One person now vs five people in the future
Oh no! The trolley is bearing down on one innocent person! Don't worry, there's a lever you can pull that will send the trolley off on an enormous detour that will keep it safely out of the way for 100 years.
Unfortunately at the end of the hundred years the trolley will come back and crash into five randomly selected people. These are future people who haven't been born yet, but they are real people and it's definitely going to happen. There's nothing anyone can do in the next hundred years to prevent it.
Do you pull the lever?
And if so, what's the shortest length of detour at which you would have said yes? I'm guessing that most people would say no at 1 second but yes at a million years, so where is the cutoff point at which you don't feel responsible for people in the future?