Trolley Problem/Consistency in Ethics

[The Grand Nudger]

Allowing vs doing? What does that mean? Which scenario? At first it may seem that allowing is the trolley scenario and doing is the surgery scenario.

But i want to bring up this point again: you're also doing an act of pulling a lever in the trolley scenario. You're also allowing 5 people to die in the surgery scenario.

Is it because pulling a lever is easier than pulling organs? For a world class surgeon the two might be equally as easy.

Those are just the terms we use to describe what we find to be a relevant difference.  You could reverse them any way you like, though.  You could say that the doctor is allowing a death and that the switch puller is doing murder.  The salient point is that no transposition of either the terms or which actor we ascribe them to can present a necessary conflict or inconsistency.

In any and all cases, killing is killing is killing.  Killing one, or killing one person five separate times.  We could even say that killing is always wrong, but we would still use the allowing or doing distinction not to modify the act of killing, but the moral desert of the person who'd done it. It doesn't change the fact that a person is dead, it doesn;t change the fact of how many people are dead. It deosn;t matter how easy or difficult it was. We will see two killers differently depending on the specific of the situation in which they kill. Why they do the bad thing, in essence, or in what circumstance...even if all other things are (or at least are considered to be) equal.