aviel wrote:But this isn't what anybody said, so I'm not sure with whom you're arguing.
That is the implication of saying it is morally imperative to kill someone to save five people if you are sure it wil save them. That...you know. It's morally imperative to kill someone if it's a surefire way to save more than you get kill. You asked how such a situation could be applied to the real world; those are examples of people who know how to save other people with just one or very few deaths, and it's the only way they know how to do it.
Again, nobody is making this argument.
Within the confines of this thought experiment, the answer is unambiguous: you push the one guy in front of the train. There's no argument in favor of doing otherwise...
The reason this question tends to be controversial isn't because it presents a difficult moral problem; it doesn't. It's because it's contrived in such a way that the right answer in this scenario would probably never be the right answer in reality.
So the situation with those examples is that you know you would save more lives than you take, and it's your only option. You have stated that the answer is unambiguous because you know it would work. You say that, "in reality you wouldn't know for sure you'd need to push the fat man, you wouldn't know that if you did, it would work." But I'm presenting you with people who do know it would work.
Then why not another time? Because that would result in bad outcomes; I would be contradicting myself to do it only once.
What bad outcomes? No one knows you did it, so it didn't influence anyone. If you started doing it more, it would look suspicious and people would begin to fear going to the hospital or donating organs, and you are smart enough to know that. So you only do it once. Why would you be contradicting yourself to only do it once? That's a net gain of 4 lives, even if you only do it once. Are you saying that we shouldn't save 5 people where we know we can do so without harming anyone except one person?
It's so unlikely that it wouldn't even occur in the first place.
Sure, but in the hypothetical, it did occur, so in the hypothetical, it could easily occur again. With that information, would you consider it more ambiguous?
And again, what of the unknowns? There are potential factors that make the question less clearcut. As in the dictator, you might end up doing more harm than good by saving those five at the expense of one.
SandTea, my dear, it is not just the way I view it. It is a fact. There are unknowns here. Unless you can tell me the characters of those people, or their states of mind, or the impact their deaths will cause, there are unknowns. That is part of the problem as put forth. It's not actually as simple and straightforward as you want it to be. You can be dismissive all you want, but pretending that I don't understand what you're saying isn't going to change my mind. I do understand; you don't want to think it through beyond 5>1. Despite not always thinking 5>1. To you, it is simple. You know two outcomes, and you have picked what you consider the lesser of two evils. Even given your parameters, I do not agree that it is the lesser of two evils, probably because I'm not as utilitarian as I used to be. I arrived at my re-evaluation by considering the unknowns, and by applying the standard of 5>1 to other scenarios. Logic does not tell me I should push the fat guy. Logic tells me I need more information to justify pushing him, and logic also tells me that 5*infinity = infinity. If I value a life as infinitely valuable and practically sacrosanct, I must treat it as such.
The implications of a world where we do not have the right to live if our deaths serve a useful purpose, which is essentially what you are saying, are profound. I'm not saying you haven't thought this through, I am saying that this question does not have a straight up easy answer for everyone, even within the confines of having Godlike powers (which I didn't see anywhere).