[geofft]

It's controversial because it's based in matters of fundamental worldview, not matters of unexplored complexity. So, given your fundamental worldview, the conclusion is pretty easy. There's nothing that a council of great thinkers is going to be able to illuminate for us on the question. We know what the arguments are. It's "easy" in the sense that the textbook trolley problem is "easy": there's nothing more to be learned about the question itself. We understand the problem and the arguments on both sides, and a council of great thinkers can pull up Wikipedia for you if you'd like.

Hard questions, as I mean them, are ones where there's a lot of complexity to even reach a potential answer. Google's trolley problems are those where the decision isn't just "flip the switch," it's "should we gather this data" or "should we conduct this experiment" or "should we participate in the market in this way" where there are unforeseen side effects to doing so, and you want a bunch of smart people in a room to try to figure those out and shake out all the complexity in the problem that you haven't even managed to state clearly.

But if you can't decide whether it's better to kill one person by action or five by inaction in the first place, figuring out whether taking/not taking the action has unexpected ethical implications isn't going to get you closer to any answers.