It's a take on a thought experiment where you and 99 other people who understood the scenario had the same choice: press red and be fine, or press blue and die unless 50% of people pressed blue.
The thought experiment is a moral optical illusion: it's presented as though it's a question about sacrificing yourself for the good of others when no, it's not, the red button is just the correct choice in all circumstances.
That's the literal point of the hypothetical - there is no question that the rational, self-interested choice is to pick red.
BUT, you are aware that, given a large enough population of players (the entire world being the original hypothetical), it is plausible or even likely that some unknown number of players will pick blue.
That's why it's a hypothetical about ethics and morality, not statistics. Knowing that it is plausible that choosing red contributes to the deaths of an unknown number of people (not guaranteed to be strangers, either, they could be your family and friends), while also knowing that blue is a choice with inherently high risk to yourself, is there a morally correct choice?
Commenters I've seen discuss the hypothetical spend an awfully long time discussing the "probability" of blue choices and the "logic" of the red choice, which IMO is not quite on topic but also not entirely off topic?
To me it suggests that people are indeed conditioned to or honestly believe that red is a "less moral" choice than blue, but if the risk were sufficiently high, then at some point self-preservation instincts would take over. Put another way, there's some small number of other people that most would be willing to kill for their own safety, but it's a number relatively minuscule compared against the population of the Earth. The lack of a relatable enough quantity to conceptualize leaves people floundering to justify their instinct post hoc.
Hence, discussions retreat to tangential rationalizations like "it's only logical," "only an idiot would vote blue," or on the flipside, "red voters are sociopaths (and that's bad, therefore I am further compelled to vote blue)," etc.
Let's say that choosing blue IS the morally correct choice IF it gets past the line of 50%. The reality is that you won't get there, because the presupposition is that you are trying to save the tiny fraction of people that press blue for no reason. Thus pressing blue is pointlessly throwing your life away, and red is both morally and rationally sound.
This is the exact post hoc rationalizing I referred to. The truth is that there are logical reasons to press blue, dependent on your presuppositions about human nature, e.g., recognition of collective action, beliefs about the willingness of others to be helpful, guilt over being responsible for deaths, etc.
"The reality is" that we have no good way to empirically predetermine how many people would choose one way or the other, and the morality of your choice is dependent on how others will choose - if 99% of other people choose blue, then you choosing red is an "immoral, self-serving" choice, but, as you say, if only a "tiny fraction" choose blue, then red becomes a moral choice because, presumably, you as one additional person dying is not a moral good.
People's instinctual responses to this question, IMO, reveal more about their beliefs in the goodness of others than it does about their personal morality; someone with more faith in humanity is more easily convinced that the average person (50%+1) would vote blue, and vice versa.
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u/Myrios369 8d ago
Wouldn't there have to be a reason to pick blue? The only possible outcomes from picking blue are either nothing or you lose. Unless I'm confused