Edit: where is a good place to read about and/or discuss interesting philosophical questions (preferrably not too far out :) )? Is it worth it to take a course on philosophy? (I've had short courses on "moral education" which were really awful).
I find the focus on doing nothing versus taking action (like in the 2nd paper you linked) misguided.
Utilitarian principle has place in about every serious ethical system in the history. Doing nothing to avoid responsibility doesn't. You can't really use that argument without reference to cost of action and in Trolley Problem that is conveniently close to 0.
There are other factors like ensuring that people feel safe (so they don't need to worry about doctors killing them to harvest the organs) and that we value life of healthy young person higher than older and sick.
Assessing how far you can go using your personal utility over one of the population is another interesting problem (mother would be justified by most for choosing to kill 2 people instead of her own child in a Trolley Problem but would be condemned by choosing to kill a whole town).
In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.
In the surgeon's example there is also cost of killing (surgeon as well as patient may feel bad about it or some other values in moral system of a person might be compromised like honor or keeping an oath) but it's again only matter of weighting the arguments not action vs inaction. It's easy to realize once you up the scale a bit: make it a scenario with whole town dying instead of young healthy person and you will get a consensus. From that you can see that action vs inaction isn't really what the problem is about.