Being a complete dilettante in the field of philosophy I will accept any warranted smackdown with grace.
It is my understanding that moral philosophers are actively trying to resolve the following apparent asymmetry in moral reasoning. Given the classic trolley problem where the rails fork with one person versus five people tied down, it's a no-brainer to sacrifice the one to spare the five. However, in the variant where there is only one branch and the only way to save the five is to push a fat man onto the rails, people display a great deal more reticence. Variants on this problem include proposing to sacrifice one healthy man so that his organs can be used to save 10 dying people -- and again observing a reluctance to commit this act of apparent utilitarianism.
To me the answer is obvious and I'm wondering if I'm missing something (either in the literature or in the argument itself). First I distinguish all people as either being in "the predicament" or outside of it. People outside of the predicament can just walk away -- as the healthy man from the 10 dying people or the fat man from the five people tied to the rails. I claim that the difficulty in the examples arises from forcibly making someone outside of the predicament a party to the predicament. I propose the following universal moral principle: It is always wrong to make someone outside the predicament an unwilling party to the predicament. It appears to me that this principle successfully resolves the moral asymmetry.
Questions: (1) has such a principle been proposed in the literature? (2) Does it indeed resolve the problem? (3) Does it create new ones? (4) Are there interesting border cases?