Who Cares About Ethics? | Biomedical Odyssey

Suppose you have stumbled your way into the campus philosophy building. There, a group of freshmen have just had their first lecture in moral philosophy and are discussing the trolley problem — the one about letting a trolley run over five people or pulling a lever to change its course toward the other track where only one person would fall victim. One student is on a roll — he’s going on about how he’d obviously pull the lever. The only way ethics can be made meaningful and pragmatic, he says, is to have its rules based in the real…