The Trolley Problem in the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles.

This article examines the normative relevance of the traditional trolley problem for the ethics and legal regulation of autonomous vehicles, particularly regarding the permissibility of trade-offs between human lives in crash dilemmas. It argues against the prevalent view that trolley problem debates are largely irrelevant to self-driving car ethics, showing that direct analogies to paradigmatic trolley cases—specifically the Bystander and Footbridge scenarios—can inform judgments about certain autonomous vehicle dilemmas, such as when sacrificing one to save many is permissible or prohibited. The article also highlights a limited but important indirect relevance: moral theories unable to account for the trolley problem should be excluded from guiding autonomous vehicle programming. It concludes that recent German legislation on autonomous driving, while pioneering, oversimplifies these ethical complexities by neither explicitly permitting nor prohibiting trade-offs between human lives.