People want other people’s self-driving cars to keep pedestrians safe

(credit: Ford Motor Company)

Autonomous vehicles will likely become available in the near future, a reality that raises ethical questions about their programming. A new article published in Science raises a classical ethical question within the context of that new reality: should a car sacrifice its driver if doing so will save the lives of many pedestrians? The article found that participants generally do want cars to be programmed in this way for other drivers, but they don’t want their own cars to work this way. It’s a potentially lethal form of “Not-In-My-Backyard” for our more automated future.

For this paper, researchers conducted six online surveys between June and November of 2015. Participants were recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Each of the six online surveys included approximately 200-450 participants.

Public good vs. individual behavior

In the first survey, 76 percent of participants said that it was morally correct for self-driving cars to sacrifice one passenger to save 10 pedestrians. That’s an overwhelming preference for cars to be programmed in a utilitarian way, reducing the overall number of casualties in an accident. These participants did not express any concerns about programming being too utilitarian.

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