WOULD YOU
RATHER

A would you rather question only works if both answers can be defended. Get the balance right and the table argues for ten minutes. Get it wrong and somebody says "obviously the second one", everyone agrees, and the round is dead.

That balance is engineered rather than stumbled on, and the party game is not the first place it was engineered. Moral philosophers have been building two-option dilemmas on exactly the same principle for decades, for exactly the same reason: a forced choice gets people to say things an open question never gets out of them.

Key Takeaways

• A good would you rather question is built, not asked. Both options have to be genuinely defensible, or there is nothing left to argue about.
• The most famous engineered dilemma is Philippa Foot's runaway tram, published in the Oxford Review in 1967 beside a second case with identical arithmetic and a very different popular answer.
• The gap between those two answers is the point. The choice is trivial; the reasons people give for it are the content.
• Pressed for those reasons, people frequently run out and keep their answer anyway, a pattern named moral dumbfounding in 2000.
• At scale the format behaves like an instrument: an online experiment logged 39.61 million two-option choices and found people differ in how strongly a preference is held, not in which direction it points.

Why does a would you rather question work at all?

Because it takes away the option of saying "it depends".

An open question lets anyone answer at whatever altitude is comfortable. Ask a room what they think about risk and you get a shrug and a paragraph. Ask whether they would rather lose a year of memories or a year of their life, and the shrug is not available. Somebody has to plant a flag, and the moment a flag goes in, the next thing out of their mouth is a reason.

That reason is the actual output. The answer is close to worthless on its own, because there is no right one, which is why the follow-up is always "why?" and never "are you sure?"

It also explains the format's one failure mode. If one option is clearly better, the question collapses into a fact and nobody has to justify anything. A dilemma with a correct answer is not a dilemma, it is a general knowledge question wearing a disguise.

What philosophers found when they built dilemmas on purpose

In 1967 the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot published an essay in the Oxford Review that needed two cases with the same shape and different answers. She built them.

In the first, a judge faces rioters holding five hostages and demanding a culprit. The real culprit is unknown, so the judge can only prevent the bloodshed "by framing some innocent person and having him executed". In the second, to make the parallel as close as possible, she supposes "that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed."

The arithmetic is identical. One life against five, in both. The answers people give are not identical at all, which is what Foot wanted to show, and her sentence about it reads like the best possible description of a good party dilemma: "The question is why we should say, without hesitation, that the driver should steer for the less occupied track, while most of us would be appalled at the idea that the innocent man could be framed."

That tram became the trolley problem. Judith Jarvis Thomson took the driver out of the cab and put a bystander at a switch instead, first in a 1976 paper in the journal The Monist whose title already used the phrase, and then in a 1985 Yale Law Journal paper called simply "The Trolley Problem". Setting the two cases side by side later, she puts the question the way a table does at about the third round: "What explains the difference between our verdicts about what the agents may do? After all, in both cases, the agents must choose between five deaths and one death."

Foot was not solemn about any of this. The same essay hands you a party of potholers whose leader is stuck in the mouth of a cave, trapping everyone behind him as flood water rises, and who happen to be carrying a stick of dynamite. It is there, she writes, "for light relief" as well as to show up a bad reading of a principle. Philosophers build these because they are fun to think about. So does everyone else.

Why can nobody explain their own would you rather answer?

Because quite often there is no reason available, and the answer survives anyway.

In 2000 Jonathan Haidt, Fredrik Björklund and Scott Murphy at the University of Virginia sat thirty participants down with one classic moral reasoning dilemma and, in their own description, "four tasks that were designed to put intuition and reason into conflict". In the four intuition stories, they report, "judgment preceded reasoning, judgments were based more on gut feelings than on reasoning, and participants more frequently laughed and directly stated that they had no reasons to support their judgments." They called it "the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a judgment without supporting reasons", and named it moral dumbfounding.

Worth being straight about the status of that work: it is a temporary report the authors circulated rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and they say so on its first page.

At a table it looks like this. Someone picks a side instantly, gets asked why, produces two reasons, watches both get demolished, and does not budge. That is not losing the argument. It is the normal shape of a moral judgement, and this format is unusually good at exposing it.

What happens when you ask millions of people the same would you rather?

You get something closer to a measuring device than a game.

The Moral Machine, built by researchers at MIT and collaborators, put one question to the public over and over: an autonomous car has lost its brakes, here are the two things that can happen, click the one you find preferable. Nine factors were varied across the scenarios, among them sparing more lives against fewer, the young against the elderly, and humans against pets.

It collected 39.61 million decisions from 233 countries, dependencies and territories, in ten languages, from more than 2.3 million people. Three results are worth carrying back to the sofa. Some preferences came out strong, notably sparing more lives and sparing the young, while others came out weak, including sparing women and sparing pedestrians. Respondents' age, gender, income and education changed how strongly a preference was held without changing the direction of any of them. And the authors report three major clusters of countries whose preference profiles differ substantially from one another.

No open-ended survey question produces that. "What do you value in a crash?" gets you an essay. Two pictures and a click gets you something you can count.

How do you write a would you rather question that lands?

Foot's method transfers almost unchanged.

1. Balance the cost, not the topic. Both branches have to hurt, or both have to tempt. A choice between something good and something slightly less good is a preference rather than a dilemma, and preferences belong in a lighter format like This or That.
2. Keep the two options in the same currency. Time against time, dignity against dignity, money against money. Mixing currencies gives people an escape route into "those are not comparable", which is the same move as "it depends".
3. Cut the escape hatches before you ask. Foot specifies that anyone on the track the tram enters is bound to be killed, precisely so nobody can wriggle out by hoping. Party questions die the same way, on "I would just do neither."
4. Then ask why, and let the answer be bad. The reason is the game. If somebody runs out of reasons and holds their ground anyway, you have found the interesting part, and it has a name.

If dilemmas are not the mood tonight, the wider quiz collection has everything from flags to vocabulary.

Frequently asked questions

Who invented the would you rather game?

Nobody credible claims to have, and the structure is far older than any published version of it, showing up as a teaching device in moral philosophy long before it was sold as entertainment. On the commercial side, the Open Library record for a 1997 Plume edition of "Would You Rather...?" credits Justin Heimberg, and the later Falls Media and Seven Footer Press series is credited to Heimberg with David Gomberg. Treat that as the earliest well-catalogued book form rather than an origin, and note that a catalogue record describes a card in a library rather than who wrote what.

What is the trolley problem and is it a would you rather question?

Structurally, yes. Philippa Foot introduced the runaway tram in the Oxford Review in 1967 as one of a pair of cases, both offering a choice between one death and five. Judith Jarvis Thomson replaced the driver with a bystander at a switch, and the phrase was already in the title of her 1976 Monist paper before her 1985 Yale Law Journal paper, called simply "The Trolley Problem", made it the standard name. It is a two-option forced choice with no comfortable answer, built so the reasons people give become visible.

Why do people get so annoyed by would you rather questions?

Usually because the question is badly built. If one branch is plainly better, being made to pick feels like a trick, and if the two branches are not comparable it feels unfair. A well-built dilemma is annoying in a better way: the answer arrives before the reasons do, and the reasons then turn out not to hold up.

Is there a right answer to a would you rather question?

Not if the question is any good. Foot's pair was designed so that people answer the two cases differently despite identical arithmetic, and the work is in explaining the difference rather than settling it. The same applies at a table. The moment a room agrees, the question has stopped working.

Do people around the world answer these dilemmas the same way?

Broadly in the same direction, with real differences in strength. The Moral Machine experiment gathered 39.61 million forced choices across 233 countries, dependencies and territories, and reported that respondent demographics changed the intensity of a preference without changing which way it pointed. It also found three broad clusters of countries whose profiles differ from one another.

Sources

• Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect, Oxford Review no. 5 (1967) - full text PDF hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. Quotations from pages 2 and 3 of that typesetting. Retrieved 10 August 2026, sites.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/foot.pdf
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, Turning the Trolley, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 36 no. 4 (2008), pages 359 to 374. Its footnote 3 on page 361 supplies the citations for her earlier papers, Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem in The Monist (1976) and The Trolley Problem in the Yale Law Journal (1985). Retrieved 10 August 2026, Philosophy and Public Affairs, volume 36
• Jonathan Haidt, Fredrik Björklund and Scott Murphy, Moral Dumbfounding: When Intuition Finds No Reason, University of Virginia, dated 10 August 2000. Quotations from the abstract on page 1, where the authors also describe the document as a temporary report of one study. Retrieved 10 August 2026, polpsy.ca haidt.bjorklund.pdf
• Edmond Awad and colleagues, The Moral Machine Experiment, author manuscript of the paper published in Nature in 2018, from the MIT open-access repository. The scale figures, the strong and weak preference examples and the three country clusters are all named in the abstract on page 1; the platform description and the nine varied factors are on page 3. Retrieved 10 August 2026, MIT DSpace open-access repository
• Open Library search interface, queried for the Heimberg and Gomberg "Would You Rather...?" titles with their publishers and dates. Retrieved 10 August 2026, openlibrary.org