ABSTRACT
It was wrong, of course, to let the human race die; it was more than wrong, it was unthinkable, to strangle to death an innocent child, and perhaps most despicable of all was the one who copped out, who dodged his or her sacred responsibility to make a crucial life-and-death decision by simply refusing to choose. By therefore shrinking the complexity of behaviour to a kind of mathematical, quantitative, logical sequence-while preserving the illusion of existential choice—game theory creates the aura of a virtual psychological laboratory of human behaviour. The moral dilemma posed by the hypothetical example of the runaway trolley car glosses over the fact that in real life it is extraordinarily difficult to induce an ordinary person to render a life or death decision concerning another human being. From so simple a beginning as a wandering passerby and a runaway trolley car, serious philosophers and cognitive scientists have drawn sweeping conclusions.
