Seventy years earlier, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky had summed up a moral dilemma of this kind in a simple question. Ivan Karamazov asks his brother Alyosha to imagine that he has the power to create a world in which people will enjoy perfect peace and happiness for the rest of history. But to achieve this, he says, you must torture to death one small creature now — say, that baby there. This is an early and extreme variety of the ‘trolley problem’, in which one person must be sacrificed in order (it’s hoped) to save many. So, would you do it, asks Ivan? Alyosha’s answer is a clear
...more
