It’s a common problem in xPhi (the annoying acronym for “experimental philosophy”) and moral psychology. It’s like a game of telephone: researchers pick up on the language and the 101isms but don’t care to delve into the history of the idea enough to realise just how much they’re simplifying the idea; journalists hear about the research and repeat the simplified version as if it’s a real metric. In the case of the Trolley “Problem” however, one clarification is important: in the original way the “Problem” is posed it *is* supposed to say something about the moral psychology of the person it’s being posed to. Some people *are* more or less concerned with a utilitarian worldview than others (there’s research for example that indicates people with broadly conservative views at least *purport* to find “sacrifice one for the many” more abhorrent than people less conservative), and the way that this cuts in the case described is it parses the issue by using an extreme example (and to be honest: such examples are more common than you’d think or like to think). The real issue here though is to mistake people’s responses as a genuine personality trait, as you say, it *does* reveal what people’s moral intuitions are, it’s a genuine self-report at the time of speaking, but self-reports aren’t revealing of actual actions taken at the time; the “Problem” as originally posed isn’t supposed to tell you what you do, or what you ultimately, it’s only posed to tell you what *you would like to think* is the case, which is very different.

I understand all these concerns, but I would counter that the specific answer *to* the so-called trolley “problem” promulgated by those who originally talked about in the sense of naming it is to give your exact “It’s a bullshit question!” answer. Foot, Thomson et al, were trying to make the case that there are non-utilitarian or not easily utilitarian aspects to the ethical and meta-ethical issues raised by the triage issue, in Thomson’s case in particular the simplistic notion that the so-called “right to life of the child” trump those of the mother forced to carry it to term which was popular at the time - and unfortunately remains popular (there are of course contemporaneous answers to that such as Singer’s which come to similar conclusions while being hinged on utilitarian intuitions, but hey she took her own tack). The real force behind the argument as presented in the original texts is to question whether, given edge cases like pushing a fat guy off a bridge to save a train full of not so fat guys, has the moral character of a utilitarian analysis at all, or the character of a more psychologically complex question about the ethical nature or moral character of the person doing the pushing - something we in philosophy sometimes call “Virtue”. I want to note here I’m not disagreeing with you, just layering on some context: when in the 60s and 70s the Virtue Theory picked up a lot of steam in the Anglosphere, it was notably driven by women realising “hey a lot of this utilitarian/consequentialist analysis is really fucked up, and written by men”, and right or wrong that makes contextual sense, no? So when the trolley problem comes up that should always be in the back of your mind. Maybe at the end of the day - and rightly so imo - triage, and I say this as a man who’s been triaged more times than I would like in the last year up to this day, is the best response to an ethical dilemma, but the argument the trolley problem attempts to address is whether that’s on purely utilitarian grounds already given at the time it’s introduced for a variety of reasons, or whether there is other stuff in play, such as whether the doctor or reception or whoever has really lived a worthy life up to this point and is genuinely doing the best they can or is mindlessly following a list they or somebody else drew up on a bored day when they were struggling themselves to meet their rent for that month. Once again, as somebody with an outsize amount of family in medicine and public health and who has been in Emergencies and triaged more than I would like lately, I think the consequentialist triage argument holds at the thin end of the wedge: sometimes someone has to die, and life isn’t always fair. Where I think the original promulgates of this kind of argument *succeed* is in denying that that end of the wedge is the only end of the wedge. Contemporaneous utilitarians, whether putative or implicit, had a then habit (one which in many ways hasn’t gone away) of reducing things away from the immediate issue of what to do about this or that to a set of numbers which would be based on at best logically dubious intuitions: I can raise my own work briefly working on a project examining racial disparities in South-East England healthcare here, because we uncovered a shocking amount of cases where the practitioner would just give up and assume somebody with sickle-cell was trying to get hold of morphine because hey they’re black; this shit shows up all over in actuarial analysis as well. ——— So after all that exposition the question can be summed up as: why does the Trolley Problem (and its ancestors) exist at all? The reason it exists is that there’s a gap between the numbers and the moral character of the people giving the numbers. Sometimes they’re great: my GP apologised in good humour for having to triage my appointment to get what’s probably quite serious treatment in favour of COVID patients etc.; other times it turns out the practitioner was just a shithead and that played out into their fucking innocent people over as unjustly presumed criminals - not that criminals don’t deserve affordable or free healthcare anyway. ——- I think in spite of all of the realistic (not sci-fi) arguments available, this same analysis ends up applying to the “dust specks” bullshit. Now, there are good arguments - even if wrong - from e.g. Benatar, Schopenhauer, but by and large they’re not coming from those people, and where things go wrong is in my experience when they come from utilitarian dilettantish assholes like Bostrom or - much worse - the Yud himself. They can talk a good game about this stuff but they haven’t even bothered to read Sedgwick for a deeper answer. —— Anyway I’m gonna quit here because I have serious health issues to deal with and I just told my most significant ex I never fell out of love with them a few hours ago and we’re both still handling that.