[New Entry by Christian Tarsney, Teruji Thomas, and William MacAskill on March 13, 2024.]
Many important debates in contemporary ethics centre on idealized thought experiments in which agents are assumed to have perfect information about the effects of their actions and other morally relevant features of the choices they face. If Abe turns the trolley, one person will certainly be killed; if he does not, five people will certainly be killed (Foot 1967); how the one and the five got into that situation, whether blamelessly or recklessly (Thomson 1976: 210 – 11), is also a matter of certainty. If Betty conceives a…
Originally appeared on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Read More
