Suppose now that, over the course of the month, the percentage of people who pushed the button was updated in real time for everyone to see.
You would see a classic sigmoidal phase shift curve. At the beginning, almost no one pushes the button—this whole thing is strange and scary and most people don’t want to think about it. Besides they’ve got a month. It starts slowly at first, with just a few people. Maybe after the first week, it’s still only at 1%, 2%. No one’s worried. But with each day, a few more people crack and push the button. Most people are still trying to keep calm, but they’re watching the number, they’re watching the rate at which it is changing, and that rate is starting to go up. The curve starts to turn upward. The month is running out. As it passes 20% or so, it seems to be going up a little faster every day. It gets from 20 to 30 a lot faster than it got to 20. It gets from 30 to 35 even faster. The closer it gets to 50, the faster it rises. Less than a week left. There are fights everywhere: close to 50, every vote is a vote for everyone. “Now that we’re so close, it’s more important than ever that you hold out!” some say, but people are too scared now.
Once it hits 50, there’s no turning back and everyone who can pushes their button first chance they get. There are people who didn’t even know this was happening—the couple off the grid in the wilderness for a month, the grandmother with Alzheimer’s—and good samaritans try to chase down these stragglers and get the number closer and closer to 100 before the month is up. The lines at the office to replace lost or damaged buttons become unimaginable.
So it’s this (courtesy of @FlannelJesus). More and more people are walking out from under the crusher, and yet some stubbornly refuse, guilt-tripping each other into staying under it to hold up the weight so that none of them die. It’s foolish and unethical. Everyone has the choice to just walk away, which they should do, and your refusal to do so does not obligate me to stay under it with you.
Yeah I saw that, and in a world of Michaels all the Michaels would be happy.
This is what you’re not getting. To reach the state where everyone survives, you require everyone to do the same thing. To reach that same state, I only require enough people to exercise some self-control.
If 2 of those 5 Reds had chosen Blue, there’d be no crusher to avoid. By choosing Red you create the danger you fear, the danger you tell everyone to avoid.
Choosing Red is fear, and fear is the mind killer.
I do get that. What you don’t seem to get is that pushing the blue button creates the very problem that pushing the blue button is trying to solve. Only those who push the blue button can die, and so you push the blue button to try to save those who push the blue button, and they push the blue button to try to save you. It’s lunacy.
You don’t get to willingly put yourself in harm’s way and then demand that I put myself in harm’s way to save you.
The only way I can die is if I choose Blue. The only way anyone can die is if most people choose Red.
On my approach, we know some people will be scared or confused and choose Red. We don’t think they need to die for that, and they won’t.
On your approach, anyone who failed to analyze the choice as you did deserves to die, and if most people think like you, they will. If they survive, it’s no thanks to you.
I don’t require everyone to think like me to get the best outcome. You do.
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that I’m not obligated to risk my life to save these people.
We can mirror your example above. Each of us is given a button and is told that if nobody presses their button then nobody dies, that if a majority of people push their button then nobody dies, and that if a minority of people push their button then they die.
You say it’s ethical to push the button because others will push the button, and we are obligated to risk our lives to save them. I say it’s unethical to push the button because in doing so you create the very need for others to risk their lives to save you.
If someone is scared and confused and pushes their button then I sympathise, but I’m not responsible for what happens to them.
That’s fair. My assumption was that some people will push the button and some won’t. It’s just the way of things. Everyone has their reasons.
So we assume some people push the button, putting themselves in jeopardy. We just can’t count on everyone not pushing the button, whether it makes sense or not.
What are we to do? You say we should regret their unnecessary deaths and move on. I say if we can count on some people having pushed the button then we all ought to push our buttons. Maybe not everyone will, but we don’t need everyone, just enough. It’s not a lot to ask, pushing a button.
Think again about my scenarios above. Imagine the real-time tally being broadcast, but with the red and blue buttons. It starts out, per the assumption above, with just a handful of each. People see that there are Blue votes. If the Reds win, those people will die. They start voting Blue. As Blue votes come in, the nearness of the 50% threshold becomes more pronounced. Just a little more and this whole thing is over. A whole lot of people will never even have to vote.
Now do the same thing, over the course of a month like before, but this time you get to change your vote, change it as many times as you like, and it’s only the final tally that will count. A lot more people vote a lot earlier. You quickly reach a point where Red and Blue are both close to 50%, constantly swapping who’s ahead. Now what’s easier? Convincing just a handful of Reds to come over to Blue? Or convincing every single Blue to come over to Red?
It’s the potential consequence that is a lot to ask. You’re asking me to risk my life.
It’s easier to convince a handful of reds to change their vote, but it does not follow that it’s wrong for them to refuse. Blues made their own mess, and now they’re expecting reds to put their heads on the line to clean it up for them. It’s placing responsibility on the wrong party.
Nice work. However, this assumes Blue lives and Red lives are equally valuable. But the dastardly Reds have already proven their perfidious and recalcitrant nature. Therefore I propose that following the voting, and the inevitable dominance of we Blues, executing all Reds. Blue Brothers, you have already seen what the Red Menace would do to you if given the chance, we must strike first!
I’m with Michael here. The giveaway for me is the line ‘it’s not a lot to ask’. In my experience, that phrase is used when an ethical obligation is assumed as a kind of fact, as when one adult sibling says to the other ‘it’s not a lot to ask that you help your parents out more’. In the present example, it’s not the simple pressing of a button which is assumed to be ‘not a lot’, it’s the ‘ought’ behind it, the ethical obligation that is assumed here to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
It is only when we begin from a presumption concerning the ethical correctness of one way of behaving over another that we conclude what we deem the right behavior is ‘not a lot to ask’ instead of asking the other person how much they believe we are asking of them and whether that request should be articulated as an obligation.
‘It’s not a lot to ask’ isnt asking us, it’s subtly telling us how we ought to behave without consulting us. The assumed ought here is that cooperation is the best policy, and we ought to make it our priority. But some of us don’t consider cooperation an obligatory means, we see it as the fragile outcome of good faith openness to multiple perspectives.It IS a lot to ask that we simply cooperate, it is a lot less to ask that we guard against having pre-determined judgments of what is not a lot to ask foisted upon us.
Before the game, there were no reds and blues, just people. (This is becoming reminiscent of Jane Elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes experiment.)
You’re right that the stakes and the actions involved are incommensurate in an unusual way. This is typical of experiments in social psychology. Risking your life to save another in jeopardy is usually running over to a car crash or diving into a flooded river, not pushing a button. It makes it difficult to repair the experiment, as I have been trying to do, by adding social cues, because the action requested is stubbornly simple and the stakes maximal.
But you’re right that what I’m asking is that you accept some responsibility for the welfare of others. Not maximally, not entirely to their benefit alone and entirely to your detriment alone, but a recognition that in addition to being primarily responsible for ourselves, we ought to take some small share of responsibility for others, and others should do the same for us. You see this regularly in the aftermath of natural disasters, some small number of people who need a lot of help and it’s possible for a lot of people to meet that need by each contributing just a little.
This experiment almost captures that dynamic by making the bar for Blue so much lower than the bar for Red to get the best result. It’s still a pretty bad experiment, but we can work with that. Yes, each individual has the one vote, and in the last scenario considered you have to individually change your entire vote from one side to the other. But if you look at the population as a whole, you’re only asking for a little change. That’s at least a little closer to reality.
I’ll quote Postel’s Law again: “Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept.” Some people—foolish though it may seem—will vote Blue. That is the starting point, not zero-zero. That is what you must respond to when you choose your vote, knowing that some people will behave in a way you consider irrational. You say you should not have to risk your life to save theirs, but by voting Blue they have already voted that you not die, even if they assume others have already voted Red. If you are the deciding vote, you are choosing whether everyone who voted Blue dies. You don’t want that responsibility. You refuse to accept it. But that’s the stupid experiment we’re doing.
Voting Red poses no risk to you but does to others. (And if we assume some people will vote each way, that risk is a fact not a possibility.) Voting Blue poses a risk to you but none to others. Voting Blue is not risking death in the usual way—that you might drown while you’re trying to save someone from drowning. The risk in voting Blue is that not enough other people will vote Blue.
In your view, voting Blue is immoral because it places a demand on others that they save your life when you had the capacity to save your own. That might be immoral even if they could do so at no risk to themselves, because you have shirked, but it is certainly immoral and especially immoral if they must assume risk to themselves to save you.
But your life is not the only one at stake. Other people will have voted Blue, no matter how foolish it seems to you. It is for the lives of everyone that voted Blue that they risk theirs, not just yours, and I say those lives should matter to you as well, even if they don’t matter to you as much as your own. The fear that motivates voting Red, and it is fear, is that a majority of people will vote Red, that they will maximally discount the lives of others, that they will behave in the way you consider rational. You are afraid that it will only be you and a few morons who voted Blue. You imagine perhaps a single Blue holding out against a sea of Reds, irrationally and immorally demanding that they change instead of him. “I insist on standing under the crusher. You have to save me by turning it off, and you turn it off by standing under here with me.” No one will do it because they are all afraid that when they step under the crusher, no one will come with them, and all they will achieve is two deaths instead of one.
It is a question of trust, unavoidably. But it is also a matter of accepting that there will be some people under the crusher, and it’s no good pretending there won’t be. In real life, there are always people under the crusher, and we have to decide what to do about that. This experiment asks only that we push one button or another, not that we give half our earnings to charity, not that we save people drowning in dangerous waters, not that we intervene in an armed robbery. In all those cases, there is a genuine issue of our capacity to effect the change we want. (Do I know for a fact that I can manage to keep myself alive and save you in those roiling waters?) But in this case, it is not your own capacity, but the goodwill of others you must trust in. Saving the people under the crusher is easy, if enough of us understand how to save them.
This whole thing put me in mind of the story Seamus Heaney tells in his Nobel lecture, “Crediting Poetry”:
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
Sometimes you don’t know which of you is under the crusher.
This experiment is like a group of people deciding if they should enter an elephant’s enclosure and fight it or stay outside. If enough people fight it then nobody will die. But also if nobody fights it then nobody will die. The fact that there are a couple of idiots who will choose to fight it does not obligate me to risk my life to help them. At a certain stage people are responsible for their own poor choices. My obligation, if I have any, is only to explain to them that fighting the elephant is stupid and that they should stay outside — which is exactly what I’m trying to do here.
And sometimes it’s not clear whats at stake in moral terms or how to parse those terms. Your Northern Ireland tale is an illustration of how the contextual specificity of ethical situations argues against too abstractive or universal a reading of what is at stake. Perhaps your conclusion concerning the ethical stakes involved in the red-blue puzzle relies on such a move. For instance, you write “we ought to take some small share of responsibility for others”, that “those lives should matter to you as well”, “fear …motivates voting Red, and it IS fear” and “in this case, it is not your own capacity, but the goodwill of others you must trust in”.
Loaded terms like “goodwill”, “responsibility for others”, “fear” and the “mattering” of others are doing the heavy lifting here, as though it were obvious that they were the fulcrum around which strategies in the games revolve. But wouldn’t what is at stake in playing the game shift if we were to consider that interpretation only one of a rich multitude of possible ways that participants will construe the motivations of others? And more importantly, even if a majority do identify with the motives you mentioned, why should caring about others vs fearful self-interest be the most fundamental ethical logic at work here?
I think Michael is arguing that one can consider the value of all human life to be paramount and still consider oneself to have a duty to examine in each particular case how best to realize that aim. In this game being possessed of good will and responsibility for the mattering of others isn’t enough to argue for voting blue, and fear leaves out ethically robust arguments for voting red.
Those motivated to rescue the group about to be crushed by the red. iron pushers know their goodwill isn’t backed up by any special skills which could be helpful, but it is likely backed up by the faith that the desire to help is contagious. As a red button pusher I may admire the motive on the part of many to rescue the blue button pushers, but I may not share the quasi-religious belief of some that the motive of goodwill should be oblivious to the idea that the welfare of the many automatically dominates the welfare of individuals without consideration of the probabilities involved.
Or perhaps they respect the probabilistic calculations of the blue voters but come to different conclusions concerning how the preciousness of individual lives vs the group needs to be adjudicated in the face of daunting odds. This is where overly simplistic binaries of altruism vs selfishness confuse more than they clarifym
I mean I think the scenario sets us up such that we are supposed to pick between simplistic binaries, yes?
Perhaps that’s the case, but the motive for the thought experiment which @Pat set out makes sense to me: it’s meant to poke fun at blue-button pushers who can’t see the “obvious” conclusion that we should all press red.
But that whole idea – the woke vs. the non-woke – is always-already a part of simplistic binaries which we can, in particular circumstances, note differences that do not fit.
