Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, 8th Edition

CHAPTER SIX

Motivational and Emotional Influences on Decision Making

You are standing on a footbridge spanning some trolley tracks. Below, you see that a runaway trolley is bearing down on five hapless people. Next to you on the bridge is a railway worker wearing a large backpack. (See Figure 6.1.) The only way to save the people is to push this man off the bridge and onto the tracks below. The man will die, but his body will stop the trolley from reaching the others. (You can't jump yourself because you aren't carrying enough weight to stop the trolley, and there's no time to put on the man's backpack.) Legal concerns aside, would you push this stranger to his death?

The situation that we have just described is a famous philosophy problem known as the “footbridge dilemma” (Foot, 1978). It pits two different philosophical approaches to ethical decision-making against each other: a utilitarian approach and a deontological approach. Utilitarianism is often described by the phrase, “doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” From a utilitarian perspective, you add up the costs and benefits of each choice and choose the option that yields the best balance of costs and benefits for all involved—which, in this case, would be to save five lives at the expense of one.

A very different form of ethical thinking, what Immanuel Kant (1964) referred to as a deontological approach, judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to rules or duties. Kant argued ...