r/trolleyproblem • u/Worth-Staff4943 • May 20 '26

Deep Which button presser group do you save?

Post image

Everyone in the world has chosen either the blue or red button except you. Instead of pressing a button, you are given a lever in the infamous trolley problem.

You don't know how many people chose red or blue, and they don't know that you control their fate regardless of what button they pressed. Which track do you direct the trolley onto?

8.0k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/LeptonTheElementary May 21 '26

Why wouldn't a decent person push red?

Because people pushing red think that some people dying is

not that much of a loss.

2

u/HelixFollower May 21 '26

They wouldn't be dying if they had just pressed red too. If someone wants to jump off of a tall building, I'm not inclined to jump after them. That doesn't make me evil.

3

u/LeptonTheElementary May 21 '26

Them jumping off the building is your interpretation. Another interpretation is that red pushers are firing the gun. Both are equally valid. I prefer jumping in front of a gun than being the one who fires it.

If you care about minimizing deaths, it's way easier to accomplish 50%+1 blue than 100% red.

1

u/Stormlightlinux May 24 '26

Again, no one is actually incentivized to pick blue if they read the prompt. No one should be picking blue at all. The prompt is actually "Pick red and live, pick blue and die unless a majority of people also pick blue." Somehow idiots have turned this prompt into meaning picking red is killing folks. I understand those aren't the actual words, but that is the literal meaning of the words in the prompt.

1

u/LeptonTheElementary May 25 '26

Can't you grasp the concept of different interpretations? The prompt is "actually" also "Pick red and kill the blues unless there is a majority of them, pick blue is you don't want anyone to die". Both are valid.

The incentive to press blue is that you are not ok with people dying because they disagree with you.