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The deontologist would be constrained by a negative duty not to kill. It would be equally wrong from a moral viewpoint to kill anyone. There is no moral reason to choose between the car and the bus. Both are impermissible. However, there is no avoidance alternative. You will kill a group of people unless the homeless person is thrown over the bridge. But throwing the homeless person over the bridge is murder. Murder is impermissible. Thus, the deontologist cannot allow the homeless person to be killed—even if it saved four or 39 lives. Because of this, the deontologist would use other normative factors, such as aesthetics, to choose whether to kill four or 39 (probably choosing to kill four on aesthetic grounds).

The virtue ethics person or the ethical intuitionist would equally reply that the engineer should act from the appropriate virtue, say justice, and do what a person with a just character would do. But this does not really answer the question. One could construct various scenarios about it being more just to run into the school bus rather than the car when the occupants of the car might be very important to society: generals, key political leaders, great physicists, etc. In the same way, the intuitionists will choose what moral maxim they wish to apply at that particular time and place. The end result will be a rather subjectivist decision-making process.