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by bmo-at 1439 days ago
I was surprised about that one as well. Here is another assumption: Speeding up the train might reduce their chance of being saved by a third party. So by speeding up the trolley you might make it less painful, but also might rob them of the chance of being saved. I know this is just a thought experiment, but there are a million variables to a scenario like this and just adjusting for the first one you see is a slippery slope.
1 comments

A lot of the problems are structured as parallels to real world problems. While strictly speaking I voted "do nothing" for that problem, I wholeheartedly support the real world parallel which is euthanasia (speeding up the trolley to reduce the pain of inevitable death).