Religion is a poor source of morality

[Esquilax]

You're overlaying a schema of utilitarianism on the trolley problem, that what is most moral is that which is most useful.  Besides the fact that this has nothing to do with what makes the trolley problem morally interesting, you're begging the question about what makes something more moral than another thing.  It is not objectively true that what is moral is determined by what is likely to produce the greatest good for the most people.  That's an assumption and one which is lacking support.  You can't just slip utilitarian ethics into the mix and presume you are talking objectively.  You've made a subjective choice about what moral goodness consists of.  I might just as well say that what is moral is that which produces the greatest happiness for women and women alone.  That's equally subjective a view of what makes something 'moral'.  You've committed Moore's naturalistic fallacy by identifying a fellow traveler of moral approval, utility, and relabeled it as your criterion of morality.

I think that's fair enough, and not something I'd considered when I posted initially, so thank you for that. However, I would suggest that moral systems, by virtue of the things that make them run, have certain requirements baked into any and all of them that essentially shackle them to utilitarian ethics in some respects. Morality requires moral actors, I don't think that's a controversial statement- inanimate objects cannot act, much less act on a moral continuum- and this carries with it specific issues that influence the success of a given ethical standard; any moral system that leads to the death of all the actors that practice it would inevitably collapse because, well, all the people willing to accept the propositions it makes will be dead. At that point it becomes moot, though I do recognize that this doesn't necessarily imply anything about the moral status of the system: perhaps it is most moral that people be dead, after all.

However, I don't see any form of rational argument that would lead to that, and I think rational support is the important thing here; any moral idea that lacks justification or evidence is simply arbitrary. Rationally speaking, since we recognize that moral systems concern themselves with the moral actors that move within them, and are exclusively the product of moral actors operating within an objective reality, I think there's an obvious argument to be made that such systems should concern themselves with the survival of those same actors. Utilitarian ethics are the best tool for that purpose, recognizing as I say this that we're imperfect beings and further, better suited ethical structures may exist.