You'll see this behavior in government with far less drastic results. A lot of bureaucratic cruff that builds up is recognized by workers as being such. The g

You'll see this behavior in government with far less drastic results. A lot of bureaucratic cruff that builds up is recognized by workers as being such. The government workers do realize just how silly and time consuming the policies are. And many have ideas on how to improve them and speed things up. But no one wants to do anything because any wrong that happens will then be blamed on them. So if there are 10 issues a day caused by bad policy, and you can change it to only be 5 incidents a day, no one is going to push for changing it because then they would be viewed as responsible for the 5 incidents instead of being viewed as reducing the incident count by 5. You pull the switch to kill one to save 5, you have now directly acted to kill a person. You are a killer, and while perhaps not legally a murderer, some will still view you as such. That you save 5 is irrelevant. To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.) Now imagine how someone who chooses the utilitarian choice is going to be viewed. Perhaps we should be doing tests not about what the subject would choose, but about how the subject would view another's choices.