In the classic trolley problem, you are asked whether you would divert a trolley car destined to kill a group of people to a track where it is destined to kill a smaller different group. Many people would not for religious type reasons because they don’t want to “play God”. Others would sometimes decline and sometimes not, depending on what they know about the people in the group. Their age, their evilness, etc. Some would be influenced by other factors such as whether people would know that they were in control of what happened.
But if none of those reasons apply to you or the situation, there is no reasonable argument for declining to reduce the number of deaths of people you know nothing about.
The Trolley problem in pure form is a hypothetical that never occurs in real life. But in less pure form it is encountered a lot. Covid and Ukraine are but two examples. That’s why I put this essay in the Current Events category. The two most obvious examples of non-pure forms would be if one group will definitely die, and the larger group won’t. (We will assume it doesn’t really matter to you which way the trolley is originally heading. You have accepted the responsibility of which group gets hit.)
One variation would be that you somehow know the people in the larger group are injured or otherwise harmed but won’t die. Say they all lose a leg. Or have to pay ten dollars a gallon for gas. How many of them would you (or the government) have to save from this harm (secretly) if the alternative is someone dying.
A second variation would be if the members of the larger group might die. If you know the odds, should it be a straight mathematical expectation problem? Better that you let five die, than let the trolley hit ten where there is a 70% chance it kills them all and a 30% chance they are barely hurt. Is there a non religious argument against this?
I am not giving my opinion on these questions except to note that it behooves people and governments to make sure that the decisions they make in situations that analogizes to these hypothetical trolley variations do not diverge to much from the way they would answer these simplified versions of those situations.
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