Do not try to tell me I don't know basic ethics when you've never even heard of a major school of thought.

OK buddy, I have. Thanks. So I'll continue.

The entire purpose of the trolley problem is to highlight disagreements between different branches of moral philosophy, and to interrogate our moral intuitions.

As I said. Right. We start with a basic problem and diverge from there to see where the point you decide to not divert the trolley appears. If you don't ever want to divert the trolley then there's no point.

No offense but an ethics professor who was in the CIA sounds like the setup to a bad joke, and I'd ask you to appreciate my restraint in not clowning on that.

Which is why I mentioned it... You're a strange one. It was interesting because he had knowledge of some pretty controversial ethical decisions that actually made for good lessons. Basically the trolley problem in real life, and where the actions were pretty fucked up.

But if you were taught about the trolley problem in an ethics class, and the things I just said weren't mentioned, then you were taught poorly.

I brought them up... What?

The purpose of such a class is not to give you objective right-or-wrong answers, it's to inform you about a variety of perspectives and encourage you to identify and question your preconceived beliefs.

Correct. However, we start from a position that we generally all agree on or we don't get anywhere. We can ignore the people who want people to die because they aren't really thinking about ethics, at least not in a sense almost anyone else would agree with. The basic trolley problem is the starting point because the vast majority of people will agree with pulling the lever because it's the only reasonable option.