Emma Green presents some (very) French research findings. Bar-goers in Grenoble were asked “to give their opinion on two of philosophers’ favorite quandaries: the so-called trolley problem and its cousin, the footbridge problem”:
In the first, people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others; the second asks about pushing someone off a bridge for the same purpose. “A drawing accompanied the text of each vignette in order to facilitate understanding of the story,” perhaps in case the subjects were too drunk to read.
“The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making,” said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers. His team found a correlation between each subject’s level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.
The Dish 