Far be it from me to say this out loud, but people who pose these kids of questions do not always have the most coherent grasp of moral theory. There is often an implicit authoritarian assertion that people have moral responsibility for situations not of their making or choosing. I mean, the entire premise of the Trolley Problem is that a person has a moral responsibility to do something in such a situation: that a lack of action is equivalent to a failure to act correctly, even though there are no positive actions that would constitute correct action either.

It's even worse in the Prisoner's Dilemma model, where the authorities setting up the dilemma are doing something explicitly immoral, but are not themselves subject to moral judgement.

The real use of a question like this is more like a koan: to get one to realize that the entire premise of the question is wrong. But that is (sadly) lost on most people…

Far be it from me to say this out loud, but people who pose these kinds of questions do not always have the most coherent grasp of moral theory. There is often an implicit authoritarian assertion that people have moral responsibility for situations not of their making or choosing. I mean, the entire premise of the Trolley Problem is that a person has a moral responsibility to do something in such a situation: that a lack of action is equivalent to a failure to act correctly, even though there are no positive actions that would constitute correct action either.

It's even worse in the Prisoner's Dilemma model, where the authorities setting up the dilemma are doing something explicitly immoral, but are not themselves subject to moral judgement.

The real use of a question like this is more like a koan: to get one to realize that the entire premise of the question is wrong. But that is (sadly) lost on most people…