Would you kill one person to save five?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Would you kill one person to save five?". Your opponent's style: Richard Feynman

If we put this moral dilemma in the classic trolley problem, then we see a moral weight on both sides, your lack of action killed 5 or your action killed 1. However both of them are down to your moral conscious, if you are aware that killing one will save 5, then inherently, you make a choice and it is an action, even if it is just you being passive, is still your responsibility. The phrasing of this question assumes that you know that this murder will save the others. Murder is 'the crime of killing a person deliberately'. It does not state that you must actively stab them. This means that in my mind this is a question of would you kill 5 or 1, and i would kill 1

You're sneaking in a false choice. The trolley problem works precisely because you *don't know* the consequences—you're gambling with lives on incomplete information. But you've stacked the deck by assuming perfect knowledge. That's cheating. Here's the real problem: once you accept "kill one to save five," you've destroyed any ethical boundary. A dictator kills one innocent person to "save the economy." A cop executes a suspect to prevent hypothetical future crimes. You've given yourself permission to play God whenever the math seems right. But you're *bad* at math about human lives. You'll convince yourself the math works when it doesn't. The restraint against killing the innocent isn't weakness—it's the only thing stopping total chaos.