Trolley dilemmas are widely used to elicit moral intuitions.
Most people do not think it would be morally right to push
a heavy man from a bridge, thereby killing him, in order to
avoid the death of several other people. Here we
empirically tested a prediction by Unger (1996) who claims
that adding more options to this scenario would shift
people’s intuition from the normally preferred option of
doing nothing to the utilitarian option of killing the heavy
man. While not finding significant results with Unger’s
original materials, an experiment with adapted materials
confirmed the assumption that pushing one person is more
likely to be preferred to not intervening if certain additional
options are provided. Moreover, we found that moral
intuitions are transferred from several-option cases to twooption
cases (and the other way around). We discuss some
possible psychological explanations for and normative
implications of these findings