Morality quiz


It’s been awhile since I posted, but I thought I’d post an interesting morality quiz from Time. Click the link to see what your choices were, and I’ve posted mine at the bottom. No fair cheating till you take the test though!!

Their intro says:

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality other species share. While it’s impossible to directly measure empathy in animals, in humans it’s another matter. Here are some of the dilemmas used to study human morality. Take this quiz to see how you compare to other TIME.com readers.

I couldn’t kill the baby, but I bumped off everyone else 😀


8 responses to “Morality quiz”

  1. sorry, i couldn’t kill anybody. you probably don’t want to be around me if you are the sad people facing the trolley or gestapo.

    on the other hand, if you are the one that needs me to act to kill you, you are safe

  2. So really you’re just a mass murder – since you’re killing the 5 people or all the people on the boat or all the poor people hiding

  3. These were really tough. I could kill everyone but pushing the man onto the tracks.

    The first two I would 100% surely die if I didn’t kill, so I had no problem with it.

    The train one was more complicated… for some reason, I just couldn’t use my own hands to push the man off the bridge when my own life wasn’t in danger. Yet I could throw a switch to kill him to save more lives.

  4. The only one I could see myself doing was killing the one to save the five–simple math really. But I couldn’t push him to do it. I hope if I ever find myself in a situation like any of these that Superman or Providence will come along and save the day.

  5. I killed off everybody. In retrospect I think I’d have to change it though in regards to the trolley ones: I’d walk away. I’m not in any way threatened, so why should I cause myself to be responsible for other people’s deaths when I don’t have to be?
    Baby I killed in a heartbeat. For the lifeboat I would propose the alternate solution of just rotating people to have to float on the outside holding on–still lightens the weight and no one dies. Except the dead guy, but he’s already dead.
    And yes it’s shark bait, but it has been done in real life and the people survived it. At least, that’s what dad tells me.
    So I guess the end conclusion is that I am a horrible selfish person. Oh well.

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