Philippa Foot's trolley problem cases establish through reflective equilibrium that virtually all competent moral reasoners track the means/side-effect distinction even before articulating a principle.

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Means/side-effect distinction(as the key moral principle being identified): The difference between harming someone as your direct method to achieve a goal (means) versus harming them as an unintended byproduct of pursuing that goal (side-effect).
Moral reasoners(as the subjects being studied): People who think through questions about right and wrong and try to figure out what they should do.
Philippa Foot(as a key neo-Aristotelian thinker): A 20th-century philosopher who revived Aristotelian ethics and argued that morality is grounded in facts about human nature and what helps us flourish.
reflective equilibrium(Introduced by Goodman in the context of justifying induction): A methodological state reached when considered judgments and the inference rules that best explain those judgments are mutually coherent, achieved by iteratively revising either judgments or rules when conflicts arise

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