The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.3

How Should We Live? Three Operating Systems of Morality

This episode uses the trolley problem, devised by Philippa Foot in 1967, to test whether you actually judge by three separate moral systems, character, rule, or consequence, or by one underlying instinct. It covers Joshua Greene's 2001 brain-scanning study of people judging trolley cases inside an MRI scanner. The episode corrects the assumption that the case proves three distinct systems exist in your brain, arguing the switch-versus-bridge difference is explained more simply by distance from violence. It closes with a 2016 MIT experiment called Moral Machine, which collected millions of judgments worldwide about how self-driving cars should choose whom to hit.