The shallowness of much of modern academic philosophy is demonstrated by the level of attention devoted to the “puzzle” of why most people (other than Buddhist monks, economists, and other psychopaths) resist pushing the fat man in person but are much more willing to kill him remotely in order to save the five children on the track. To me it seems obvious that there are two main factors at play here. Firstly, on a purely utilitarian level, the suffering of a victim of a surprise accident might reasonably be judged to be less than that of a victim of personal assault (because of the emotional content and sense of rejection induced by the latter); and secondly, at the level of the person who has to perform the act (or not), the emotional cost of facing the shock and implicit judgement of the victim is a significant deterrent which might cause the person facing the challenge to adjust his moral judgement so as to avoid an unpleasant obligation (and of course it probably also matters whether the experimenter’s question is “what should you do?” vs “what would you do?”) . These may be interesting questions for psychology as a scientific study of how humans actually behave, but the “philosophical” content is (as usual) vacuous.
The interesting question of why Buddhist monks align with economists and other psychopaths is, I suspect, answered by the fact that they share with those categories the property of being somehow “outside” normal society. A monk is seen, and thinks of himself as being seen, as not a normal person but more as an agent of nature or natural “law”. So the pain suffered by his victim is more like that of an accident victim, and the monk is probably both aware of that and less open to the fear of judgement from his victim.Source: What Do Buddhist Monks Think of the Trolley Problem? – The Atlantic
P.S. Speaking of economists, I also find it bizarre how many of the behaviours identified by people such as Steven Levitt as “irrational” are generally accepted as such when to my mind they are often perfectly rational optimizations of an objective function that is just not the mind numbingly trivial linear one that seems to be all that economists are capable of understanding.