“We ought to spare the lives of as many innocent people as we can, whenever possible.” (Now, this is obviously sending us back toward utilitarian math. Put a pin in that, we’ll return to it in a second.) Since five innocent people are about to die, we conclude that the action that obeys our duty to that maxim is: “Pull this lever.” We can reasonably argue that we would have pulled that lever if no one were on the other track, so if the result of following our maxim is “one guy gets smooshed,” well, that sucks, but it was not our intention.
