Depending on the variant, and we'll go with the fat man scenario we're supposed to opine on anyway, there are only a set amount of possible choices, so other options are out of the question, that's the whole point of the thing. You either let five people die and rationalise it however you want or you kill one person. But if you choose to save the the one man you'll still have sentenced 5 people to death by inaction. If this were a one vs one situation, that would be an impossible choice to make(actually it would just have to be either random or preferential), but in this scenario, the two choices are not equal. So either you're willing to have 5 people's deaths on your conscience and rationalize it however you want or you're prepared to do something horrible in order to save 4 lives more than you would otherwise. Not stepping up because you don't want to dirty your hands is morally indefensible.
If this happened in real life, I'm assumming there would be certain legal realities at work that would have to be considered, but the thought experiment itself mentions no such parameters, so we'd better ignore laws completely on this and go with our moral gut - in answering the question, ofc.
I can more effectively demonstrate that the only good option here is to kill one person by again, stressing out the fact that this is a completely isolated event we're considering, one imagined precisely in order to test and train our moral intuition and reasoning, not one meant to present itself as a possible or probable event that you're going to experience in real life, and by talking numbers - if you would kill one person in order to save all other humans on the planet then we can agree that numbers do matter. And all things being equal, two lives should matter more than one, by that same logic. Five lives even more so.
I think more people would "choose" to push the fat man if the question was not whether we would do the deed, but rather whether it would be good to do so, or not. It is definitely better to save five lives instead of one. Whether we would be capable to, I think none of us really know, but should we do it? Yes, definitely.
EP
If this happened in real life, I'm assumming there would be certain legal realities at work that would have to be considered, but the thought experiment itself mentions no such parameters, so we'd better ignore laws completely on this and go with our moral gut - in answering the question, ofc.
I can more effectively demonstrate that the only good option here is to kill one person by again, stressing out the fact that this is a completely isolated event we're considering, one imagined precisely in order to test and train our moral intuition and reasoning, not one meant to present itself as a possible or probable event that you're going to experience in real life, and by talking numbers - if you would kill one person in order to save all other humans on the planet then we can agree that numbers do matter. And all things being equal, two lives should matter more than one, by that same logic. Five lives even more so.
I think more people would "choose" to push the fat man if the question was not whether we would do the deed, but rather whether it would be good to do so, or not. It is definitely better to save five lives instead of one. Whether we would be capable to, I think none of us really know, but should we do it? Yes, definitely.
EP
