> I am not super convinced about this in hindsight Yeah, trolley problems are a philosophical tool to help work out the ethical edge cases for situations like

> I am not super convinced about this in hindsight Yeah, trolley problems are a philosophical tool to help work out the ethical edge cases for situations like the example you gave. Though they can be a distraction by reducing to the wrong bad choices. When trolley problems became mainstream because of looming spectre of self-driving cars, the example of "should the car drive off the bridge and kill the driver rather than hitting a child on the bridge" was making the rounds. I was always on the side of "I don't care if, in this absurdly rare case, the car decides to run over the kid AND then drive off the bridge because human car drivers kill more the 30000 people a year in North America alone". And, as aside, ahhhhh, remember those days of our biggest problem being that self-driving cars were about to own the streets and put thousands of truck drivers out of work.