Comments for 2019-12-30:

carado (WWW) 2021-05-24
 I believe the main purpose of the trolley problem is to determine whether people are
 consequentialists or deontologists.
 Deontologists believe that it is actions which are either moral are immoral; in your post, you talk
 about whether your decision is moral or not, so I assume you to be a deontologist.
 I am a consequentialist: I care not about the moral value of actions, but the moral value of
 outcomes. 5 people getting killed is generally worse than 1 person getting killed, so getting to
 that latter possibility is what I think someone ought to do.
 It is not so much based on "instinct"; both consequentialism and deontology can be based on reason,
 and in fact the rationalist community (LessWrong, etc) largely follows consequentialism.
 As for the 6 people's physical characteristics, you can take them out of the equation by simply
 hiding them in opaque bags on the tracks, and informing the person making the choice that all 6
 have been selected at random from the general population; like any test, you want it to test only
 the thing you care about (here, consequentialism vs deontology).

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