My apologies, I seriously misread the first sentence of your closing paragraph. Still, you are presenting “righteous indignation” as a motivation when “empathy” is an equally probable one. I don’t feel good about feeling bad about people getting killed, I just feel bad about it. But this isn’t about indignation at all. I think it’s pretty transparent why giving the president of the United States (an office, not a person) the power to kill arbitrarily is a terrible mistake from any perspective: legal, moral, consequentialist, whatever; and I think the person who is about to occupy that office is a very good argument to show that.
My answer to the trolley problem is that hypothetical moral problems thought up by philosophers try to box people into making choices outside of the context they would require to make a real moral choice. Real moral choices have uncertainty, and constructing choices without uncertainty isn’t helpful. People who say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette manage to break fantastic numbers of eggs and produce no omelettes.
