No matter how safe automated driving will be in the future, there will remain situations where an accident is unavoidable and vehicles will have to decide between options that all potentially result in lethal outcome. Empirical ethics is one method that can provide decisions that are socially acceptable. To gain knowledge on attitudes towards ethical decision making in hazardous situations, we ran a driving simulator study with personalized abstractions of a classical ethical dilemma (cf., "Trolley Problem"). Our results indicate that drivers, who are confronted with the decision of sacrificing the life of others, want vehicles to decide utilitarian, even when the probability of their own survival is substantially low and provoking an accident could result in their own death. Interviews with subjects after the study revealed that such ethical decisions polarize: some could not live with possessing a vehicle that might harm others for their own good, others would demand exactly such a behavior.
['Anna-Katharina Frison', 'Philipp Wintersberger', 'Andreas Riener']
First Person Trolley Problem: Evaluation of Drivers' Ethical Decisions in a Driving Simulator