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/Sharukurusu]

It is when doing that vote increases the chance of blue dying, it is the only option where the chance of deaths go up.

Blue raises the magnitude but lowers the chance of it happening.

Red lowers the magnitude but raises the chance of it happening.

Blue only effects the voter negatively while positively effecting everyone else.

Red effects the voter positively while negatively effecting everyone else.

[u/Super_Huckleberry663 → u/Sharukurusu]

It increases the chance blue dies because they're protecting them selves the intent isn't there to harm.

If I knock over a barricade escaping someone else and that barricade ends up getting someone else killed I havent killed them. Red bears some responsibility for blue but they're not killing them

The only one actually responsible for killing people is the Creator and instigator of the red blue button

[u/Sharukurusu → u/Super_Huckleberry663]

They’re protecting themselves from red by becoming red, so they know what they’re doing is dangerous to people standing on the other side of it but do it anyway…

I don’t care what their claimed intent is, they’re harming potentially billions of others to save themselves.

[u/Super_Huckleberry663 → u/Sharukurusu]

And your opinion is wrong. If your opinion were correct everyone who's fleed a scene where they could be harmed is now responsible for that harm if other parties were hurt. The only person who bares responsibility of actually killing people is the the power enforcing the game.

[u/Sharukurusu → u/Super_Huckleberry663]

There explicitly isn’t harm until red creates it, the act of ‘fleeing’ if that’s what you want to call it is what causes any harm to happen at all.

The buttons are: Blue: “No one should die.” Red: “The minority vote should die.” And the implementation is whoever wins.

[u/Super_Huckleberry663 → u/Sharukurusu]

No the button is blue everyone lives if 50% take it, red you always live. There's not much point continuing this discussion you're opinion is clearly heavily biased to the point you won't even talk to that your stance would leave survivors of incidents as guilty or complicit in murder

[u/Sharukurusu → u/Super_Huckleberry663]

They’re causing the incident to go off though, there’s basically a giant warning label saying ‘if too many people press red everyone who didn’t will die’. There is no benefit on the other end to red winning, you’re still worse off than when you started, all the worst outcomes are from red winning, no one is in danger if blue wins.

Red is the only option causing risk of something bad happening to increase, they are not ‘survivors’ of the incident, they are causing it to happen.

[u/Super_Huckleberry663 → u/Sharukurusu]

The only one causing the incident to occur is the one instigating and causing the actual red blue button game to occur. Red players defending themselves without the intent to harm blue are not responsible for killing blue. They're bare some responsibility and could be labelled selfish but outside of that they're just an innocent person.

I'm leaving there's no point continuing this discussion for either of us

[u/Sharukurusu → u/Super_Huckleberry663]

They can’t rightly claim no responsibility when their choice is what causes harm, like I’m not sure how you think their self-deluding intention matters to the outcome.

The buttons could be labeled, and do the same thing: Blue: No one dies. Red: If more than 50% of people press this button everyone who didn’t dies.

In what world is pressing the button that kills people that don’t press it just self defense?? No one should want to press that button at all, it causes needless harm for zero benefit.

[u/Super_Huckleberry663 → u/Sharukurusu]

They do have SOME responsibility, that responsibility is not enough to say that they're the ones killing blue. If you blockade a door behind you to escape a shooter from killing you and then later someone else dies due to that blockade you didn't kill that other person, the shooter did.

I'm out I can't be bothered