All in all, this is one of the more interesting moral thought experiments I have come across. Kudos to those who say they would press the blue button. Maybe it’s the explicit act of having to physically press a button that affects their choice.
But I would submit that unless everyone advocating this position are ascetic monks living in monasteries, or planning to commit suicide to avoid negatively affecting others, this is inconsistent with how they actually live their lives.
I think most of us push the red button every day, whether we realize it or not. In an overcrowded planet with human-caused climate change leading to environmental degradation (which leads to famine, war, and the exodus of populations), our mere existence—especially living in a first-world country where people utilize far more energy and resources than the average global per-capita rate—is contributing to other people’s deaths, however infinitesimally.
For the hypothetical to work as a dilemma, i think non pressers would be killed along with the blues if the reds are in majority, but they’re not included in the blue total so they aren’t actually helping anyone
ironically, it’s those pushing the blue button who are causing needless death (their own as it turns out). Pushing the red is best for both yourself as an individual as well as for society as a whole (everyone survives if everyone pushes red). Pushing blue is misguided altruism. It’s not necessary to push blue for everyone to survive.
True. But is is necessary for you to push blue to be able to say honestly that you had no direct hand in causing the deaths of anyone else (or yourself).
well I would argue those pushing the blue button are causing their own death. They are sacrificing themselves in the name of altruism when no such sacrifice is actually necessary for everyone to survive.
I still don’t follow. Unless you are saying your mere existence is some sort of gift to society as a whole, your logic completely escapes me. As I pointed out above, expecting everybody to push the red button is delusional.
There will be blue-pushers. Whether they’re just sentimental saps or they are bad at logic or they’re in fact the sort of indomitable altruist we wish all humans were, there will be those people. And great numbers of them. Like 30-40% of all button pushers.
Therefore everyone must make their decision on what to do with the certain knowledge of the existence of a non-trivial blue contingent. At which point you can vote red and be part of the problem actively trying to cause their death or you can vote blue and be part of the solution actively trying to prevent their death.
Whichever way you decide, you can only be trying to cause/prevent. You can’t ensure cause or prevent. That’s the nature of collective action. We are all at least a little bit guilty of whatever our actions cause.
And once again the parallels to current politics are very obvious, but not appropriate to dig into in detail in this thread or in IMHO.
In military organizations there’s a strong tradition of sticking together no matter what, in some cases even extending to not leaving the dead behind; but at some level the generals have to dispassionately make purely utilitarian calculations, even at the cost of abandoning people to their deaths. I think that this illustrates that even the strongest commitment to altruism has to break down at some point. In a zombie apocalypse, at what point do you decide that a party member has made themselves a dead weight that the rest just can’t support any more?
Yeah a better analogy would be a shipwreck where by a bizarre series of events (I’m not going to explain here, maybe the sharks have a union agreement ) if you stay in the stricken ship you are guaranteed to survive. If you jump in the water you risk being eaten by a shark, but only if most of the ships passengers stay on the ship. If most passengers choose to leave the ship, everyone survives
Something that’s being overlooked in several of the upthread posts (like the one by not_werewolves) is that it doesn’t require a huge majority of button-pushers to press blue for everyone to live, only 50.1 percent. The poll referenced in the OP was 60/40 red. But we don’t know who was polled. I saw a poll on another board that was predominantly blue.
Yes, not everyone will press blue, but they don’t have to. It is not an illogical choice nor does it guarantee your death.
It “helps” by killing those guilty of the “sin of empathy”, which I expect will be the motivation for most of those pressing it. Not the desire to survive, but the desire to kill the sort of people who would press blue.
As has been said upthread, the resonance with present politics is obvious.
No, you’re missing the point. There is zero chance, absolutely zero chance, that everyone makes the same calculation you do. Many people will use a different logic to arrive at the conclusion of pushing blue. It is guaranteed that people will die if we push the red button. It may be as much as 30-50% of the population. The reality is that you’re willing to kill 50% of all human beings alive, the greatest massacre of all time, so that you can assure your own personal safety, and you’re wrapping it up in logic in such a way as to justify it. Well, they didn’t HAVE to die, if they were as clever as me, so it’s really their fault that I was part of the movement that killed billions of people is what you’re telling yourself.
We could have zero deaths, or we can have guaranteed deaths of at least several million but more likely over a billion. You are choosing the latter and trying to dress it up as the obvious choice. It is not irrational to pick blue. It’s a sad state of human affairs that so many people think they’re correct in condemning billions unnecessarily to death.
What do you think the chances are, for whatever reason, with no deliberate communication or strategizing ahead of time, that everyone pushes red? That everyone uses the same exact calculations and the same values that you did to come to your conclusion? That everyone is a perfect robot, or a perfect copy of you, and therefore no one has to die?
What amount of people do you think won’t think very deeply and think “well, everyone survives if we pick blue, so I pick blue, duh”? What amount of people say “I’m not willing to condemn billions to death, so I’m going with blue and hoping other people come to the same conclusion”? What other people pick blue for a dozen different reasons? I’ve already said I’m picking blue – do you think I’m simply incapable of logical thought?
I suggest it’s never lower than 20%. It’s a guess on my part, but any sane number is going to at least involve hundreds of millions of people on the global scale, right? There is zero – absolutely zero – chance that all of humanity chooses red. Your assertion that no one has to die is a complete fantasy.
People pushing the red button are causing needless death because it’s literally the only action that can result in deaths in this scenario. You are pushing the only button that you can kill people, and then saying “obviously anyone who doesn’t push this button is killing themselves and other people” – you are essentially victim blaming on a grand scale. We could all survive and no one has to die, but people like you insist that the only rational choice is to make sure that at least 20% of the population dies, and you’ve already prearranged your excuse for why it’s the fault of the people you killed.
In every major election there’s a significant number of people who don’t vote. I think most of them if you asked would have a preference one way or another but judge that the extremely negligible chance that they will make a difference in the result is outweighed by the 100% chance that they’ll be inconvenienced for 20 minutes.
How do you think these people will vote when there’s the same extremely negligible chance of making a difference, but a very high chance of committing suicide by making the wrong choice?
Edit: this wasn’t supposed to be a reply to SenorBeef, it was just supposed to be a reply to the thread, must have clicked the wrong thing.
) if you stay in the stricken ship you are guaranteed to survive. If you jump in the water you risk being eaten by a shark, but only if most of the ships passengers stay on the ship. If most passengers choose to leave the ship, everyone survives