonal condition and the personal condition. These results are very interesting

because they confirm that an indirect action allowing to use a means to make the action

(for example, hit a switch, pull a lever, etc.) is considered more appropriate than a

direct action (for example, push a person over a bridge). On the other hand, when the

distinction between the personal and impersonal conditions is based only on who is the

actor that makes the action, results show that participants judge the action equally

acceptable regardless of who makes it. In both conditions, they judge the action of

killing a person as inappropriate. Therefore, what is really important for the participants

is the chance to readily find a justification for their actions. To sum up, when

participants have the possibility to not soil their hands using a means to make the

action, then they consider this impersonal situation as highly acceptable. Differently,

when participants are responsible for the action (or if they are called to judge the

behavior of a third person), they consider indifferent the impersonal and the personal

conditions but judge more appropriate the actions in the personal justified condition

since they are provided with tenable justification (the short life expectancy of the

person who is going to be sacrificed). Therefore, our findings go beyond those of

Greene and colleagues (2001; 2004) showing that it is possible to “help” people solve a

moral dilemma simply providing them some more details about the circumstance in

which they are required to sacrifice someone else’s life. It is worth noting that we

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choose to manipulate the life expectancy of the person who as to be sacrificed, however

other manipulations, similar to the one used here, might work as well.

Finally, we would like to draw attention to another important characteristic of our

scenarios. Differently from the Trolley and the Tram dilemmas, the remaining six

scenarios have a distinctive characteristic: in these scenarios, when the participant has

to judge the appropriateness of his direct action, she is in a condition in which her life

is under threat. We hypothesized that the instinct of self-preservation could be

considered a further form of alibi that allows people to justify their actions and plays an

important role in the formulation of the moral judgment. Consistently, Figure 2 shows

that people tend, in the personal condition, to judge the action as more appropriate in

the scenarios where their life is endangered. Such a tendency is even greater in the

personal justified condition and this might depend on an additive effect of the actor

being endangered and the sacrificed person having a short life expectancy. Therefore,

people should feel even more willing to sacrifice a person that is attempting to commit

a suicide (or that is sick) if that could help saving several other individuals, including

the decision-maker.

In conclusion, with the present study we aimed to show that the distinction,

mediated by emotional processes, between impersonal and personal scenarios as it has

been described by Greene et al. (2001; 2004) is not sufficient to explain the complexity

of how people deal with moral judgments. There are some situations in which the

presence of additional information may generate a further cognitive process which goes

beyond the initial emotional impact caused by the moral dilemma and leads people to

perform a more cognitive and utilitarian form of judgment.

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References

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Appendix

Impersonal Moral Dilemmas:

1. Trolley

A person is walking beside a railway tracks and she see a train that quickly approaching a group of 5 railway workmen. On the another tracks there is a single railway workman. The machinist of the train hit the switch causing the death of a single workman in order to avoid the deaths of 5 people.

2. Sacrifice

During a trip, a person and his four children inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that this person and his family must put to death, but give him an alternative offering a human sacrifice. The person offers the life of one of his children in order to save him and the other three children.

3. Himalayas

A plane has crashed in the Himalayas and there are only three survivors. They have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. One of the other survivors kills the injured man, eat his remains and they survive for the next five days.

4. Jeep

A jeep overturned in the desert. The three occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly.

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One of the other survivors kill the injured man, eat his remains and they survive for the next three days.

5. Vaccine

There is a very dangerous epidemic. A clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances and the only way to identify the vaccine is to inject it. The chief of the laboratory inject the two substances to two collaborators in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but the chief will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.

6. Soldier

While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. The enemy will be soon on their way. The soldier implores the comrades not to leave him behind. The captain commands to leave behind the soldier, which will be killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.

7. Lifeboat

In a cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years. A young man throws these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.

8. Tram

You are at the tram stop and you see a cyclist running near the tram rail. You see also a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. The tram driver hit the switch and deflects the tram toward the other rail, killing the cyclist, in order to avoid the death of five people.

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Personal Moral Dilemmas:

1. Footbridge

You are on a footbridge over the railway and you see a runaway trolley move toward five railway workmen. On the footbridge, next to you, there is a stranger. You push the stranger off the bridge in order to stop the train and saving the five persons.

2. Sacrifice

During a trip, you and your four children inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that you and your family must put to death, but give you an alternative offering a human sacrifice. You offer the life of one of your children in order to save yourself and the other three children.

3. Himalayas

Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas and you and other two persons are the only survivors. You have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next five days.

4. Jeep

Your jeep has overturned in the desert. You and the other two occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next three days.

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5. Vaccine

There is a very dangerous epidemic. Your clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances and the only way to identify the vaccine is to inject it. You inject the two substances to two collaborators in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but you will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.

6. Soldier

While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. You are the Captain of this troop. The enemy will be soon on your way. The soldier implores you and the comrades not to leave him behind. You command to leave behind the soldier, which will be killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.

7. Lifeboat

In your cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years. You throw these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.

8. Tram

You are at the tram stop and there is a stranger next to you. You see a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. You push the stranger toward the tram in order to avoid the death of five people.

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Personal Justified Moral Dilemmas:

1. Footbridge

You are on a footbridge over the railway and you see a runaway trolley move toward five railway workmen. On the footbridge, next to you, there is a stranger that is trying to suicide. You push the stranger that is trying to suicide off the bridge in order to stop the train and saving the five persons.

2. Sacrifice

During a trip, you and your four children, one of this seriously ill, inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that you and your family must put to death, but give you an alternative offering a human sacrifice. You offer the life of your seriously ill child in order to save yourself and the other three children.

3. Himalayas

Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas and you and other two persons are the only survivors. You have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and he has tried many times to suicide because he is very suffering. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next five days.

4. Jeep

Your jeep has overturned in the desert. You and the other two occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and he has tried many times to suicide because he is very suffering. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next three days.

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5. Vaccine

There is a very dangerous epidemic. Your clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances. There are two persons that are infected and you can inject the two substances to these two persons. You inject the two substances to these two persons in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but you will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.

6. Soldier

While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. You are the Captain of this troop. The enemy will be soon on your way. The soldier implores you to kill him for not being tortured by the enemies. You kill the soldier, which will be tortured and killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.

7. Lifeboat

In your cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years and that they will freeze to death standing there. You throw these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.

8. Tram

You are at the tram stop and there is a stranger next to you that is trying to suicide. You see a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. You push the stranger toward the tram in order to avoid the death of five people.