It appears that we live in a world where not only will most people refuse complicity in a disaster in order to save more lives, but where many people reject outright the idea that they should have any considered set of moral standards for making hard choices at all.

Er, you're attaching too much value to hypothetical philosophical questions.

I'd have thought it obvious that they're dodging the question so as to avoid the possibility of the answer being taken out of context and used against them. Lose-lose counterfactuals are usually used for entrapment. This is a common form of hazing amongst schoolchildren and toward politicians, after all, so it's a non-zero possibility in the real world. It's the one real-world purpose contrived questions are applied to.

tl;dr: you have not given them sufficient reason to care about contrived trolley problems.