Persuasive Essay On Self-Driving Cars

Words: 600
Pages: 3

With technology advancing as the years go by, self-driving cars may not be too far off. However, in a hypothetical situation where the car can’t stop and it will either ram into a crowd of ten people or into a wall, consequentially killing yourself, what would be more optimal? I would argue using a utilitarianism point of view that the car running over the crowd would be the best option. The question on whether you ought to even drive these self-driving cars should also be brought forth.

With the current statistics of car accidents and their causes, I would advocate for the use of self-driving cars. On March 2016, according to the website of Peel & Holland, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration established that in 2010 80% of collisions and 65% of near crashes have some form of driver inattention as contributing factors.1 This statistic shows the majority of car accidents are the driver’s fault. A self-driving car would eliminate the
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I doubted my first idea because, as Shafer-Landau states in The Fundamentals of Ethics, there is too much information to be attained.2 One cannot simply take this problem into consideration without considering other factors not blatantly stated in the problem. For example, some unforeseen consequences of the car driving into the wall could be either property damage of said wall, or less consumers buying the self-driving car thereby making more accidents happen in general because ordinary cars are more prone to causing accidents. Even if one were to argue that killing ten people will cause more harm than killing one, Shafer-Landau also proclaims we aren’t even able to precisely quantify harm or benefit.3 Thereby, making the claim that killing those ten people would cause more harm null, since we can’t quantify