The concept you're describing is known as moral indulgence or moral self-indulgence: When a person refuses to do the right thing because they want to keep their hands clean. When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action. "Five people were struck by a trolley because I lacked the moral fortitude to save them."
[0] https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/philosophy/wp-content/uplo...
The problem is people don't stand at these switches. They have to go out of their way to stand at them. They probably aren't even aware that there is a switch. They probably don't know what the effect of the switch is. Yet somehow they have to pull it and get it correct, with no one to support them in making that decision?
This isn't some amateur aircraft landing scenario, where you get assistance by the control tower.
In other words, what I mean to say is that your response (and similar ones) are quite common.
> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.
That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.
The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.
These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.
Thinking more about it, in my case it's the number of people what would push me to take action. I feel 5 lives vs 1 is not worth enough for me to change destiny. If it was 100 lives vs 1, I would definitely take action (sorry fat man). I'm not still not sure about 10 vs 1. I guess in the moment I'd go with my intuition.
Utilitarianism and its more recent avatars like "effective altruism" intends to replace moral questioning with math from elementary school. The world doesn't work that way. Never has, never will.
(It's also quite perverse, because there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.)
All the facts, while helpful, are not necessary for utilitarianism.
> "effective altruism"
I think you're attacking a straw man. You won't find Peter Singer attacking people for engaging in suboptimal charity.
> there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.
You can certainly say you'd sacrifice five to save one, but you need to back it up. The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.
Rule utilitarians can coherently refuse to pull the switch. I happen to disagree with their moral framework, but they can mount a vigorous defense of the position. Personally I come down hard on the side of rejecting the status quo bias. Commiting to symmetry in moral decision making is useful for avoiding contradictions. I also don't care much for act utilitarianism, since it's susceptible to non-utilitarians putting their fingers on the scale (ex. "buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog".)
It would seem the whole setup of the experiment is designed to rule out personal courage. The question isn't "would you fight a terrorist" to save five people, or would you climb a dangerous mountain, or swim a violent stream, or defeat some incel with a machine gun...
The question is "would you flip a switch", and the subtext is "with zero risk to yourself". How does flipping a switch become an act of courage and not flipping an act of cowardice.
Also, movies. I don't think there's one (successful) movie where the hero voluntarily and coldly sacrifices even one completely innocent and unrelated individual, in order to save any number of people. When the hero kills someone, every movie goes to great lengths to explain that person somehow deserved it or was an enemy.
In movies, it's the villains who are utilitarians. That should tell us something.
> The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.