Nobody has the authority to decide whose life is worth less

The argument

This argument focuses on the position of the person at the lever. To divert the trolley is to appoint oneself the judge of which lives are to end, on the basis of a count taken in seconds with no knowledge of who any of these people are. Proponents argue that no one holds that authority. The bystander was not given the power of life and death by the people on either track, and seizing it is a usurpation that the urgency of the moment does not legitimate. The argument is reinforced by how little the chooser can actually know. Counting bodies assumes that lives are interchangeable units differing only in number, which proponents regard as the deepest error in the utilitarian answer. The single person may be a parent of several children; the group may include someone who has lived long and well. None of this is available to the bystander, and the pretence that the choice is simple arithmetic conceals the fact that it is a judgement about the comparative worth of strangers, made in ignorance. Proponents conclude that the morally available option is to refuse the role. Declining to redirect the harm is not indifference; it is a recognition that the tragedy was set in motion by something other than the bystander, and that one may not resolve it by transferring death onto someone who was safe. Where no one can rightly be chosen to die, the person who chooses becomes the author of the death rather than a witness to an accident. Because no individual has the standing to rank strangers' lives and act on the ranking, this argument concludes, one should not pull the lever, and the single man should be spared.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who would divert the trolley reply that no ranking of worth is required, only a count of equally valuable lives, and that each person's claim to life adds to the others rather than cancelling out. They argue that refusing the role is not available: the bystander's hand is on the lever and the outcome follows from what they do either way, so declining to choose is itself a choice, made with the same knowledge and answerable in the same terms, but with more deaths attached.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Declining to act is also a decision about which lives end, as the premise's own framing concedes in making the bystander's position inescapable. Absence of conferred authority is a feature of both options, so it cannot distinguish between them. [Rejecting P2] Knowing nothing about those involved is the reason the opposing case gives for counting rather than a reason against it. Where nothing distinguishes the people at risk, number is the only morally relevant difference remaining, and the premise treats that as a defect. [Rejecting P3] Treating lives as interchangeable is a judgement of equal worth rather than of comparative worth, which is the opposite of what the premise claims. Counting people equally is also what the premise's own appeal to the single man's claim depends on.