Table of Contents

List of Figures xi Prologue xiii Acknowledgments xv Part 1 Philosophy and the Trolley Chapter 1 Churchill's Dilemma 3 Chapter 2 Spur of the Moment 8 Chapter 3 The Founding Mothers 13 Chapter 4 The Seventh Son of Count Landulf 26 Chapter 5 Fat Man, Loop, and Lazy Susan 35 Chapter 6 Ticking Clocks and the Sage of Konigsberg 44 Chapter 7 Paving the Road to Hell 57 Chapter 8 Morals by Numbers 69 Part 2 Experiments and the Trolley Chapter 9 Out of the Armchair 87 Chapter 10 It Just Feels Wrong 94 Chapter 11 Dudley's Choice and the Moral Instinct 108 Part 3 Mind and Brain and the Trolley Chapter 12 The Irrational Animal 127 Chapter 13 Wrestling with Neurons 135 Chapter 14 Bionic Trolley 153 Part 4 The Trolley and Its Critics Chapter 15 A Streetcar Named Backfire 169 Chapter 16 The Terminal 175 Appendix Ten Trolleys: A Rerun 183 Notes 193 Bibliography 205 Index 213

About the Author

David Edmonds is the author, with John Eidinow, of the best-selling "Wittgenstein's Poker", as well as "Rousseau's Dog" and "Bobby Fischer Goes to War". The cofounder of the popular Philosophy Bites podcast series, Edmonds is a senior research associate at the University of Oxford's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a multi-award-winning radio feature maker at the BBC. He holds a PhD in philosophy.

Reviews

"An accessible, humorous examination of how people approach complex ethical dilemmas... Written for general readers, the book captures the complexities underpinning difficult decisions."--Publishers Weekly "This is a rare treat--a serious, thought-provoking book on ethics that is also witty, funny, and entertaining. Not to be missed... David Edmonds has taken the well-known trolley car problem and breathed new life into it, examining it from different perspectives and using it to shed light on the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, Aristotle, and others. If you think philosophy has to be ponderous and difficult, you haven't read this book... What's intoxicating about this book is that every time you think you know what you think, Edmonds tosses out a new element... There's lots more to enjoy and learn from this book, a real gem and one of my new favorites."--Mark Willen, TalkingEthics.com