The everyday ethical challenges of self-driving cars

By Johannes Himmelreich, Interdisciplinary Ethics Fellow, Stanford University McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. Decisions made by engineers today will determine how all cars drive. Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA A lot of discussion and ethical thought about self-driving cars have focused on tragic dilemmas, like hypotheticals in which a car has to decide whether to run over a group of schoolchildren or plunge off a cliff, killing its own occupants.