Basic Theoretical Morality Question

[I_Ryan]

@CommonSense

When I was in the car with my friend, he came up with a basic morality question (he said he got the idea from previews for an upcoming movie). It’s pretty simplistic, but I don’t know much about morality. Here is the situation:

There is an “unstoppable” train filled with thirty children travelling on a path directly to a nuclear power plant. If the train hits the plant everyone on the train and 100,000 surrounding people will die. The only possible chance one has of stopping the train is blowing up the train and killing everyone on board before it hits. Is it morally justified to do so?

I argued no, because I would be taking the peoples’ lives without their consent. I am just curious what conclusion one would come to using the non-agression principle (which allows for self-defense), as well as under other morality systems.

If the 100,000 surrounding people are innocent like the children, I would of course recommend that we should blow up the train. Why wouldn’t we choose to kill just 30 innocent people over choosing to let 100,030 innocent people die, especially when the 30 who we would kill in the first possibility are included in those who would die in the second one?