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The core ethical point of the trolly problem is that you have to take an action. In real world scenarios there are most often significant distinctions between t

• hackerlight 4y ago
  The physical action is a red herring under a moral system that takes consequentialism seriously. The trolley problem shines a light on this red herring. Firstly, whichever decision you make, you have to take a real physical action. Suppose you decide not to pull the lever. You still have autonomic arousal, neurons are firing, your prefrontal cortex is inhibiting you from pulling the lever just for laughs, and so on. Lots of atoms had to move around to come to that decision, which you would label as "inaction". I disagree, it is action. Only a minority of caloric expenditure is associated with the actual lever being pulled. Not that this really matters, anyway, given that the outcome is what's ethically important. Secondly, you should consider the consequences of thinking that pulling the lever somehow matters ethically. That means that in certain edge cases, you're surrendering the choice of who lives and who dies to the arbitrary whims of the experimenter. If I was a malicious experimenter, I could maximize the number of dead people by just jury rigging the allocations. If your ethical framework leads to a situation where a maximum number of people die, I would argue that there's some faulty ethical reasoning there.