Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post

You're not condemning a life actually. Assuming the two possibilities detailed in the questions are the only ones, one person is condemned already. Your choice is whether you'll save four or let four die.
One person or five are already condemn, unless you want to consider the person who may or may not pull the lever as the condemn. Otherwise, by saying one person was condemned already is to state that the single person was going to die. Also, you are still participating in such a scheme since accordingly, it is your decision that is decisive. Therefore, even though there are lives that are already condemn you still make the choice of who survives. It is inescapable. Either way you participate in killing someone. Though I do blame the orchestrator of the whole thing to be at fault but that's going outside of the box, isn't it?

Also, if you hold that the only moral answer to this question is to kill the one person, and you are a moral person, then choice is an empty word. While you could say that the moral person could have chosen otherwise, by the very nature of them being moral and the "only moral answer" being to kill the one person, they do not have the freedom to choose.

Of course both choices are awful because someone dies either way. but you're looking at it as choosing to kill someone. This is incorrect since you have no choice in whether or not someone dies. The only choice you have to make is whether or not to save four people. And I can't see any argument for how, given what we know, choosing not to save four people isn't better than choosing to save one. You can talk about wanting to refuse to accept a utilitarian notion of ethics, but what you want to accept isn't really that relevant. You either save four people or you save one. We can sit around talking about the value of even a single human life until the cows come home, but with no other information, saving four is a better choice than saving one when either outcome is guaranteed.
This is mostly just semantical footwork to explain the situation in a more positive fashion. It is just like good marketing. It doesn't change the fact of the situation, but makes one look more appealing than the other. Saying you are "saving five lives" instead of killing one, merely brings to the fore the rescue and puts the death to the background. I would rather say that no single life is more important than another. Moreover, it is hard to say that five are necessarily more important than one. Abstractly, without reference to the character of the individual, I have a hard time to accept that fives lives are greater than one. I can see problems with such a statement, problems that I haven't quite resolved myself but I also think the solution lies in my own understanding of the world and the impossibility to measure the value of a life. Five impossible to measure lives do not necessarily outweigh or balance one immeasurable life.

I don't see how acknowledging that saving four people instead of saving one is the better choice somehow takes away from the gravity of a single human death. A single death is still awful and always will be. But one death is preferable to five every time given no other information. And as much as you may find reducing the choice of how many people to save to simple mathematics appalling, it's far from the sort of thing that's unheard of in the real world.
Saying that it is the only morally right action does. It justifies killing someone. I find it very hard to justify killing someone. Moreover, by spinning it as "saving five lives" you are putting the fact that someone dies, and is essentially killed since your actions killed them, to the background. While it doesn't change the someone dies, it mutes it and distance it.

Yes, in the real world this does happen. Doesn't mean I like it either. Moreover, it is a thought experiment so a bit of idealism is allowed, or so one would think.