No. Mind control is (ironically enough) against my morals.
I was watching some nature show on TV ages ago, and they had segments on lions and hyenas. We were joking about the “nice” lions and the “nasty” hyenas when the narrator made some comment about how people usually find hyenas icky, for lack of a better word. They then explained how hyenas were actually pretty chill and probably better than lions in a lot of ways (sorry, it was long enough ago that I don’t remember any details).
I felt that.
The Lion King did a lot of brand damage to hyenas. Disney seems to have this effect in general. Lemmings never recovered, either.
Lions do kill hyenas, but rarely for food. It’s mostly about turf, rivalry… and spite. Lions seem to hate hyenas—it’s not hard to see why. Sometimes they cripple them, whether by accident (hyenas are tough and often escape mid-attack) or on purpose—as a dominance flex. It’s a warning to the rest of the clan: mess with us, and this could be you.
Nasty? Sure. But the savannah doesn’t do nice.
What color is the button?
The color is blue.
This changes everything.
Absolutely. I’ve long wanted people to become the Borg, except with ongoing innovation and experimentation in morality.
I don’t think the largely faith-based and violently tribal status quo is a good long-term match for our species. It would be lovely to push the reset button and start again from a cleaner slate.
If they adopted my views, I guess it’d largely be secular humanism, but with small experimental groups that continuously evaluate different lifestyles and moral processes, like a million parallel biospheres seeded with philosopher-scientist-ecologist-artists. I’m sure some of them will become sycophantic cults of personality again in due time, but maybe other ones will manage to evolve our genome with better moral encodings that aren’t so disastrously fight-or-flight. Either way, it’d be a neat experiment, and I’d say it’s at least a better shot than what we have today.
Does it still kill one random person?
Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure this would technically count as a worldwide genocide, since it is destroying all other cultures. And for most purposes, the people themselves die; the program running their bodies isn’t them anymore in any real sense. They’re just meat puppets.
They can’t do that, because their morals and beliefs are locked in. They cannot experiment, cannot change.
So you are suggesting that I can’t experiment/change? Because I heartily disagree with that.
The button imposes my morals and my ideology, nothing more. I am not rigidly dogmatic; my ideology requires exploration and rationality, self-reflection, and most importantly, change in direction in light of lessons learned.
My morality is, of course, harder to pin down in a single sentence, but is mostly geared toward an almost-Hippocratic “do the least harm possible for the greatest benefit.”
I’m imagining a game show with a big button called, “Who Wants to be a Cult Leader?”
Is there anybody in this thread other than yourself who you would trust with the magic button?
I don’t have the direct knowledge of others’ morals and ideologies.
What I know is that abuse, genocide, rape, etc. is incompatible with mine, so there will be much less violence and misery in the world. As is fraud, greed, and confabulation, so grifting and medical woo bullshit will also be right out.
No, because your beliefs are not imposed by a magic button. And it states in the OP that their imposed beliefs will be lifelong. So no experimentation, no changing of opinions according to evidence, they’ll robotically stick with their programming even if it kills them.
Unless responding to evidence and changing your mind accordingly (within reason) is a part of your ideology then it shouldn’t be an issue.
Again, changing your mind is impossible in this scenario; people are acting under compulsion, they cannot change their mind.
I created the scenario so my previous comment is confirmation that what you’re saying isn’t the case.
Then your OP is self-contradictory.
It doesn’t change the ethics of the situation anyway. Even if people can eventually change their mind, you’d still have to rewrite their personality and all of their life experiences to impose the moral beliefs in the first place. No different than killing them.
No. I just didn’t feel like writing an entire lawyer reviewed and evil genie proof essay covering every possible circumstance, question and gotcha people would have in response to the scenario.