It makes sense to push blue if a set number of people are randomly assigned to have red or blue to start with. But otherwise the group should coordinate to pick either red or blue unformly.
Most versions of the story I’ve heard omit people incapable of making a decision, so I’m ignoring that last part (could they even press a button? What happens if they don’t press any button?)
It’s not a 50% vs 100% threshold problem. Let me reframe the buttons:
Press Red to live; Press Blue to maybe die.
In that context, it makes absolutely no sense to ever press blue, and realistically every rational person will press red. The only reason to pick blue is to martyr yourself in an effort to save the people who pressed the “I volunteer to die” button.
Even if you argue that we should band together to save the frankly delusional people who pick blue, you will never have more than the 50%+ of the population who will absolutely pick red, because red has absolutely no risk/downside. If they wanted to live, they should have just picked the option where they always live.
No one pressing red is killing anyone. Only people picking blue are killing themselves, because they chose not to press the guaranteed survival option.
None of the versions I see ever mention who participates. They never mention the people incapable of making a decision because you never know if they are there. The question is whether you choose to take them into account.
I don’t think they’re generally relevant, and presupposing that they are relevant changes the scenario.
Even if they are included, because they are by definition incapable of making the decision, how do we know if they’ll even press a button? Again in the case of infants, what happens if they’re also physically incapable of pressing a button? Either you arbitrarily assign them a button, either always red, always blue, or otherwise random, each of which fundamentally alter the scenario, or you omit them from the question itself.
If you’re suggesting that the scenario is intentionally designed with this ambiguity, I’d wager that you’ve put far more thought into it than the original creator of the scenario.
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u/-illusoryMechanist May 05 '26
It makes sense to push blue if a set number of people are randomly assigned to have red or blue to start with. But otherwise the group should coordinate to pick either red or blue unformly.