Increase the numbers then it will become more logical.
Change the 5 people to millions. Now it's one person vs. millions.
The choice is now even more obvious. And if you don't consider the numbers in this case people will call you a psychopath if you can't see the difference in moral weight between millions and one life.
It is difficult to create scenarios that trade-off one life for millions without implying responsibility of the person being asked to make the decision. People are grappling less with moral trade-offs in these decisions than they are with the dual axis questions or morality and responsibility. Create a scenario that trades off one life for a million but doesn’t imply the person choosing is in a position of responsibility and it becomes morally unambiguous.
For example a researcher choosing to sacrifice a healthy individual to donate their immune cells to save a million terminal cancer patients is considered morally reprehensible because people can’t to see how the researcher could be considered responsible for the a healthy individuals life. If the individual goes from being healthy to being in a coma and researcher becomes family member the question then becomes morally ambiguous.
That's my point. Moral ambiguity is evidence for the fact that morality is an arbitrary biological concept. It stems from evolution. It's a set of competing instincts.
If morality was a universal concept there would be nothing ambiguous about it. It would be logically consistent. But what we observe is that we can trigger inconsistent moral situations.
The core formulation of law and our interpretation of morality is formed off of cultural cues. But our core moral instinct is biological and genetic.
This very example. This very topic is evidence to that fact. The moral conflict described as the topic of this HN article is consistent across populations across cultures. It is genetic. It is not learned.
In fact we can actually identify physical and structural difference in people who lack morals. Psychopaths, people who innately lack a moral sense. The differences can be literally seen as a physical manifestation of an actual 3D coordinate of the brain. A researcher who studies these things can actually tell you if you're a psychopath or not just by looking at a brain scan.
Change the 5 people to millions. Now it's one person vs. millions.
The choice is now even more obvious. And if you don't consider the numbers in this case people will call you a psychopath if you can't see the difference in moral weight between millions and one life.
Numbers are indeed part of the equation.