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NancyLebovitz comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong
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This is reminding me of some long discussions of "The Cold Equations", a short story which is an effort to set up a situation where an ideally sympathetic person (pretty young woman with pleasant personality) has to be killed for utilitarian reasons.
The consensus (after decades of poking at the story) is that it may not be possible to rig the story to get the emotional effect and have it make rational sense.
I'm not absolutely certain about this-- what if the girl had been the first stowaway rather than the nth, so that there wasn't as good a reason to know that it shouldn't be so easy for stowaways to get on ships?
If I remember correctly, she still would have died even if she hadn't been jettisoned - the ship would have crashed and she would hardly walk away from that. That makes her unsalvageable. In standard trolley problems I don't switch tracks, but if there were a way to switch the track so the train killed only one of the same five people it would already have killed, that person is unsalvageable and can be singled out to save the salvageable.
You're right.
The SciFi Channel usually does a pretty poor job at making original movies, but their adaptation of "The Cold Equations" was pretty good, covering most of the problems with the original story. The pilot and the girl frantically look around for excess mass to jettison, and find some, but it's not enough. The issue of what measures were taken to stop people from stowing away simply weren't discussed; she's there, and they have to deal with it. And at the last minute, the pilot does offer to sacrifice himself to save the girl, but she refuses to let him.