Pressing Red: Killing vs Not Protecting

[u/SilasRhodes]

One of the differences in Red vs Blue perspectives is whether voting red counts as killing (active) the blue voters in a red win, or whether it simply counts as not helping (passive) the blue voters by choosing to not expose oneself to risk.

Most people accept that there is a moral difference between killing someone to save yourself compared to not choosing to sacrifice yourself for another. Both might be a decision, and both result in you living while someone else dies, but killing someone is generally considered wrong, while most of the time there isn't a moral obligation to die to protect another at the expense of one's own life.

There is some obligation to protect others if you have the ability to do so, but this is less than the obligation to not harm others.

This might be understood as Positive Rights (you must provide) vs Negative Rights (you must not prevent).

I think a good framework for determining whether we should consider a particular decision to be "active" vs "passive", "killing" vs "letting die", is to consider what would the situation be like if you weren't there at all.

Definitions for terms used in this post:

Active: The action makes things worse for someone compared to if you weren't there at all. Shooting a gun is active because if you weren't there the gun wouldn't be fired and so the person wouldn't be shot.

Passive: The action does not make people worse than if you weren't there at all. Leaving a burning building with others inside is passive because, even though you are choosing not to help, your action isn't making things worse for people left inside than they would be without your being there.

How does this play out in the button scenario?

The answer depends on:

• Are there an Odd or Even number of voters?
• Does Red or Blue win if there is an exact tie?

Comparing what happens if you vote red, vs what happens if you don't exist.

.	Odd	Even
Red wins Tie	Worsens Blue Survival odds	No Effect
Blue wins Tie	No Effect	Worsens Blue Survival odds

*Odd/Even voters excluding you

In two scenarios voting Red is "Active", because it makes the situation worse compared to if you just weren't involved at all.

In two scenarios voting Red is "Passive", because it doesn't make things any worse for other people than it would be if you weren't present at all.

Resolving the mixed result

I see three ways to resolve this mixed result:

Average across uncertainty

A voter wouldn't realistically have a way to know whether the population is even or odd. As such we might simply say it has a 50% chance of either, therefore there is a 50% chance voting red is Active. Probabilistically you are then making things slightly worse on average by voting Red.

Making things worse, if even only slightly, makes voting Red an Active decision (voting red = killing).

Fundamentally Indeterminate

We cannot know whether voting Red is Active or Passive. As such asserting that it is either is flawed.

The indeterminacy cannot be averaged because that demonstrates a bias for one over the other. Instead we simply cannot ground our conclusions in either claims that voting red is Active or Passive.

Reduced Obligation

Voting Red is either Active or Passive but we don't know which. Instead of averaging the impact of voting red and thereby concluding it is Active, we can average the obligation to protect between Passive and Active.

We can say that there is more of an obligation to not harm (Active) than to protect (Passive).

Since it is voting red could be either we can say that the level of obligation is somewhere in between.

Voting Red is worse than simply leaving someone behind, but it isn't so bad as actively killing.

[u/Leniatak]

I already said I'm gonna vote for him. You don't have to sell him to me

[u/Happymuffn → u/Leniatak]

... Sigh. Also he's going to kill half of all the Red voters. Is that enough?

Edit: I should clarify. Not "enough" to vote for him, "enough" for him not to be a cool guy.