From PhilPapers forum PhilPapers Surveys:

2009-12-13
Switching the Trolley
I find the airline case very interesting, because I've always been inclined to let the trolley roll on and kill the five, but here I feel a strong push towards steering the plane for the suburb. It always seemed to me that in switching the trolley track you rope someone innocent into a pre-existing (albeit horrid) situation. The real fact is that a trolley is heading for five people. It is the person who contemplates switching the tracks that brings the single bystander into the situational web. But why doesn't this intuition transfer over to the airline case, encouraging me to plow into the city center? It might be this: The plane isn't, as it were, on rails that head towards the people in the city center. There's a sense that it could crash anywhere, it hasn't been set up to head that way in particular. So I feel more comfortable in trying to minimize damage by diverting it. Is that what gets rid of the sensation of dragging innocent people into the equation? Help needed!