Taking aside the question of legal liability and moral responsibility, the question arises how automated vehicles should be programmed to behave in an emergency situation where either passengers or other traffic participants like pedestrians, bicyclists and other drivers are endangered. A moral dilemma that a software engineer or car manufacturer might face in programming the operating software is described in an ethical thought experiment, the trolley problem: a conductor of a trolley has the choice of staying on the planned track and running over five people, or turn the trolley onto a track where it would kill only one person, assuming there is no traffic on it. When a self-driving car is in following scenario: it's driving with passengers and suddenly a person appears in its way. The car has to decide between the two options, either to run the person over or to avoid hitting the person by swerving into a wall, killing the passengers. There are two main considerations that need to be addressed. First, what moral basis would be used by an automated vehicle to make decisions? Second, how could those be translated into software code? Researchers have suggested, in particular, two ethical theories to be applicable to the behavior of automated vehicles in cases of emergency: deontology and utilitarianism. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a typical example of deontological ethics. The theory suggests that an automated car needs to follow strict written-out rules that it needs to follow in any situation. Utilitarianism suggests the idea that any decision must be made based on the goal to maximize utility. This needs a definition of utility which could be maximizing the number of people surviving in a crash. Critics suggest that automated vehicles should adapt a mix of multiple theories to be able to respond morally right in the instance of a crash. Recently, some specific ethical frameworks i.e., utilitarianism, deontology, relativism, absolutism (monism), and pluralism, are investigated empirically with respect to the acceptance of self-driving cars in unavoidable accidents.