How do you teach an autonomous car when to hurt its passengers?

How do you teach a car when to self-destruct? As engineers develop and refine the algorithms of autonomous vehicles that are coming in the not-so-distant future, an ethical debate is brewing on what happens in extreme situations — situations where a crash and injury or death are unavoidable.

A new study in Science, "The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles," attempts to understand how people want their self-driving cars to behave when faced with moral decisions that could result in death. The results indicate that participants favor minimizing the number of public deaths, even if it puts the vehicles’ passengers in harm’s way — what is often described as the "utilitarian approach." In effect, the car could be programmed to...