I recently read Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/0143126059). It is a great book. I recommend it to people seeking to understand how our societies my find ways to resolve moral differences.
From page 114, I like and mostly agree with the assessment that the trolley dilemma discrepancies can be resolved by recognizing the differences between our emotional and logic minds. But it may also be that emotional argument against pushing a person is better than the logical argument for not pushing the person because, try as psychologists might, you can't separate a human from their environment. Behavior isn't totally isolated. A human has to live with their choices. Even when made clear that there are no other alternatives for saving the life of the five and there is no way pushing the man can fail to save the five, there are ramifications to the action. Perhaps after I push the man in front of the trolley killing him to save the five, I go home and commit suicide or become homicidal and kill ten people because I can't live with what I had done. I don't think this factor ("How am I going to cope with myself after doing this awful deed") can be removed from the experiment. It may be part of the logical algorithm to consider the emotional impact of the action on the actor.
Even actions we take within games affect our neural pathways and thus how we live our real lives. Our actions within a video game, or thus (perhaps to a lesser degree) in a thought experiment, can impact our lives going forward (https://www.center4research.org/violent-video-games-can-increase-aggression)
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