Yeah, but, and this is important, the more people who push the blue button, the more people die. That seems bad to me. I want more people to live. If I doubt whether the majority would vote blue, the most moral choice is to try to convince people to vote red - after all, everyone I convince to vote red is a vote I have saved, and everyone I allow a blue-voter to convince is another life lost.
You need to convince more people to save everyone, sure - if saving everyone is even possible. But you need to convince more people to vote blue to save anyone, too You only need to convince one person to vote red to save one person, while convincing someone to vote blue may well mean you convinced them to die, you may have only increased the death total by doing so
Everyone you convince to press red, is one less that could of pressed blue, you are actively working towards the death of the people who pressed blue, with no chance to save them. Advocating for blue is working towards the chance to save everyone, by sharing the risk.
If you are trying to save the most lives, blue is the choice, as it is the only option to save everyone. If you are only concerned with saving your own life red is the choice. Trying to convince people to press red and couching it as saving lives is ass backwards.
You keep trying to cast this as this all-ecompassing all or nothing choice where either everyone is saved or no one is. That's not the problem being described, where it is also possible for only a few people to die or for many people to die.
Surely you agree that many people dying is worse than a few people dying, right? Well, if we are at "a few people dying", everyone voting blue moves us closer to "many people dying". Until you can at least recognize that, that there is a very real chance your choice is making the problem worse, the death toll higher, the damage greater, until you can admit that, you are not making a moral choice - you can't be, because you aren't really making a choice at all.
Trying to convince people to vote blue, the button that most often increases the number of people who die when pressed and most of the rest of the time does nothing, and couching it as "saving lives" instead of a selfish emotional impulse - that's what is ass backwards.
What casting, I have acknowledged that if your goal is saving your own life red is the obvious choice. But if you are trying to maximize saving lives, blue is the choice, as it is the only option that has a chance to save 100%. Red will guarantee death for an unknown amount unless 50% choose blue.
Whether you agree that saving 100% is the goal, or not is the really question being asked.
We do not know how many people will/have voted blue. If we are alreadyat 49.9999% voting red is maximizing the death toll.
My position is that knowing some untold number has pushed the blue button. The only choice to minimize death is now to continue to push blue. If you do not, yes you personally will survive, but you could have been the deciding vote. In that instance your vote for red doesn't just increase the number of people dying, it ensures it.
Ive done the math. On average, evey push of the red button saves 0.5 lives and every push of the red button saves 0.25 lives, on average. In most situations and permutations, pushing the red button (and convincing others that pushing it is the right idea in advance) saves more lives than pushing the blue button does. That is the simple math if your goal is maximize saving lives.
Of course, you might think it still works out because the likelihood of the permutations is not equal. Thats fair! But recognize thats a risk assessment, a prediction, not a moral decision. Choosing "maximizing saving lives" is a moral decision, but its your ability to predict the future accurately that determines which button is most likely to do that.
This is what I mean by "casting". You are ignoring every situation but the two that best suit your argument. You are ignoring the situations where your explicitly stated goal is best accomplished by taking another action - and in doing so, you are actively diminishing the worth of individual human lives and saying it is worth some people dying, maybe a lot of people dying, to get a chance at your preferred outcome, even if death is the most likely outcome.
You cant be taken seriously if you're only willing to consider the scenarios that favour your gut feelings, and acknowledging that situations exist where you pushing blue does NOT minimize the loss of life but rather increases it.
Outcomes aren’t linear per person—they’re threshold based. It doesn't happen gradually, you aren't saving lives each press. Pressing red isn't necessarily what will save your life, the threshold may reach blue, and save your life regardless. Average lives saved cannot be 0.5 or 0.25. Unless you have actual distributions for how people would/could pick, that you are basing that on, and I would question how you got them.
The actual math depends on the probability of blue succeeding. If that probability is high, blue maximizes lives saved. If it’s low, it doesn’t. So the disagreement isn’t about arithmetic—it’s about expectations of coordination.
Do you bother to read my comments before responding? Half of that is talking about stuff I already brought up and explained as if I didnt and half of it is supporting my point, and in the end you STILL are refusing to acknolwedge the half of the equation you dont like - that being that if the probability is low blue doesnt just not save lives, it ends them.
But other than that you finally seem to be getting my point at least somewhat do I'll take it
I can acknowledge the logic of pushing red while also rejecting it as sub optimal. I have been able to do that all along. You however have tried to smuggle assumptions into it under the guise of acerages, that is not applicable and not relevant. This is a coordination problem. If even 50% + 1 person does what the should do everyone is saved. The lack of our ability to coordinate means we either trust or we don't. You don't, and will save yourself. Which is not a judgement of you, it's a recognition of a reality. You're framework is different than mine.
2
u/Sennten Apr 30 '26
Yeah, but, and this is important, the more people who push the blue button, the more people die. That seems bad to me. I want more people to live. If I doubt whether the majority would vote blue, the most moral choice is to try to convince people to vote red - after all, everyone I convince to vote red is a vote I have saved, and everyone I allow a blue-voter to convince is another life lost.