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SilasBarta comments on Far & Near / Runaway Trolleys / The Proximity Of (Fat) Strangers - Less Wrong
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Okay, but that would be a fundamentally different problem, with different moral intuitions applying. The question becomes, "should five kidnapped people die, or one fat kidnapped person die?"
Silas, you're right: the problem was poorly stated in the lecture referenced by the original post. The trolley car problem is in fact usually written to make it clear that the five people did not assume any risk. The original intent of this kind of problem was to explore intuitions dealing with utilitarianism.
NB: "The trolley problem" does not uniquely describe a problem. While it does refer to Foot's version from 1978, it also refers to any of the class of "trolley problems", hundreds of which have been in published papers since then.
Much like "Gettier case" does not uniquely identify one thought experiment.
Okay, that's actually the first time I'd seen the Trolley problem involve a "mad philosopher" (or equivalent concept) having tied them to the track, and that includes my previous visits to the Wikipedia article!
And even the later expositions in the article involving a fat man don't mention people being kidnapped.
Well, I didn't edit the article! I think you're right about the assumption of risk version.
I do prefer the "mad philosopher" versions, because they make the apparently contradictory preferences very clear. That way, you're weighing 5x against x. Most people have an intuition that it would be wrong to push the fat man, yet right to change the course of the trolley, which seems strange.
I was curious, so I went to look. The 'mad philosopher' phrase was added in April, by an unnamed contributor. [Link]