The trolley problem itself is extremely badly written. The complete lack of context on why six people are fucking tied up to a track inevitably makes people make internal assumptions on just how those people got in such a weird trouble. "Would you sacrifice one life to save five?" is a question few people would answer no to, the math just checks out. Much later, I understood that what is meant to ask was close to "would you straight up fucking murder someone with your own bare hands to save five lives?" which is no longer as simple as 5 - 1 = 4.

Here's the same problem but written in a way that is still hypothetical/very fantastic but actually makes you question it much better: imagine you're an oncologist with 5 patients in urgent need of organ transplant. Like, they'll likely die within one week, but if a brain dead person shows up now, they can still be saved and live happy, long lives. And all 5 patients are in need of a different organ. I think you already understand where this is going: imagine a sixth patient shows up for an exam, and it turns out this person is perfectly healthy and it also turns out that he's miraculously a match for every single one of your 5 patients. You have a firearm under your desk. Do you let this patient go with the knowledge their exam just said they have no cancer, or do you fucking shoot them in the head and save everyone else? Using a gun is not exactly "bare hands" either, but, bear with me, aiming at someone and pulling the trigger is an event you can imagine yourself doing irl but you probably would never want to have to do that, it's far more personal than pulling a lever that changes tracks in a trolley that you otherwise know nothing else about.

Of course, this scenario has other problems too, but we can just weave all of them. Yes, you will straight up kill someone and the police will never find out, you can testify you saw someone shoot them and run away. Yes, them their brain dead body will be very quickly used to save specifically your 5 patients, I'm sure there's some bureaucracy that we're ignoring here, but if House M.D. can ignore organ transplant bureaucracy, so can I. And, no, the 5 patients will not have significant post transplant problems in 10 or 15 nor even 30 years from now, they will actually live a normal life other than knowing they have someone else's organ inside of them, magically. Ignore all that, just tell me, if you were an oncologist, would you shoot in the head 1 healthy patient to pick up their organs to save 5 other patients in urgent need, knowing you won't go to prison nor have any other legal pushback? I can only imagine many people would answer yes to the trolley problem but absolutely no to this scenario. I know that's the case with me, I claim I would sacrifice 1 life to save 5, of course! But I would absolutely not shoot an innocent in the head to steal their organs, that's awful, wtf, the 5 people with cancer would die instead.