Beautiful. But it sucks for anyone on the trolley.

Yes, but if the people on the other side were shooting at you (or someone else) and it would thus be legal to shoot them in self-defense, doing so by accident doesn’t suddenly make it a crime again.

Self defense is an active claim against incrimination for homicide. If the claim is valid, it *shouldn’t* matter that it was an accidental homicide, and the chances of a jury finding you guilty for doing it accidentally (when they wouldn’t for doing it on purpose) is stupendously low.

Yes, and those people are literally* too stupid to live on their own. They only survive because our society chooses to protect them.

Well, OK, not ALL of them are that stupid – some are simply amazingly naive. That at least can be remedied.

* “Literally” as in “non-figuratively”, and also “non-intended-to-be-insulting-ly” – literally.

Re: Trolley problem

A recent SSDD cartoon suggested jamming the switch midway, causing a derailment and saving everybody down-track.

If you shoot at a wall, not realizing that others are standing behind it, and the bullets go through the wall and kill the people on the other side, that could be considered Reckless Endangerment causing Death, a clause of Second-degree murder, depending on your intent.

* You are standing beside a switch control on a trolley line when you notice an out of control trolley car coming down the tracks towards you. As you look down the tracks beyond your switch you see a group of people on the track that if you do nothing will be hit and probably killed by the runaway trolley car. If you pull the switch, the trolley will be diverted to another track where a single person is standing, who would be killed by the out-of-control car. What should you do and why?

The same thinking, scaled down a bit, leads to kids being punished for fighting in school if they passively got punched and never fought back.