[theptip]

Personally I agree with you and it seems obvious to me to pull the lever. Here is my take on why there are people that believe it’s obviously the other way around:

There is a fundamental branching point of ethical systems between consequentialism (eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters) and deontology (which says basically that some set of rules exist, and ethical behavior equates to following those rules, no matter the consequence).

If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious.

Western morality, being heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian systems with Ten Commandments and books of God’s Rules, has a lot of deontological assumptions baked in (as does the legal code). So even with time to ponder the problem, “thou shalt not kill” will weigh heavy on many.

[jodrellblank]

It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better". What if the five people are 100 year old dementia patients moaning in agony and the one person is an infant? Do you still pull the lever because "more people alive is better"? What if the five people are infants and the one person is an elderly convicted murderer, does that change how easy it is to pull the lever? In "more is better" neither shouldn't change your view, but they feel different.

> "(eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters)"

Speaking of the outcome - before you are involved, the person who tied six people to the tracks is attempting murder; if society finds the person it will punish them. After you pull the lever, should society try you for murder? For aiding and abetting a crime? Celebrate your rescue? A society where any individual can kill any other individual, if they think it is for the greater good, feels like it would be unable to hold together. The outcome of more people being alive but the destruction of society seems like it could be bad enough to outweigh the loss of five people.

[theptip]

It’s a thought experiment for studying ethics. You can modify all of the variables as you choose, but in general you want to pick the simplest form that suffices to demonstrate the point.

In this case making the people different would make the experiment needlessly complex. The problem as-stated (assuming identical individuals) already illustrates the consequentialist/deontologist conflict.

I think you are perhaps engaging on a different level than intended; “what are the legal consequences of this action” is downstream of the problem. In other words, we should make our legal system conform to our ethical system, not take the legal system as some fact that must guide our ethical principles.

This is not intended as some legal case study to test law students’ understanding of culpability in homicide. (Although that might well be an interesting discussion in its own context).

> It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better".

No consequentialist would claim this, and to be clear that’s not what I claimed either.

[jodrellblank]

You said "If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious." and I took that to mean that killing someone to save five people was what you consider the consequentialist 'obvious choice'. From there you now clarify that the people are all the same so all we have to go on is quantity of living people, it seems. If "more people alive" is not what you mean by "the better world", then what do you mean by it?

[theptip]

You said “reducing it to more is better”, which is itself an oversimplification. That is not the principle at work here.

There are various utility functions that utilitarians might choose, for example hedonic (Mills) or eudaimonic. And various other assumptions you must make, such as “is the average life net-positive in utility or net-negative?”. Then you put your values into your utility function and assess the possible worlds and their likelihood of occurring. (For simplicity I’m leaving out the utility of having rules as heuristics, but worth mentioning as two-level utilitarianism seems appealing to me).

All else being equal, as in this thought experiment, saving more lives is better than saving fewer in my and most utilitarians’ opinion. But “more lives is better” is not the underlying principle at work in making the evaluation/decision. It’s merely the result of the calculation. One can easily construct thought experiments where more lives in existence would reduce utility and not increase it, in which case utilitarians would advocate for not saving those lives. For example if we modify the trolley problem to say pulling the lever will also cause the five survivors to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of their lives.

(Look up “the repugnant conclusion” if you want to see a thought experiment where common intuitive morality breaks down under most systems).