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Constant comments on Human errors, human values - Less Wrong
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That's a good observation, but it doesn't completely solve the problem. The problem here is not just the trolley problem. The problem is that people disagree on whether not pushing the fat man is a value, or a bug. The trolley problem is just one example of the difficulty of determining this in general.
There is a large literature on the trolley problem, and on how to solve the trolley problem, and the view taken in the paper, which was arrived at by many experts after studying the problem and conducting polls and other research, is that humans have a moral value called the "principle of double effect":
Is this a value, or a bug? As long as we can't all agree on that, there's no reason to expect we can correctly figure out what are values and what are bugs.
There's really two problems:
Come up with a procedure to determine whether a behavior is a value or an error.
Convince most other people in the world that your procedure is correct.
Personally, I think a reasonable first step is to try to restrict ethics to utilitarian approaches. We'll never reach agreement as long as there are people still trying to use rule-based ethics (such as the "double effect" rule). The difficulty of getting most people to agree that there are no valid non-utilitarian ethical frameworks is just a small fraction of the difficulty of the entire program of agreeing on human values.
People do, but how much of that disagreement is between people who have been exposed to utilitarian and consequentialist moral philosophy, and people who have not? The linked article says:
The key word is "consistent". The article does not (in this quote, and as far as I can see) highlight the disagreement that you are talking about. I, of course, am aware of this disagreement - but a large fraction of the people that I discuss this topic with are utilitarians. What the quote from the article suggests to me is that, outside a minuscule population of people who have been exposed to utilitarianism, there is not significant disagreement on this point.
If this is the case, then utilitarianism may have created this problem, and the solution may be as simple as rejecting utilitarianism.
And here I thought you were going to conclude that this showed that the majority reaction was in error.
You stated a problem: how to get people to agree. You gave your solution to the problem here (my emphasis)
I pointed out, however, that it is apparently utilitarianism that has introduced the disagreement in the first place. I explained why that seems to be so. So the problem may be utilitarianism. If so, then the solution is to reject it.