I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.

> I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake.

If it's expected/uninteresting for someone to hit the brake when someone shouts at them to do so, then is it not interesting to consider why the opposite happened in this case? ("I pointed to the person next to it and shouted [...] They didn't, so I ran down the train")

> You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.

Which I think is one of the author's points, that "morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options" and that doesn't match reality.

I don't think the author was describing it as an interesting philosophical problem; rather as the difference between the real world and philosophy class. Indeed the real-world problem is not one of moral calculus. It's reacting in a decisive & timely manner with partial information. Most of us are not well-prepared for emergencies, and philosophy class is kinda laughable as an idea of adequate preparation.

What if it results in another high speed train rear-ending yours, and dozens of deaths?

The reason you think about things ahead of time is so you don't make an instinctual or socially-pressured decision in the moment which may be bad.

In this specific case, it's whether you even have a brake available for passengers to use, or you decide that having a brake there would usually make the situation worse. Passengers are ignorant of most of the consequences, they can only react to what they see in front of them. The reason you put a brake there is because the driver would likely brake if they could see what was going on, but they can't have and process all the information about everything in the train at all times.

i.e. "If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck'," and there's a brake for you to use, somebody has already made the decision that your ignorant decision will likely be a good one.

Anyway, somebody's arm getting torn off, a scene spread over a quarter-mile of train tunnel is certainly going to delay trains a lot more than a quick stop, and leave a bunch of people in the train traumatized, with large dry-cleaning bills. There's a way to make this into an interesting problem by changing a bunch of stuff, but it actually isn't. Not pulling the brake isn't going to avoid anything if somebody's arm is stuck in the door. The reason they put the brake there is because they've already calculated this.

"work out some complicated moral calculus" is the entire schtick for these effective altruism guys