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oliverbeatson comments on The Problem With Trolley Problems - Less Wrong
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Ceteris paribus, I cannot imagine what number of people stupid enough to be sitting about on a train track (probably violating property rights for a start) it takes before saving them becomes worth the sacrifice of the average bystander.
Least convenient possible world: replace "sitting on a train track" with "tied to a train track by a villain".
This happened to me just last week.
In response to the downvote: Hmm, I wonder what fraction of people on railway tracks are there because they are reckless and what fraction are victims who are not generally at fault? I assumed my 'ceteris paribus' covered this sufficiently but perhaps villainous train-plots are more the norm than I thought. Given this, subsidising the risk of recklessly hanging around train tracks by having a policy of sacrificing innocent bystanders to stop trains will only prevent the emergence of a mechanism whereby people don't end up on train tracks, which is fairly surely, on net, suboptimal to the cause of not having people die in train accidents. Alternatively, I may have missed the point. This appeals to me as a possibility.