Suppose the fat man belonged to a particularly vindictive clan that would hunt down you, your entire family, and everyone you ever had lunch with, if you pushed him in front of the trolley. Would that change your decision?
What’s that you say? You don’t have this information and you want me to proceed without it. In other words, you accept that this decision must be made lacking complete information.
How is it then that you object to people proposing alternatives like “try to break the switch”? Somehow, you are claiming the information you have presented is incontrovertibly true while at the same time accepting that other (not explicitly specified but still relevant) information is simply unknown.
In such a situation, it seems to me perfectly reasonable for someone to question their (i.e. your) assumptions, and possibly insane not to. Is the switch really infallible? Is the fat man really big enough to stop the trolley? Are the people really unable to help themselves? I can just imagine the aftermath:
“What in the world were you thinking? Why didn’t you just disable the switch? Whatever made you think that a 300 lb fat man would stop a 3 ton trolley? Why didn’t you just wave your arms and yell?”
So it seems we cannot confidently address this “moral dilemma” about choice until we resolve fundamental questions of knowledge and belief. More precisely, one cannot evaluate the morality of a decision without putting it in the context of our knowledge and beliefs about the situation and its potential outcomes.
