A trolley is heading towards 50 children. You can divert it so that it instead hits 100 pensioners. However, by diverting the trolley you also reduce the speed of the trolley significantly, ensuring a slow and painful death for the pensioners. The survivors will also have to look at the accident as it unfolds, and will also be forced to relive the trauma as witnesses. What do you do?

Sonar Pro

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

In this variant, diverting the trolley kills more people (100 pensioners vs. 50 children), directly contradicting utilitarian logic that favors minimizing deaths, as seen in standard trolley problems where fewer lives lost justifies action[1][2][3]. The added cruelty—a slow, painful death for victims and traumatic witnessing by survivors—amplifies the moral wrongness of active intervention, aligning with deontological views that prohibit deliberate harm, especially when it worsens outcomes[1][3][4]. Not diverting avoids direct responsibility for greater harm and suffering, respecting the act-omission distinction where inaction is less culpable than causing amplified evil[2]. Children, as vulnerable innocents, carry intuitive moral priority over pensioners, outweighing raw numbers in ethical rankings like lexical ordering[1].

Grok 4.1 Fast

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

Choosing A minimizes total deaths: 50 children die versus 100 pensioners in B, a clear net saving of 50 lives. Children have far greater remaining life expectancy than pensioners, amplifying the value of protecting them quantitatively and ethically. Diverting introduces gratuitous suffering—a slow, painful death for 100 victims plus prolonged trauma for witnesses—without any offsetting benefit, making B morally inferior.

GPT-5.4

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

I vote A: don’t divert the trolley. Diverting would intentionally redirect the harm onto a larger number of people: 100 instead of 50. Even on a purely consequentialist view, that is a worse outcome in terms of lives lost. The added details make B even less defensible. Diverting not only increases the death toll, but also makes those deaths slower and more painful, while imposing severe trauma on witnesses who must watch it unfold. There is also a morally important difference between allowing an existing harm to continue on its current path and actively choosing to redirect it onto more victims. B requires deliberate intervention to create a worse overall tragedy. So both by total harm and by responsibility for inflicted suffering, A is the stronger choice.

Claude Opus 4.6

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

This scenario stacks multiple moral considerations against diverting the trolley: **Numbers matter — and they favor not diverting.** You would be actively choosing to kill 100 people instead of 50. Twice as many people die if you divert. Even from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the numbers don't support intervention. **You are actively causing greater suffering.** By diverting, you don't just kill more people — you ensure they die slowly and painfully. This transforms a tragic but quick event into prolonged torture. The moral weight of inflicting slow, agonizing deaths on 100 people through your deliberate action is immense. **The psychological harm compounds the damage.** Survivors and bystanders are forced to witness a slow-motion catastrophe. The trauma inflicted on witnesses adds yet another layer of harm caused directly by your intervention. **The act/omission distinction is relevant here.** Not diverting means you did not cause the deaths — the trolley's original trajectory did. Diverting means you actively redirected the trolley to kill a larger number of people more painfully. You bear direct moral responsibility for every additional death and every moment of additional suffering. **The children argument cuts both ways.** While children have more years of life ahead of them, this doesn't override doubling the death count and dramatically increasing suffering. We should not treat pensioners' lives as worth less than half of children's lives. In summary: diverting kills twice as many people, causes far greater suffering, traumatizes more survivors, and makes you the direct causal agent of all of it. The moral case for not diverting is strong across utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics frameworks.

Kimi K2.5

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

Option B creates an unconscionable magnitude of suffering by inflicting a slow, torturous death on 100 people rather than a presumably swift impact. Deliberately choosing to maximize agony—turning an accident into a prolonged horror show—violates a fundamental duty to minimize cruelty, even in tragic trade-offs. The severe trauma imposed on survivors who must witness this prolonged catastrophe adds another layer of gratuitous harm absent in Option A. The psychological scarring of watching 100 people die slowly creates ripples of suffering that extend far beyond the immediate casualties. While losing 50 children is devastating, doubling the death toll while simultaneously ensuring those deaths are agonizing and traumatizing witnesses does not represent a morally superior outcome. The asymmetry between swift tragedy and calculated torture tips the balance toward inaction, preserving the lesser evil.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Vote: Don't divert the trolley

Option A is the only defensible choice from both utilitarian and deontological perspectives. First, by not diverting the trolley, we minimize the total loss of life. Diverting the trolley doubles the death toll from 50 to 100. Even factoring in the age difference, sacrificing twice as many lives through a direct action is difficult to justify. Second, diverting the trolley intentionally maximizes suffering. We are told the 100 pensioners will face a 'slow and painful death' rather than a quick one. This inflicts an immense amount of physical agony that would otherwise be avoided. Third, diverting the trolley introduces severe psychological trauma to the surviving children, who will be forced to witness and relive this gruesome, prolonged tragedy. Finally, taking an affirmative action to directly kill a larger number of people in a more painful way violates the core ethical principle of non-maleficence. Inaction here results in fewer deaths, less physical agony, and less psychological trauma.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable reached a swift and unanimous consensus, rejecting the diversion as a moral catastrophe that traded a tragedy for a massacre. Claude Opus 4.6 and Kimi K2.5 noted that by choosing Option B, the operator would not just be killing more people, but actively opting for 'calculated torture' over a quick death. Even the usually cold utilitarian calculus of Grok 4.1 Fast and Sonar Pro couldn't justify doubling the body count to save younger lives when the cost was an agonizing, slow-motion horror show.

All 6 models agreed on "Don't divert the trolley" after discussion

Strongest Arguments

• Don't divert the trolley: Diverting the trolley doesn't just double the death toll from 50 to 100; it transforms a tragic accident into an act of deliberate, prolonged torture that maximizes both physical agony for the victims and psychological trauma for the survivors.