In response to the downvote:
Hmm, I wonder what fraction of people on railway tracks are there because they are reckless and what fraction are victims who are not generally at fault? I assumed my ‘ceteris paribus’ covered this sufficiently but perhaps villainous train-plots are more the norm than I thought. Given this, subsidising the risk of recklessly hanging around train tracks by having a policy of sacrificing innocent bystanders to stop trains will only prevent the emergence of a mechanism whereby people don’t end up on train tracks, which is fairly surely, on net, suboptimal to the cause of not having people die in train accidents.
Alternatively, I may have missed the point. This appeals to me as a possibility.
This happened to me just last week.
In response to the downvote: Hmm, I wonder what fraction of people on railway tracks are there because they are reckless and what fraction are victims who are not generally at fault? I assumed my ‘ceteris paribus’ covered this sufficiently but perhaps villainous train-plots are more the norm than I thought. Given this, subsidising the risk of recklessly hanging around train tracks by having a policy of sacrificing innocent bystanders to stop trains will only prevent the emergence of a mechanism whereby people don’t end up on train tracks, which is fairly surely, on net, suboptimal to the cause of not having people die in train accidents. Alternatively, I may have missed the point. This appeals to me as a possibility.