It seems to me that you should have the choice when stuck between two potential outcomes in which death is _inevitable_. Haha... you guessed it, this relates to the alternative scenarios where you can choose to throw someone in front of the train to stop it. That's not inevitable and I see a moral problem with that. But I think most (at least somewhat utilitarian) philosophers would agree that having this choice is better for society, but only when the agent does not have the right to involve agents external to the realm of the problem.

Hey! Man, you have to let us know what they say in class!

I basically agree, to some extent, depending on what you mean... ;) I guess I am becoming a lawyer, eh.... hehe.

Well, first of all, they don't usually really give us any answers. A lot of this is getting into questions that philosophers and legal theorists aren't entirely sure about themselves. The only things we're more sure about are the tests that we can use to actually decide cases, and even then, sometimes they're not really as good as you'd like them to be.

You talk about inevitability, but this is really a religious or philosophical question. I'm thinking more and more that no situation presents inevitable outcomes, so maybe these hypotheticals are meaningless.

But assuming you are allowed to kill someone when it's the lesser harm of two inevitable outcomes, who gets to decide it was inevitable? What if someone outside the situation knew of another solution, but the actors didn't? What if the train engineer didn't know of another solution, but the court finds that there was another alternative, if only he had thought of it...? Should he be liable?

In this case, we do have a good test, the 'reasonable person' test. If a reasonable person could have hit upon the solution, we may expect him to have done so. This is something that most human beings can determine to a reasonable degree of certainty, so it works as a test for courts.

As to what he should do when the outcome is really inevitable, my mental jury is still out. ;)

But think about this variation: Two white people on the track you're heading towards, and one black person on the other track. Would the engineer be accused of racism if he chose to kill the one black person? Or would it be conceded by most people that it's simply better to lose one person than two?

What if he could jump the track onto an adjacent street on which he saw only one person walking, and that seemed to be the only alternative?

"who gets to decide it was inevitable"

The "stake holders"... or, society at large in this case, represented by the jury. It's all relative to society isn't it? Hmm...

"Would the engineer be accused of racism if he chose to kill the one black person?"

Don't you think that such an accusation is also racist? :)

I don't necessarily see what you're getting at with the jumping the track example. The only difference seems to be the property damage that would ensue. I don't think that many people would be able to calculate in their minds if the expected damage to property + 1 life would be greater or less than the value of 2 lives. (Value being determined by remuneration in this case).

"I guess I am becoming a lawyer, eh.... hehe."

I guess I am becoming a business man, hehe...

In the first example (in the original post), is not the likelihood of 1 of the 5 people seeing the train greater than that of 1 person seeing the train? Depending on the probability of workers seeing the train while listening to their music, it could be beneficial to stay on track to the 5 people.

Regarding the racial issue, I think that everyone agrees that fewer deaths are better in general, but there are other valuations at play too... i don't know how society would handle those:

For instance, one distinction we don't usually want people to make is that of race. Some people may value one race over another, so if someone did make a decision based on that, it would be a problem...

But similarly, we may value a brain surgeon more than a homeless drunk. Would it be wrong to try to avoid the brain surgeon if you knew one was going to die?

In the jumping the track example, the person on the street was totally unrelated to the situation until the engineer jumped the track. Is that still the same as the 1 person on track 2? I don't know for sure, but I have the feeling that it's less 'inevitable' once you open up such a possibility. According to the way the problem is worded, yes, this case should be exactly the same, but I think it makes us wonder whether it's really 'inevitable'... ;)

But as you suggest, once people have to make more complicated valuations, the situation changes... I think we would be much less inclined to agree with them then. The only valuation I think we can all agree on is 'more is better'... Otherwise, we know that everyone's indifference curves are different, so we probably shouldn't let them make life/death decisions based on that...

Why not stop the train? The problem states he is on a coliision course but not that he doesn't have time to brake. Stop the train and let everyone live. Or how about using a visual signal like the headlight? Otherwise run over the one guy because
he is 4/5th less likely to have dependants to sue your but.

Well, that would be nice, but we're assuming that it's not possible to stop the train or notify the people on the tracks... You can never specify such a problem in sufficient detail to preclude _everything_ you're trying to rule out... ;)

It's just a thought problem to get to the issue of individual rights (autonomy) versus social welfare... and see why we consider things moral or immoral...

Chris was probably great at those games where you're given a tricky scenario and you have to figure out the answer... as in "there's a dead man in a room with no windows, an icicle, and a donkey. What did he eat for dinner?" ;)