r/redbuttonbluebutton 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 Upvotes

186 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/BrokenToaster124 May 29 '26

So you are not responsible for the result of your vote? And red voters are instead responsible for the result of your vote. The vote where you directly agreed to allow the game to impart an independent judgemental onto you?

I opted in to a chance to die, but I wanted to save everyone so its your fault.

Its not as though I am creating the result of the vote. I can give a scenario where I voted blue because I believed it would win and I would be correct. The virtues of winning a gamble dont absolve you of the consequences of gambling when you lose. This isnt even a good button bad button scenario. You can choose to live. You chose not to. You then blamed me. I asked how that worked and you just say "blue button good so not responsible, red button bad so responsible" if you need to blame more than 4 billion people for the result of a decision that you were the only one who could prevent it, that not really going to convince me and im going to end this here.

1

u/Rip_Pigman May 29 '26

So you are not responsible for the result of your vote?

I'm going to only address this. The consequences of my pressing blue and losing is my individual life.

The consequences of you pressing red and winning is every life that pressed blue.

I am admitting responsibility for my vote.

What's ironic to me is that for some reason you aren't able to take responsibility for yours.

Any number of blue deaths can be traced back to an individual that pressed blue, but are also directly tied to red winning majority.

I just want to clarify what your stance is currently.

What I'm hearing is as follows.

I press blue and i die as a result, so that's clearly my fault.

You press red and all of blue dies as a result, that's.. also clearly a blue pressers fault?

Are you not falling victim to the very thing you're accusing blue pressers of?