[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
Honestly, a billionaire would probably hire people to push the button for them.
They’d minimize explaining what the button does, and then pay them like $100,000 a year to push the button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Why would they get payed that much? this is unskilled labor, they get minimum wage.
That, or they hire an undocumented immigrant for even less. Extra bonus because they can’t read the sign that explains the killing thing.
Apologies to all the foot fetishists, I eventually gave up trying and thus have failed you.
Guess I have new anatomy lessons to grind. Shit’s hard yo.
You’d have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire this way. Obvious fact perhaps, but it’s easy to forget how unnecessarily much a billion dollars is.
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?
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.
