[blue]
If you could push a button that gives you a hundred thousand dollars but a random person dies, would you do it?
[yellow, cautious]
Interesting thought experiment… intuitively, I’d say no, but it’s worth thinking about… it’s a genuine moral dilemma in a capitalist world: there’s a dialectic between our desires and the common good…
MEANWHILE, BILLIONAIRES
[an orange guy in a suit is shown with a terrifying grin pushing as many buttons as possible at once on a table, slamming one of the buttons, and even using their foot to press an extra one]
https://thebad.website/comic/the_totally_hypothetical_button_thought_experiment
More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn’t a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.
Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it’s ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?
Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone’s death? Is it different if it’s someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it’s just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don’t have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?
I’d say at sub-0.1% chances of killing someone, I’d press with impunity. At those low probabilities, they’ve basically just got hit by lightning at the same time I’ve pressed a random button.
Granted I’d probably only do it whenever the 100K ran out, so once every couple years. Unless my investments die.
deleted by creator
Depends a lot on how you’re helping them and what you’re doing with the rest. If you’re spending like a typical American (or Canadian) you’re doing a lot of environmental damage with your day-to-day life so you’re killing people incrementally with that lifestyle.
Without a doubt.
I think that’s what makes this thought experiment interesting: Even with the guarantee that someone dies instantly (the worst case), you can figure out how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars, and from a utilitarian perspective, you’ll probably end up with a net positive of lives saved (you can probably save more than one life for 100 k). From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost for each button press (provided all the money goes to saving lives), and figure out the exact number of button presses that is the morally “correct” choice. In that sense, this thought experiment can demonstrate the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme: Most people would agree that it’s morally defensible to sacrifice one person to save one million, but when you do this calculation, you could end up with the result that you should sacrifice a million people to save ten million, which I think most people would find questionable.
Is keeping someone alive enough to balance the books? Does the quality of their life matter? What if they’re alive but living in a refugee camp?
I don’t think you can, not without making massive assumptions. Lives lost directly might be easy if the button is labelled “0.1% chance of killing someone”. But, what if you spend your $100k on driving a light truck which emits a lot of pollution, which in turn contributes a tiny amount to the deaths of a lot of people?
And, for lives saved, say you do it in a pretty easy to calculate way, donating food to people who would die without that food. Is that where the calculation ends? What if that person goes on to help other people? Or what if that person goes on to become a soldier and kill people.
I don’t think it’s at all realistic to try to calculate an expectation value of lives saved / lost with any accuracy except through the most direct effects.
I guess that’s what I’m getting at.
Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.
Yeah. Non-zero chance your car’s emissions kill someone too.
same could be said about taking a steamy shit on the toilet. 8-10% of all cardiac emergencies happen in the bathroom.
sometimes you get the stinky fudge dragon, other times the stinky fudge dragon gets you.
Though the chance someone other than you dies from you taking a shit is pretty far fetched, and I’m not liking having to try to conceive of how that happens.
But a lot of activities are this way. Getting on a ladder in public could kill someone, just breathing around other people could kill someone, etc etc.
Also factor in when they die. Maybe your action results in a demise after a period of time. Lung Cancer won’t kill someone right after they puff a cigarette, so the cigarette baron may not consider it his fault in the sort term.
It isn’t the “cigarette baron’s” fault any more than the beer baron’s fault or the parachute maker’s fault. Some people are going to die if they choose to indulge in mildly risky behavior. If the scenario is something like this, everyone here will be pushing that button. Don’t say you won’t because you will.
Yeah, that would be an interesting twist. 100% chance that pushing the button kills someone, but it might happen in 2 years or it might happen in 30 years. But, even if someone lives a perfectly normal life for 30 years, their cause of death will be this button.
The problem with statistics is that 20% of people in a large population absolutely will die. At least in the context of this meme, the statistics used are gathered from real world data - deaths from cancer, lack of treatment, poor working conditions.
100% of people in a large population absolutely will die. I don’t know why you think some people are immortal. I also don’t know what that has to do with this meme.