Answered Jan 24
There are a few issues that obscure the Trolley Problem.
First, there is approximately zero possibility that I will ever be in such a situation in real life. Speculating on a philosophical level is completely different to being physically in the moment.
Second, there may be implications of social acceptable answers, and coming up with the morally “right” solution in the eyes of your audience.
Third, there could be very different answers, based on specifics of the situation:
The trolley is headed towards five people: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, and Slobidan Milosovic. They are inviting their friend Augusto Pinochet to join them.
To save them, you would need to divert the trolley to a side track, where Albert Einstein is standing.
or:
The trolley is headed towards five randomly selected people whom you don’t know.
To save them, you would need to divert the trolley to a side track, where Brock Turner is standing, with the same deer-in-the-headlights expression as in his mugshot.
In that second case, are you mainly looking for an excuse to kill Turner, or is that just a bonus?
Things could get even more mixed:
The group includes four nice, peaceful individuals, but the fifth is a deranged gunman on his way to shoot up a shopping mall. You don’t know who the single person is.
Or biased:
You recognise the group as being the five bullies who tormented and assaulted you throughout school. The single person is a close friend of yours.
The bias may involve risk, where there is some level of possibility that, either the group or the single person are good or evil.
A seemingly logical approach would be simply based on quantity (kill the one to save the five). However, quality is a factor that complicates things dramatically.
The possibilities are endless. What if the group is a team of terrorists planning an attack, while the single person is Bruce Willis on a mission to stop them?
The question of how I would handle it is now moot, because, in the time it took to think about it and write this post, the trolley has already defaulted to running over the group, regardless of who they are.