Richard Matheson is clearly one of the BEST writers in history. He wrote many episodes for Twilight Zone and lots of short stories, including “Button, Button”. (Personal fave = “Blood Son” READ IT TODAY!)
Would I push the button? Yep. More than 100 times just to make sure it works.
I’d climb under the dashboard and trace the wiring of the button, find out which circuit or patch is responsible for the people-killing mechanism, and short it out. Then push the button.
SERIOUS ANSWER: money is not a natural substance, it’s a token in a social agreement. Hence I cannot simply be “getting” money if I push the button, someone has to be paying me to push the button. I am not inclined to work as a contract killer. And there probably exist legal jobs where to perform my job would be to kill some people, albeit indirectly. Some of them may bring good into the world as well. Pushing a button doesn’t strike me as falling into that latter category. Unless I have reason to think the person in question “needed killing”, e.g., I’m hired to be the executioner for a capital murder case and think justice was done in the findings, I don’t think I’d want the job.
I see another completely differant point that I have never seen anyone else make.
The whole premise of this idea is that is it possible to transfer responsibility from the person who carries out the killing, or at least share the responsibility.
You have to ask yourself, just who is actually doing the killing, the person pressing the button, or the one who set up the scenario in the first place.
The person making the offer is surely guilty of the crime(along with any other accomplice that we may not know about), the person who is invited to press this button cannot rationally believe that death will occur to another person.
Lets change it just a little, imagine a stranger walks up to you with a suitcase of money and a gun, he asks you to say ‘yes’ to a proposed assassination - the stranger will be killed right in front of your eyes - there is a victim ready to be shot in plain view - all you have to do is agree to watch to get the million bucks.
Does that still make you responsible? Would you agree, you get no say in who the victim is, you do not know anything about them.
Shot rings out, stranger is dead, are you responsible? or does this lie solely with the killer?
I’d do it for free if I got to pick who pegged it.
I’d kill the person who gave me the button.
—.
I wouldn’t have a second thought- I’d give the box right back. No thank you. It doesn’t matter if, worldwide, people die all the time… 'cause I’m not the one killing them. I could never live with myself if I pressed the button.
Eh, if it’s a moral thing you can always spend half of the million saving a few people’s lives to make up for it. Unless you’re into silly Batman/Macgyver feel-good morals.
Never. I have enough guilt as it is.
This is me.
I think you want to kill the person who pays you so they can’t take the box and give it to someone else. Now that I think about it, you’d probably have to kill the person who gave you the button too. Can’t leave any witnesses.
Even if I didn’t know the ending of that particular story, I think I’d still realize that there was some catch.
Not that I’d push the button in any case, but I’d suspect that if I did push it, it wouldn’t work end happily for me.
No, for all kinds of moral and philosophical reasons, and also because of a deep mistrust of anything that looks too good to be true.
I’d take the box apart to see how it works.
I think a better question would be how many people would have to die per button push before you stopped considering it. For me it would be around a thousand.
I would not press the button. Anyone who would offer such a bargain is clearly doing so only to fuck with my head.
The problem with that argument is that people who are thinking in straightforward, honest, practical terms don’t walk up to strangers and offer them a push-the-death-button-for-money deal. After all, why doesn’t HE push the button?
If you participate, you’re fully responsible.
A million dollars doesn’t even cover the value of a statistical life, in the US at least. A while back I read a story that the EPA was considering lowering the value from 7 to 5 million I believe, and people were up in arms about it.
I’d be on that thing like a rat in a Skinner box.
I could only hope that it’s a daisy chain sort of thing where the person who pushes the first button doesn’t really kill anyone. Then the second person that pushes the button kills the first insensitive bastard, and so on until all of these selfish people are gone.
I know this is based off some previous story but I never read it to find out what the twist is. A story about everyone on Earth having a 1-in-6.8 billion chance of dying each time seems like it would take a long time to catch up with you.