Indeed, the large number of people who switch but don’t push seem to care enough about strangers to demonstrate the issue.
In the usual hypothetical, the people on the trolley tracks are strangers and thus their importance to you is already about equal. Shouldn’t you be asking that we find people whose importance to you is large? Kurzban-DeScioli-Fein (summary table) ask the question in terms of pushing a friend to save five friends and find that this reduces the discrepancy between switch and push. (Well, how do you define the discrepancy? It reduces the additive discrepancy, but not the logit discrepancy.) In a different attempt to isolate consequences from rules, they ask whether they would want someone else in the trolley problem to take the action. They find a discrepancy with pushing, but substantially smaller than the push/switch discrepancy.
Indeed, the large number of people who switch but don’t push seem to care enough about strangers to demonstrate the issue.
In the usual hypothetical, the people on the trolley tracks are strangers and thus their importance to you is already about equal. Shouldn’t you be asking that we find people whose importance to you is large? Kurzban-DeScioli-Fein (summary table) ask the question in terms of pushing a friend to save five friends and find that this reduces the discrepancy between switch and push. (Well, how do you define the discrepancy? It reduces the additive discrepancy, but not the logit discrepancy.) In a different attempt to isolate consequences from rules, they ask whether they would want someone else in the trolley problem to take the action. They find a discrepancy with pushing, but substantially smaller than the push/switch discrepancy.