Not something I claimed. I re-assert my previous position. I oppose the style of persuasion used in the grandparent. Specifically, the use of a chain of connotatively-fallacious rhetorical questions.

That's a lovely assertion and all, but I wasn't responding to it, sorry. (I didn't find the questions all that fallacious, myself; just a little sloppy.) Immediately before that statement you said "So you had a specific agenda in mind."

It was this, and the (perceived?) implications in light of the context, that I meant to reply to. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

There often going to be others that happen to have more instrumental value for achieving many instrumental goals for influencing the universe. For example if someone cares about the survival of humanity a lot (ie. more than about selfish goals) then the life of certain people who are involved in combating existential risk are likely to be more instrumentally useful for said someone than their own.

Oh, come on. I didn't say it was more instrumentally valuable than any conceivable other resource. It has greater instrumental value than other lives. Individual lives may come with additional resources based on the situation.

That's like responding to the statement "guns aren't instrumentally useful for avoiding attackers because you're more likely to injure yourself than an attacker" with "but what if that gun was the only thing standing between a psychopath and hundreds of innocent civilians? What if it was a brilliant futuristic gun that knew not to fire unless it was pointing at a certified Bad Person? It would be useful then!"

If someone says something that sounds obviously wrong, maybe stop and consider that you might be misinterpreting it? Principle of charity and all that.

(I really hope I don't turn out to have misinterpreted you, that would be too ironic.)

Apologies. You are quite right, I was indeed being "really blind" and pretty obtuse as well (though not deliberately so). I've now spotted that the original poster explicitly said to ignore alll chances that the fat man would fight back, and presumably that extends to other external costs, such as retaliation by his relatives, the law etc. My bad.

I've also commented on this further down this thread. I now find my moral intuitions behaving very strangely in this scenario. I strongly suspect that my original intuitions were very closely related to all these knock-on factors which I've now been asked to ignore.

No I was pointing out that in all realistic ways of constructing the hypothetical there are going to be quite major risks and costs to oneself in pushing the fat man: an obvious one being that he easily could fight back. This may indeed be one of the factors behind different moral intuitions. (We have no instincts about the cost-to-self of flipping a switch: although that could also be very high in the modern world, it takes some thinking to realise it).

For what it's worth, my own answers are "no flip, no push and no jump" for precisely such reasons: all too risky to self. Though if I had family members or close friends on the lines, I'd react differently. If there were a hundred or a thousand people on the line, I'd probably react differently.