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If I kill the big guy directly I also have the chance to throw something equally heavy. If I do this remotely I do not have the option. Though this may be tacit, it may affect public assessment.

The other drawback is; that by offering the option discursively as an abstract problem you engage mental patterns fundamentally different from those one might encounter in the actual situation.

For example, it has been shown that people might kill the guy if they thought they were authoritatively commanded to do so or that they would certainly gain approval.

The effort to bracket out all the messy stuff of real life, while it obviously attracted your researchers, in fact makes the situation effectively unimaginable because no such "pure situation" can arise and, when a real situation occurs, more faculties than our ethical intellect are engaged. You may get a good game of logic, or even insights into human thinking, but you certainly don't find out what people would really do.

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160510 to bbcws steve evans re show PHILOSOPHY
The brightest were the kids. They were not self trapped into the classic error i call extrapolation, or, particularly, linear extrapolation.
I mention a couple details first, however. The harvard ladys analogy to experiment is wrong. The button pushers have the authority of button, as indeed at stanford, VS ILLEGAL. The choice of harvesting organs is fallacious, as it comes into the wheelhouse called individual rights, ones contract with leviathan. The question of action is discussed best in Baghavad Ghita. You sully your problem by saying fat man, an insult, especially wrong as you dodge the issue of who are these people.
There is a class question. You say workmen. that is, like fatman, a loaded notion.
We are not asked what DID you do... but instead, what would you do. not even what would obama do. or my mother, etc. Accordingly it is a question of self image and what i confess to, even if anonymous...after all, the presumption is that my vote counts, even if secret. What churchill did in ww2 is irrelevant.
The question was standard we are told in army in ww2, you drive truck carrying soldiers down mountain road and suddenly there are children in the way...will you save the kids by going off the cliff? The obvious point is to be prepared for instant decisive responsible action. Eisenhower won kudos for sending ship alone to australia, risky but necessary. A family friend met a man on a bridge in europe who knew he was a jew during war and immediately killed him to save himself from imminent danger. If uncle sam and john bull had attacked hitler in 1934 ww2 would have been prevented. On the other hand if truman had not been a pussy he would have prevented mcarthur going north into north korea. If usa constitution worked, senate would have blocked lbj invading vietnam, the nadir of usa international morality. The senate was shown to be morally delinquent. The constitution depends on the people.
One is indeed responsible for potential action. The distinction between throwing the man overboard or pulling an already existent tempting switch is false, and results in cowardice, not moral distinction at all. The vatican tradition of celibacy prevented innumerable births. As did misguided feminism in recent decades.
There is indeed sin of omission. Democracy is as often as not an excuse to pass the buck, let george do it. Gee, the gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, bonobos and sloths are not my concern.
But we are now in a new zeitgeist. Ike scoffed at a woman writing letters to politicians as being a crank. Now everyone, including me, is on the web, or bbcws, even, back in the day, with gracious margaret howard.
The rationale for e g Dresden ww2 bombing is that we must eventually learn that there is no such thing as innocent civilian in a democracy...we are all responsible, so the people of Dresden were responsible along with hitler. Iraqis brought upon themselves the forcible removal of saddam, and it is indeed, now, iraqis who are killing iraqis. We get what government we deserve. When a nation allows a rotten government, it must expect other nations to correct it, and maybe not in a way the natives like. Indeed, usa must get over its sly pretense that it was not me it was lbj, now we are nice guys. I did not kill the american indians, etc. We wash our hands each election. Let us blame bush, while actually we benefit from his assertion of imperialist prerogative on behalf of friends of usa. The extreme case is jfk, the king must die, usa turned away from him after the cuban missile crisis.
People who think know we are all victimized by the media. But it is the very medium we swim in. The medium is not only the message, it is the mind we use for contemplation, as catholics centuries ago thought in terms of vatican dogma.
Altho freud warns us that unconscious dominates, we still, as arjuna, do not, morally, have the option of sleeping at the switch.
Nor the option of hiding in pseudophilosophical trench dug by error of thought ensconced in harvard kudos.
Thus, your moral tasks are as unrealistic as the harvard ladys fantasies. We always know who are the victims. If the fat man is william conrad, i do not sacrifice him for a flock of navvies. Generally, you could amplify, instead of pretending to simplify, by saying i had just walked by the navvies, looked at each personally, thus counterbalancing my close presence now with man on bridge.
The basis of psychological health is reasonable enlightened self interest. If the victim of organ harvesting is an enemy, to be sacrificed for even merely one of ours, morality dictates to go ahead.
To extrapolate from a conceit gets us to hell. We must see from the side, explore imaginatively what other factors may be operative. Futurists and jerks like karl marx lose by ignoring the side action, the factors other than what is in their own test tube. But imagination, as we cherish in children, is not, however, experiment. Thought is thought, and real actuality is actual. Altho they meet in mind, we can at best be alerted to possibilities, and at worst fascinated by prediction.
Indeed, we cannot know until tomorrow.
Uh, please do not introduce the fraud called altruism.
live long and prosper,

I've only heard the second programme. I thought the trailers were FANTASTIC and I was looking forward to hearing the show based on them.

I really enjoyed the way this seemingly abstract moral dilemma was then played out in real situations - the conjoined twins and situations of war.

It is one of the things I find enormously sad in my society that we only worry about whether you can be 'proved' right or wrong. Few take a look at what is actually right or wrong and the responsibility we all must assume for our choices and actions.

To: Would you kill the big guy?
I've listened very carefully several times, "five people tied to the tracks...". You have not addressed the issue - who tied them there? If YOU standing on the bridge were THAT entity that tied them there (that is, placing the five in harm's way - invading a country/region to satisfy your own foreign policy), your moral dilemma is much deeper than simply deciding the moral break-even point of that ratio 5/5 to 5/1.
i.e. possibly YOU should jump down onto the tracks. Rod Grover, Prague

The discussion here seems to be on the topic of the documentery rather than the trailer...

I really loved the trailer. In fact I got rather hooked on it - so much that I really miss it now.

It came just after the announcement "Â鶹Éç" and now - whenever I hear the announcement it is followed by an anticlimax.

Is there anywhere to download the trailer?

This is an absurd question. It points out how tunnel-blind Western/Judeo-Christian mores are.

There is a third choice. Throw yourself in front of the train in scenario 2. Asking the second question this way you don't have to consider the moral 'sin' and violence of murder.

Buddists approach this in stories of one of the Buddha's lives, where he throws himself in a tiger pit so that the animal will eat him instead of a child who has fallen in. They go through deep debate over this because suicide is 'immoral' in Buddhism. The thing that makes the Buddha's action 'moral' is that he did it for right-reason, which is a way of saying he did it for the child, not for himself. Not for self-agrandisement, nor sorrow for the child.

This variation is so important in the military context that I can't believe it isn't covered. It goes straight at the Israeli's argument.

The trolley problem just seems like a moralising attempt to justify what you've already decided to do. If you REALLY want to think about morals, let's make the challenge a bit more interesting. Let's accept that if youre in the position of having to decide which way the runaway trolley has to go, it's better to send it down the line with one person on it rather than five. Ok, fair enough. Now let's assume that that one person is an American (or European or Israeli), and the other five are Iraqis (or Afghans or Palestinians). Or the one person is an innocent child and the other five are convicted criminals. The problem is a bit harder now, isn't it?