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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A runaway trolley is speeding down the tracks. If you do nothing, it will kill five workers. You the option to pull a lever, diverting the trolley onto another track where it will kill one person instead. Do you pull the lever ?
Why or why not ?[/quote]
I turn around and walk away. [b]I am not responsible for the 5 people's death.[/b] If I pull the lever, I am responsible for causing a person's death. I could live with the choice to do nothing and comfort myself by saying there was nothing I could do. I couldn't live with pulling the lever. [/quote]

You absolutely are responsible for killing the 5 people.

In the immortal words of Neal Peart,

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice . . . I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill.

- "Freewill" by Rush [/quote]

What kind of logic are you using?
Doing nothing in this case is not killing.
Death happened by accident not by pp.[/quote]

Neither pulling the lever nor not pulling the lever is "killing," in the moral sense.  All the deaths are by accident - there's a runaway trolley.  None of it is on you.  But absent any knowledge about the six people involved, choosing to let 5 people die instead of one is, in my mind, unquestionably evil.

Think of this variation.  You have the same lever, and the same 6 people tied to the track.  But there's a third position in the lever - the center position.  If you push the lever to the left, the trolley kills 5 people.  If you push it to the right, it kills one person.  You HAVE to push it one way or the other.  You have no choice.  (If you prefer, assume that the entire earth would cease to exist, or explode, if you don't push the lever in one direction.)  You don't know anything about any of the people.

You have to choose - does one person die, or do five people die?  Unless you are a sociopath, you choose the one person.  But that is exactly the same thing - you made the choice.  That is the part of this to which morality applies.  Moving the lever is just implementation.  [/quote]

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