assuming all 6 people are strangers so that you have no known reason to be biased in favor of anyone,.. pulling the level is the obvious moral thing to do. the entire medical industry is an extension of this choice. intubating a patient may kill them but not intubating a patient will allow them to die. doing nothing is just as much a choice as doing something,.. not pulling the level just means you have 5 counts of murder instead of 1.
the push a man variant is just stupid. obviously whoever thought of that has never seen a death scene where a person has been hit by a train. i've seen it in chicago where people get hit by the metra pretty regularly. if you push the man 6 people die instead of 5. it's a simple matter of momentum (mass x velocity). even the smallest trolley will weight 3-4 tons and a massive man would be 500 pounds making it a 12x multiplier. hell, if the man of really weighed 500 lbs it would take me longer to push the man in front of the trolley then to push the regular sized people out of the way...
the push a man variant is just stupid. obviously whoever thought of that has never seen a death scene where a person has been hit by a train. i've seen it in chicago where people get hit by the metra pretty regularly. if you push the man 6 people die instead of 5. it's a simple matter of momentum (mass x velocity). even the smallest trolley will weight 3-4 tons and a massive man would be 500 pounds making it a 12x multiplier. hell, if the man of really weighed 500 lbs it would take me longer to push the man in front of the trolley then to push the regular sized people out of the way...
