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markrkrebs comments on Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted - Less Wrong
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I put in the different degrees of injury to set the context for the doctor's choice... maybe it takes 5 times as long to save the severely injured person. I didn't mean to imply that the severity of the injury affects the moral calculation.
You're right, this is like the trolley problem. When all 6 people are anonymous, we do the calculation and kill 1 to save 5. When the trolley problem is framed as "push the fat man off the bridge", that's enough personalization to trigger the other part of the brain.
Moral philosophy in general tries to find universal principles whose logical consequences agree with our moral intuition. The OP is saying that we can fix consequentialism by making the moral calculations more complicated. Good luck with that! If moral intuition comes from two different parts of the brain that don't agree with each other, then we can always construct moral dilemmas by framing situations so that they activate one part or another of our brains.
"philosophy tries... to agree with our ...intuition..."? Bravo! See, I think that's crazy. Or if it's right, it means we're stipulating the intuition in the first place. Surely that's wrong? Or at least, we can look back in time to see "obvious" moral postulates we no longer agree with. In science we come up with a theory and then test it in the wind tunnel or something. In philosophy, is our reference standard kilogram just an intuition? That's unsatisfying!