> Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.
And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.