How doctors and public health officials deal with dilemmas

Scientists in the US have investigated the ways in which medical doctors and public health professionals deal with hypothetical dilemmas that require them to decide whether to sacrifice a few for the sake of saving many. Their research extends the kind of dilemma often seen in ethics and philosophy courses, such as the well-known footbridge dilemma, originally suggested by philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, in which a trolley is about to hurtle into and kill five workers on a railway track. You are on a footbridge spanning the track and can save the workers by pushing a large man next to you off the bridge and into the path of the trolley. The question is, is it morally permissible to kill the one to save the five?

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