Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

#1 seems simple enough, case 2 is different to case 1 where the 1 healthy person is not going to die even if the other 5 die. So it would seem harder to kill a perfectly healthy person (who is not going to die) for 5 who are going to die, as opposed to kill 1 person who will die anyway to save 5.

The third case is again different to the second case because in the second case you have to pull the trigger, where as in the third case the trigger is essentially already pulled and so the responsibility is just to direct the bullet - this puts you in 'damage control' mode.

#1 is like "would you rather kill your son or your daughter?" Yeah I know philosophers like such questions.

#3 has a simple answer: duh, yes, it is really a computer screen in front of me. I have proved it to you by writing this comment.

I always thought that #2 was illustrated very well by the Ship of Theseus paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus).

The second relies on definition of "to be the same". :-)