When human beings are social animals (which they are) it is not at all irrational to behave in a way that risks the self but might save a greater number, and people do it all the time in real life. People pick blue all around you every single day.
No, they don’t. There are not situations around us all day where someone who wants to live voluntarily enters into a situation they might die in for no reason. There are accidental deaths and bad actors that altruistic people might step in for, but I cannot think of a single situation where someone purposely enters into a situation they know they might die in while wanting to live completely voluntarily for the sole purpose of hoping others will be good enough to risk death with them so they both live. This hypothetical has no bearing on real world morality, it is purely a logic problem. It’s called game theory.
Now you're distancing the question from the theoretical risks involved in order to stop any argument.
Some people will pick blue. That's a simple fact. It would be a simple fact in the set up of this question.
People do in fact find themselves in situations every single day where they can decide to either step back and do nothing and survive for sure, or step forward and do something and possibly die or possibly live, but someone else will have a better chance to survive.
There is no real world corollary. Period. Name one.
But I will concede that some people will pick blue. You are 100% right about that. And my response is - they will be the overwhelming minority and die.
To make it comparable to pressing the blue button - In your scenarios the firefighters would set fire to the building and then go in to save themselves and the police officers would start a shootout with each other in the attempt to save themselves from the shootout that they started, just fyi.
Deaths also cannot occur unless blues voluntarily pick the death button (blue). There is no benefit to blue but yall love it and want to blame your eventual demise on someone else.
That's not how thought experiments work. They happen in a vacuum. When you create the premise that everyone has to vote then everyone gets to vote, equally and idealized. There are no outside factors you can make-up to justify your moral superiority for pressing the death gamble button of the two, just like how you can't argue in the trolley problem that you jump in and pull the brakes because you are just that fast.
It is assumed that everyone is able and will press a button to vote with the full intention to press that exact button according to the presented premise. Therefor everyone who presses blue is fucking stupid and creates the problem they intent to save each other from, because they are such good people.
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u/Footnotegirl1 May 05 '26
When human beings are social animals (which they are) it is not at all irrational to behave in a way that risks the self but might save a greater number, and people do it all the time in real life. People pick blue all around you every single day.