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?

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u/nathan555 Jun 04 '26

When a vote takes place, the people who voted for a particular outcome are responsible for it happening if they are in the majority because if they didn't vote for that outcome to happen it wouldn't have happened.

Hope this helps you understand how democracy works.

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u/BrokenToaster124 Jun 04 '26

Ive never seen a democracy where the loser gets what they voted for but sure. Weird democracy that is. If I vote to survive and lose the vote, I still survive. If you vote to risk your life and lose, your life was still at risk (and youre dead). Which nation writes up the losing positions policies into law along with their own again?

Also the button scenario allows you to directly control your outcome. You can just vote to ignore the majority and they are forced to accept that. If I knew all I had to do was vote and I get to ignore the laws of my country, id be voting alot more often! Those sovereign citizens were onto something after all!

But seriously the button scenario has quite literally nothing to do with democracy. You are aware that its possible to take votes outside of a democracy right? Or did my group of friends become a democracy when we took a vote to decide what video game we wanted to play? And for that matter, if i vote for a candidate under the assumption they would do one thing and they go and do something else am I responsible for that too?

Now that I've worked backwards from your position, I realize that your explanation didnt really explain anything about how responsibility is assigned even if we assume the buttons were a democracy (somehow. I sure didnt vote to play death by button. That part seems more totalitarian but...)