In his article on physician-assisted suicide (1) Dr. Manthous discusses a study (2) demonstrating that a large and diverse group of people have an intuition for the ethical principle of the double effect (3). Eighty-five percent of people in that study found it morally acceptable to switch a runaway trolley from one track to save five persons on it, even though another person would be killed on the other track as a result of the switch. In contrast, only 12% would choose to deliberately push someone into the track of the runaway trolley to slow it down and so prevent the five deaths. Dr. Manthous affirms that the end result is identical in both options.
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