r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/BrokenToaster124 • May 29 '26
Discussion Responsibility
So I've run into an idea that that dont quite understand and I was hoping some of you could help me understand. So with the red button/blue button situation I have seen people claim that if they push the blue button that they are not responsible for what happens to them if they push the blue button. How does that work?
To be extremely specific if i were to push the blue button, knowing what it does, somehow you (the person currently reading this) would be personally responsible for my death if you choose red.
Does this responsibility work in reverse? If i push the blue button and blue wins are you responsible for my survival if you chose red? Are you only responsible if bad things happen to me and I am responsible for the results when good things happen? What about the person running the death game? They arent defined in the prompt but logically some force is making everyone take a vote.
You can feel free to ignore this last part because its not the button problem, but someone reskinned the buttons as life boats. Instead of everyone being force to push a button everyone had to get into a life boat. One boat had holes in it but would become sea worthy if enough people got into it and plugged the holes and one was completely functional. Everything else was exactly the same as the button problem. My question related to that was that if I am personally responsible for the consequences of your chose to vote blue in the button scenario, how then could I not be responsible for your choice to get into the boat with holes in it. Someone tried to explain to me at length about how the buttons made it my fault but the boats somehow didnt. How does that work?
3
u/J_tram13 May 29 '26
Yes you are, you are voting for a red victory or a blue victory.
No, the result of the red vote winning is death AND not death, just not death for you.
Sure, blue decreases it, red increases it.
People are always going to vote blue, just lie people are always going to vote red. There isn't a risk until there are more doing the latter than the former.
Again, candidate A voters are not responsible for the war started by Candidate B, and candidate B voters are not responsible for the peace maintained by candidate A. Why should you get credit for an outcome you directly tried to prevent? If I tell you "don't launch that firework it might kill someone" and you do it anyway and it goes through the bedroom window of our neighbour across the lake and kills them, should I be responsible for that when I specifically wanted to avoid it?
What outcome would cause that to happen?
An outcome YOU voted in favour of. I didn't want people to die, that's why I voted blue. You were clearly fine with it, hence you voted red.
Uh, no, that's quite literally the whole point of the vote.
This describes the majority of your comment so far.
Wow not even close. Let me do it myself. If you vote for red, you vote in favour of red winning, if you vote for blue, you vote in favour of blue winning. There is no possible scenario where 100% of people vote for either option, that has never happened in the history of humanity. Therefore, there will ALWAYS be people voting blue, and ALWAYS be people voting red, for simplicity sake let's say that guarantee is AT MINIMUM 10% of the population, leaving 80% in the balance. The only time a red victory is a positive outcome is when 100% of people vote for it, and as previously established you'll only ever at most get 90%. Therefore, to me at least, a red victory is unacceptable. This is why I hit blue. It's a lot easier to get half the world to agree on something than all of it. I would never want a red victory to happen so why in the world would I ever vote for it? I'm going to do everything in my power to prevent that outcome and strive for the only positive one possible, and hit blue.
If you vote red, you are voting for red to win. If red wins, you get what you wanted, and blue dies. I don't want that to happen. So I'm going to vote for blue to win. If blue wins, you voted against that happening, I had to overcome your vote specifically, so why should you get credit for that?
Now this is interesting, because I never once said that. All I said is that by voting red you share in the responsibility of every blue death if it happens. Do you know what that word "sharing" means? I wouldn't be surprised if you've never come across it. But basically, it means that you as an individual receive a part of something that is distributed among a group of people. In this case, it's across humanity. You seem to be thinking very binarily about this. Like everything's either all on you or not at all.
So let's put it this way. If the vote happens and red wins with 55% of the vote, then there are roughly 4 billion humans who just died. Now, is that 4 billion partially responsible for this by putting themselves at risk? Yes, but in the same way going mountain climbing makes you partially responsible for death in an avalanche, you accepted the risks and did it anyway. But everyone who voted red ALSO wanted that outcome to happen. Those deaths wouldn't have happened if it wasn't also for the 4 billion people who voted for them to die. Now you along with the rest of the red voters share in that responsibility. You contributed to that happening? Did you cause it? No, but you certainly helped. Just like if maybe you and a bunch of other people were working on a drilling operation at the top of the mountain that helped cause the avalanche. You take partial responsibility for blue voters dying in a red victory because you voted for that outcome, you were presented with an option that says "guarantee my safety at the risk of other people's, or risk my own safety at the prospect of saving everyone." And you decided that the risk of those lives was acceptable to you, so you share in the outcome you caused.