You’re right, we know a lot about the world and a lot about each other, but the course of events and the behavior of human beings is a continual surprise. This is an ignorance we cannot remedy.
But we manage somehow to live together, and clearly ethics plays some role in that. It’s not just a matter of ethical behavior creating a countervailing predictability, keeping your promises, and so on; consistent damaging behavior is predictable too.
The ethical stance is that the surprising is not necessarily transgressive, and the unknown need not be feared. We cannot remedy our general condition of ignorance, but in a specific situation we can, often, remedy our specific ignorance, at least enough to make better judgments than our pre-conceived first impressions might suggest, and it is ethical to learn before judging and before acting.
More than that, you have to recognize your own effect on others and on the situation you are all in together. Treat people with hostility and suspicion, and you should expect them to do likewise. It’s not automatic. Sometimes your hostility will be met with kindness, and sometimes your kindness will be met with hostility. But it’s not random either. You get to choose your ‘opening move’, the stance you will take toward the other, the degree of openness you will adopt. You have some say in the likely ‘payoff structure’ of your encounter.
In short, I think the unknowability of others, or their immediate status of ‘unknown to you’, is itself constitutive of having an ethical relation to them, remembering that you are just as unknown to them.
What is the alternative? That you know everything about everyone? That ethical behavior is only possible when you do?
It’s not that simple because it’s not true. It’s also the case that everyone survives if everyone votes red.
There is no difference.
Framing 1
If most vote red then only red voters are given the vaccine
If most vote blue then everyone is given the vaccine
Framing 2
Anyone who votes red is given the vaccine
Anyone who votes blue is given the vaccine only if most vote blue
These framings are functionally equivalent, but the second framing shows that the first framing is misleading. Voting blue only helps blue voters, but blue voters only need help because they voted blue — so voting blue creates the very problem that voting blue is trying to solve.
As the second framing shows, it is most rational to vote red. It is also most ethical to vote red, as it does not create the need for others to risk their lives to save you.
I am moralising, because the question being asked is; which course of action is (most) ethical? But I don’t start from the premise that voting blue is foolish and unethical; I’m showing that it’s foolish and unethical.
There is a trivial way for everyone to survive that does not depend on everyone else risking their lives to save them. Everyone can simply push the red button, take the vaccine, and not enter the elephant’s enclosure to fight it. Even if it’s true that some will do differently, that was a willing and unnecessary choice they made and does not create an obligation for me to follow suit.
Guys, seriously. You think we are here because we bet on everyone voting red through all of evolution?
Look around. We have a majority of red pressers wearing blue clothes. Betraying the structure we all depend on while pretending to uphold it. Coordinated well enough that it looks like cooperation until you press on it.
The ones society paints red are often the ones who won’t pretend to be Blue.
And sure, you can build a fine argument for Red. Watertight, reasonable, nobody could fault you for it. Great case altogether. Work away.
Only thing is, the evolutionary record never asked what you could justify. It just kept going, selecting for what held together long enough to matter.
Red has a great argument. Blue has the fact that we’re still here.
From here. If most stand on the blue button then the trolley is diverted and everyone survives and if most stand on the red button then the trolley is not diverted and only those who stand on the red button survive.
I say that everyone should stand on the red button.
If anything I’d say this rendition shows how the question is philosophically bad. If you can frame it such that one option is as commonsensical as following the subway warning signs of “Stay off the Tracks!” then it’s not exactly an interesting dilemma.
What’s interesting about the trolley problem is that it’s a dilemma which shows how our intuitions can be put into conflict when we formalize how we are making the decision. Also either way you’ll be in some way responsible for death so there’s no “clean hands” option where you can say “Well, I’m not responsible for it”. The whole idea is that you are responsible for your action and asking you which to choose.
If you can get off as easy as saying “Just follow the law!” then you’re sort of abdicating responsibility for the choice. You’re framing the other option as a choice, whereas what you’re doing is following the safety regulations.
It’s philosophically interesting because the problem can be interpreted in two equally valid ways:
Voting red means “kill blues” and voting blue means “don’t kill anyone”, where the majority vote is fulfilled
Voting red means “don’t kill me” and voting blue means “kill me if most press red”, where every vote is fulfilled
Both satisfy the condition that if most vote red then only reds survive and if most vote blue then everyone survives.
I choose not to interpret the meaning of the votes at all. I just look at the mechanics of the problem, which is that everyone who votes red survives and that everyone who votes blue survives only if most vote blue, and so voting blue creates the very problem that voting blue is trying to solve.
It’s close to prisoner’s dilemma in one sense because there seems to be one strategy that is more “rational” than the other, only in this case the measure of rationality is something like choosing certainty over uncertainty, but only in the narrow sense of your survival. So that raises two issues. (1) Are we so in thrall to certainty we’ll accept the death of untold others to get it? (2) How much uncertainty can we tolerate? On the one hand, as @Banno noted, there is research on prisoner’s dilemma, the ultimatum game, this very puzzle (at least in online polls), to suggest that your prior for cooperation should be higher than 0, and maybe higher than a coin toss. (Prisoner’s dilemma should, rationally, have 0 cooperation, but shows something between 30% and 60%, in various studies, iirc. Reddit polls on this thing are generally won by Blue, sometimes overwhelmingly.) In which case, maybe it’s rational to pick cooperation, even just by probability, but even 70% is not as good a prior as 100% if all you care about is your survival.
Beyond that, there’s a real issue about the locus of control: you can ensure your own survival through your own action, or you can trust others to ensure it. We already know for a fact that human beings are overwhelmingly dependent on each other for survival and probably have been for millions of years, even before the emergence of our species. And yet—there’s still that thing in us, the Glengarry, Glen Ross thing, that when the chips are down it’s every man for himself. We have plenty of counterexamples, but what problems like this seem to show is that cooperation and trust are built on evolved capacities (joint attention, shared intentionality, etc) but are not themselves “instinctive”; even though it’s the behaviors these capacities enable that would have been rewarded by natural selection, there is nothing like a “cooperative drive” that can compete with the “survival instinct” as an equal. Why that should be so is an interesting question.
It doesn’t matter what the odds are. Whatever they are, when we vote we are gazing into the past, because the vote is measuring distributional patterns of viewpoint that have already been set. A vote without the option of debate and re-voting only gives the illusion of a real-time choice, so motives of selfishness vs altruism are irrelevant here. The only substantive choice from the vantage of the individual player is whether to incur some chance of dying by pressing blue or not to incur that chance by voting red.
It’s easy to say that you’re willing to risk your life when dealing with a hypothetical. I suspect that in a real world situation there would be more red voters than these online polls suggest.
You frame it as blue voters trusting others. I frame it as blue voters burdening others with unnecessary responsibility and risk. Nobody needs to trust others to save them because everyone is capable of saving themselves.
Yes, some will inevitably vote blue, but unless you can convince enough others to vote blue then you’re not saving anyone, only adding further deaths. So it’s not as simple as “it’s more likely that 51+ vote blue than 101 vote red”, it’s potentially also “it’s more likely that 51+ vote red than 51+ vote blue”.
The question of the OP was simply ‘Which button would you press?’ I think commenters thinking the game is an ethical conundrum are falling victim to an illusion stemming from confusion concerning the role of choice in blind voting. All the vote is doing is registering patterns of demographic distributions already set in place.The vote is an empty formality. the debates concerning selfishness vs altruism are only relevant in a situation where a vote is followed by debate and politicking, and then another vote is taken once people have had an opportunity to be influenced by each other.
If the OP’s question were ‘which way would you try to influence others to vote, and why’ that would make the game centrally about ethics, but as the game is structured, these issues are colossally irrelevant, since the voting total is a glimpse into the past. The only forward-looking option, the only substantive choice, from the individual’s vantage, is whether to incur a very significant risk of dying by voting blue.
Well, it was posted in the Ethics category and not something like Humanities & Social Sciences or Logic & Philosophy of Maths, so I took it as implicit that @FlannelJesus was asking about the ethics of either choice.
The question is simply which would you press? It’s in the ethics category because your answer may have ethical implications, and people are going to want to talk about that on a philosophy forum. I don’t think there’s a more suitable sub forum for this. I may be mistaken.
But what do you think of my argument? I’m claiming the notion that a choice is involved in this voting set-up an illusion. So FlannelJesus is asking a question that doesn’t actually apply here.
Sure, but this is a general problem with research on social psychology, the problem of not actually having skin in the game. Research on the ultimatum game involving actual money still shows people rejecting offers they perceive as unfair, even though that’s not, strictly speaking, rational. Different thing, but related.
It cuts both ways though: in real life you regularly bet your life on the trust you place in others. A bit less than I do, since I live in the land of guns, but it’s a fact. It’s just a fact that isn’t pulled out of the fabric of your life and placed in front of you to be judged “rational” or “irrational” as it is in an experiment like this.
And that may be an unusual situation. You don’t generally face a choice between operating on yourself and trusting someone else to do it.
The fact remains, you see the problem entirely in terms of your own life only. The life of another is just not your problem, it’s their problem. If a tree falls on their car with them in it, you’ll consider helping, if it’s not their fault, but you’re under no obligation whatsoever. But if they make a choice you consider stupid, that doesn’t relieve you of the obligation you already didn’t feel, it just makes it even less likely you’ll accept any risk at all to help. Every man for himself.
You’re framing it as if this a zero sum game, but it’s not.
As I said above, this is a valid interpretation of the problem:
Voting red means “don’t kill me”
Voting blue means “kill me if most vote red”
It is not my responsibility to risk my life to save those who willingly and unnecessarily say “kill me if most vote red”, and if I were in the position to convince a child how to vote then I would convince them to say “don’t kill me”.
I’m not sure what you mean. There certainly is a choice between pushing either the red or the blue button. Are you saying that the choice reduces to “either 0% chance that I die or > 0% chance that I die”, and that this isn’t a legitimate choice because there’s nothing to gain and only something to lose by pushing blue?
