I once had a loud co-worker who loved his big new SUV, always telling everyone how much safer his family would be in a collision. This seemed borderline immoral to me, if reducing fatalities in his own SUV risked the lives of the people in the other vehicles instead (plus pedestrians, etc.). How much can you reasonably endanger others in order to protect yourself? It’s an interesting question, a little like the runaway trolley problem.
Now there’s data, shown below: driving SUVs significantly increases the total fatalities in collisions. The Economist writes: “For every life the heaviest one percent of SUVs or [personal] trucks saves… more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles.”
The people in my co-worker’s big SUV were a little more likely to survive, but those other people were much more likely to be killed. Is this moral? Is this right? My co-worker clearly valued the lives of his family well above the lives of others, so his own decision might have been rational, but it suggests a massive market failure.
Discuss.