DESCRIPTION

You have probably heard the trolley problem. A runaway trolley, five people on the tracks, a lever that will divert it — but kill one person instead. Most people say pull the lever. Then comes the bridge version: same trolley, same five people, but this time you have to push a man off a bridge to stop it. Same arithmetic. Almost everyone says no.

That inconsistency is not a failure of reasoning. It is a window into the architecture of how moral thinking actually works.

Shawn and Claire take the most famous thought experiment in moral philosophy seriously — not as a puzzle, but as a precise instrument for exposing the genuine conflict at the heart of moral judgment. Why does the same numerical outcome produce completely different verdicts depending on how the harm is caused? What does that reveal abou ...