Thinking About "Toward a Universal Ethics"

Gazzaniga's "Toward a Universal Ethics" is kind of like a different flavor of ethics essay (a Baskin-Robbins flavor perhaps) when compared to Appiah's "The Case Against Character. Appiah brought up scenarios that went something like "Would you help someone get change for a dollar? What if it smelled nice?", while Gazzaniga went straight for the jugular by going right into life or death situations. One of his exact scenarios was "...a trolley is headed down a track, straight for five people. You have to decide whether to hit the five people or, up close and personal, throw a person standing next to you onto the tracks to stop the trolley from hitting the other five." This made me come to the conclusion that Appiah was asking when and where you would do something, but Gazzaniga just wants to know the why and how. If a trolley is about to kill five people, the smell in the air suddenly become irrelevant, and I thing that's pretty interesting. Gazzaniga brings up couple more scenarios after this. There is one where a man is bloody and dying on the side of the road but rescuing him would make your new car dirty. Most people would take him regardless of this, and I don't think anybody would consider differently if the ambient noise level was 20 dB higher than the norm (another example Appiah brought up for situationists). However, a third of Gazzaniga's scenarios states that you get something in the mail telling you to send back money to save lives. This is where I think situationism finally plays a bit more of a role. If you're having a bad day you throw the mail out, and if you just won the lottery you save yourself some kids. So from this I've concluded that the background of a situation matters less the more interactive a situation is. There's a pretty severe difference between breaking a 20 and putting a bloody man into your car with the intention of saving his life, and that seems like where a line could be drawn.