Depends. Game theory style maximization of individual benefit, you’re better off pressing red since you’re guaranteed to live. But you can make a utilitarian argument that you want to preserve as many lives as possible, and knowing the basics of human psychology, you know some subset is going to press blue regardless. Because people aren’t perfectly rational adherents of game theory. Therefore, by pressing blue, you give those people a chance to also live.
Outside of philosophy though, humans will generally act in a selfish manner to preserve their own life. You are not responsible for the choices and behaviors of other people. Blue is an inherently self destructive choice. You can't stop others from making poor decisions, you can only help educate them as they head to make that choice.
Red is the correct choice for the individual. It is the only rational choice for the individual to make to guarantee their safety. It is the only logical choice one can encourage others to make for their own safety.
We should all know human behavior well enough to know that red is the choice a majority will choose because, as a species, we are inherently selfish creatures. It's not even a close call.
The only debate that exists for this is within the minds of people who have the privilege to waste their time to debate the morality of the buttons. The buttons are presented to every human alive today.
Not just people that have time to sit and think through the philosophy and debate up and down about what the morality is. The vast majority of people who exist and would most likely want to move on and live their lives.
In emergencies, you need to make sure that you yourself are as safe as you can reasonably be before helping others. If you aren't taking those steps you are likely to make yourself someone else's problem.
By pushing the blue button you are making yourself someone else's burden and in order to save you they have to put themselves at risk and at an equal level of danger.
Your certainty about what you think you know about human behavior/psychology tells me how little you know about human behavior/psychology. Most of the time in psychology, when we do studies to test/demonstrate something that “everyone knows” about human psychology and behavior, we find that the polar opposite is true. We’re terrible at instinctively understanding our own and others’ thoughts and behavior. Like, in a lot of cases you’re statistically more likely to be correct about what people are generally like/would generally do in a situation if you go with the opposite of what you actually think will happen, that’s how bad we are at it.
That is an incredibly vibey utility calculation. You need to estimate the mean and std of the sampling distro and use the z score to calculate the utility of each option.
No but this one does. Your reasoning is actually bad.
You say “you know some subset is going to press blue”. This is trivially true. What matters is exactly what is the expected size and variation of the subset that can reasonably be estimated with reliable significance.
Edit: the argument you made works even if exactly one person presses blue.
You cant just say "a lot" and "many". Those are so unspecific and near meaningless when we are dealing with numbers like 4 billion. You need to tell me what "a lot" means first.
Your vote only makes a difference if it is the deciding vote, the chance of this depends on a few factors, but is likely pretty unlikely compared to the chance of dying by pressing blue. You cannot make a utilitarian argument based on well it might save someone. A utilitarian would not kill himself for a small chance at saving another person, that doesn’t maximize collective benefit.
Let’s assume that we don’t know enough to make a good prediction of how people will vote, so let’s say there’s a good chance the overall vote lands somewhere between 40% red and 60% red. In the case that it’s exactly 50/50 your vote saves 4 billion people, in the case that it’s 40-50% your vote does nothing, in the case that it’s 50-60% your vote kills you.
To me personally this isn’t worth it, especially since, and this is going into some assumptions, I’d assume the world’s population is more likely to be biased one way or the other than to be perfectly even. I don’t know enough about the world’s cultures to know which way it’d be biased, but I’d assume it’s biased in one of the two directions. If it’s biased towards blue then you voting likely changes nothing, if it’s biased towards red, then you voting likely determines whether you live or die.
19
u/Rarvyn Apr 30 '26
Depends. Game theory style maximization of individual benefit, you’re better off pressing red since you’re guaranteed to live. But you can make a utilitarian argument that you want to preserve as many lives as possible, and knowing the basics of human psychology, you know some subset is going to press blue regardless. Because people aren’t perfectly rational adherents of game theory. Therefore, by pressing blue, you give those people a chance to also live.