A daily moral game
One trolley dilemma a day. Pull the lever or don't, then see what the world chose.
Moral profile
10 dilemmas, about 3 minutes. At the end we tell you your philosophy and the thinker you're closest to.
Endless mode
Play the days you missed and every dilemma you haven't answered, back to back. It doesn't affect your streak.
The trolley problem is a thought experiment introduced by the philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. A runaway trolley is heading for five people; if you pull a lever, it switches to a side track and hits one person instead. It's one of moral philosophy's most famous questions because it pits two big ideas against each other: utilitarianism, which looks at outcomes, and duty-based ethics, which says some acts are wrong no matter what. Makas asks you a new version every day, sometimes serious and sometimes absurd, and compares your answer with players around the world.
What does the world choose? Live statistics →Most do, but the answer shifts when the question changes. In a study of 70,000 people in 42 countries (Awad et al., PNAS 2020), a country average of 81% pulled the lever in the classic dilemma. That fell to 72% in the loop version, where one person's body stops the trolley, and to 51% when you had to push someone off a footbridge.
Everyone gets the same dilemma each day. You have 15 seconds to pull the lever or not; if time runs out, you did nothing. Then you see how many people chose like you and the result in your country. Share your result like Wordle and keep your streak going. Missed days are waiting in endless mode.
Your answers to the 10-dilemma test are scored on five axes: rules vs. outcomes, bystander vs. interventionist, self-first vs. selfless, impartial vs. loyal to your own, and order vs. chaos. You get the closest of 9 types, each matched with a thinker: Bentham, Kant, Philippa Foot, Laozi, Levinas, Confucius, Hobbes, Diogenes or Camus.
Votes are counted anonymously. No names, emails or IP addresses are stored; your streak and profile stay in your own browser. No account, and the game is free.
Turning the trolley problem into a game was inspired by Neal Agarwal's Absurd Trolley Problems on neal.fun. Makas takes it to a daily format, two languages and a moral profile test.
Starting percentages for the classic dilemmas come from the open dataset of Awad et al. (2020); the rest are estimates. Real player votes take over as they come in.
Votes are counted anonymously. No names, emails or IP addresses are stored.
Inspired by Neal Agarwal's Absurd Trolley Problems on neal.fun. Thanks, Neal.
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Kindred thinker: .