My take on this is simple, i think it's a fairly basic question. I would try and save everyone obviosuly, but if there is no way out, no loop holes, and possibly no other solution, i would try and save the most amount of people possible even if that meant that 1 person had to go, that was the best way to go about this scenario. Yes i might feel guilty and sad for that one person but in the end if three people were falling off the cliff and i could only save two, im going to save two.

You have not killed an innocent person but you haved saved five, think of it that. You could choose to do nothing which would still be an innocent act, yes a very wrong act but still nothing you could technically get in trouble with the man for. You are not required to save anyone and by choosing to save 5 people you are in essence not only saving people but also saving 5 people as opposed to one. This is a tough situation and i don't think your valuing one life more or less than another but you are doing what must be done.

Utilitarianism doesn't allow any room for the recognition of the human value of family or friendship in this type of a situation.

What do you guys think?

Yes you have killed an innocent person. You are effectively and intentionally causing the death of that one person when you pull the lever. It is not a wrong act to do nothing if you can't save them all. It is impartial inaction, because you don't want to kill one innocent person to save five. It is not what must be done. That is a profound overstatement.

You are not required to save anybody. If i didn't save someone i would not be directly nor indirectly killing them. I'm just saying that by saving 5 people that didn't have to be saved from the start, that is the best possibility considering it's either save 5 or 1. Five people or one person dies, its a two sided question, one side has a far better outcome, i'll take it. Yes there would be an innocent life lost but not at my hands only at the hands of those who put that person(s) in this scenario to begin with. And neither am i one to put a value on a life.

Yeah, no blood will be on my hands. This is so absurd, but imagine that the one person is a 1yr old infant and has an identical twin on side B, plus 4 other people. The fact that the lever is "naturally" in the "B position" - meaning the train goes to side B - doesn't mean anything to me, because the position of the lever is not natural at all. That is what I understand from the thought experiment. We cannot conceive of a reason why the lever should be set for A or B. All other things being equal, would we rather see 5 people die or 1? I value each individual's life and five heads are better than one.

It is more interesting to imagine two elderly souls on side B and one teenager on side A. Soon, you have to make some sort of formula to handle all possible situations with age differences. Then throw in gender. And how nice of people they are?

But who cares? Emergency rescue professionals, soldiers, and officers in war. That formula will not be applicable to non-emergency situations and morality should be concerned with life qua life - not life qua emergency situation. That is my assertion. Please disagree if you like.

This should throw you for a loop. What if the five people on the track are all bad people, and by bad people I mean people who intentionally cause the pain and suffering of other people? What if you didn't know this and you saved them instead of saving the one person who was kind and decent? That one person would cause more happiness and the five people would cause nothing but suffering, but you didn't know that when you pulled the lever. You see the problem with utilitarianism?

It shouldn't throw anyone for a loop if you take a minute to think about the counterargument. If instead of utilitarianism you argue for its opposite, deontology, then you are promoting the principle that it's better to allow the death of 5 bad people than one good person. And that leads to an even bigger nightmare of deciding who is good and who is bad by any logical measure as if that can ever be known to begin with.

Do you watch Lost? Remember the recent episode in which Sayid tries to kill Ben when he was a boy, but Kate tries to save him on the grounds that he isn't that bad person yet?

Does utilitarianism only work in the most artificial and oversimplified circumstances? Mill takes care to address the objection that his utilitarian calculations do not make the philosophy impractical. Essentially, he argues that he is only setting forth the measure by which to judge actions, not the precise process by which to make an action. He says that it would be absurd to make utilitarian calculations in the face of every moral question, and that instead, people will draw on their experiences to make the decision.

Essentially, utilitarianism is the way to evaluate decisions, not the way to make them. Just as the process of evaluating music is remarkably different from the process of creating music.