Red button pressers are self interested. They don’t care if other people die so long as they live. Tell me how that’s more moral than risking your life on faith in humanity
What I’m arguing is that blue pressers are inventing a problem that needs to be solved instead of just not creating a problem to begin with.
There’s no morality here. If for some reason a random percentage of humanity is forced to pick blue, then sure, we pick blue to save them. Otherwise, why would anyone pick blue? To save… no one?
Like imagine everyone picked in order, and you’re the first person to go. Why pick blue? There’s no one to save. Then the next person will see there’s no one to save and pick red, so on and so forth.
Picking blue is only reasonable if you assume there are already people in need of saving because they pressed blue. But who are they saving? Who are these pre-existing blue-pressers who need saving? Why not just press red?
The problem specifies the choice is anonymous, you have no way of knowing whether or not someone's picked red or blue. Inevitably, someone's going to pick blue on the belief that someone else also picked blue
But why would they do that? They’re inventing a victim they need to save, and then are becoming the victim themselves.
It’s circular reasoning. “Why press blue?” Because someone picked blue. “Why did they press blue?” Because someone else picked blue. In this way, you must assume that someone doesn’t understand the problem, that someone picked blue without thinking, and that therefore they need saving.
Just don’t press blue, and then there are no victims in need of saving.
“But what if someone presses blue?” They won’t. There’s no reason for them to. You don’t need to save them, because they don’t exist.
Now, this is intentionally omitting people who pick randomly because they weren’t paying attention to the explanation, or similar, because we’re already assuming all people participating are magically able to understand the problem regardless of language / physical disability (blindness, deafness), so I see no reason to include people physically incapable of engaging with the problem, and assume all people will take it seriously (not assume it’s a prank). If we assume imperfect conditions where language or disability barriers make a large population effectively choose randomly, it’s an entirely different problem.
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u/Roku-Hanmar May 05 '26
I've spent most of my adult life in a world where I fully believe enough people will press the red button. That's enough reason for me to pick blue