Thank you for again making my case for me.
Because we like making rational decisions?
If they don’t see the deaths and consequences of the choice, that’s not really the fault of game theory. You can do game theory and acknowledge those.
What reality is being fictionalized? This thought experiment is fiction.
On a charitable reading, they aren’t “blind”, they just consider voting red to not be immoral.
Yes, and if, one day someone puts those buttons before us we’ll know how we really vote, right?
We should all refuse to co-operate with the button-providers until make a case for the button-pushing to be necessary. Vague phrasings like “everyone in the world has to…” are designed to rule out the possibility, but that also removes the example from “serious consideration”. The trolls invite us to divide into blues and reds and be at each others throats. That’s the lesson I take away from the thought experiments. Tribes form easily.
I’d push blue, but I don’t think the decision has much weight. Neither moral, nor rational. Just psychological: if less than 50 % vote blue I don’t have to live with my decision; if I had pushed red, I would. All the consequences, not just my “silly, irrational” conscience.
People see things differently; such is the way of the world.
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Your failure to respond to the very simple question of “If 51% were expected to vote red within a 95% level of confidence would you vote red?” speaks volumes. The answer is screamingly obvious. You vote red.
Do you agree?
I did respond. I said:
Now, if your family and all your loved ones assured you that they would vote blue, so that your red vote ensures you were left alone, how would your vote change?
This is offered not as a challenge, but as showing that of course different circumstances will lead to different outcomes. It’s irrelevant. Look at the scenario in the OP.
Remind me then if you answered, did you say yes or no?
To your question, I would go to great lengths to save my family, moral or not, weighing their interests above others.
I’ve repeated my answer. I’m not playing your silly “gotcha” game.
In much the same tone as you rightly refuse to answer my question directly with “yes” or “no”. It’s irrelevant to the scenario.
Truly ridiculous. I asked a question you won’t answer. Just yes or no, and you call it a silly “gotcha” game.
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He’s taking an interesting position. His refusal to answer suggests that he would vote red if he knows that most will vote red. So he only votes blue if he knows that most will vote blue, even though him voting blue is superfluous. It’s nothing more than “I want to be able to take the moral high ground after the fact” (even though it’s not unethical to vote red).
That is why the question in the OP is best answered by assuming that we have no way of knowing, or good reason to believe, that either outcome is more likely than the other. We haven’t seen people be polled on this question before; we’re just put in front of the buttons, explained the rules, and told to make a choice.
How you read that into my comment is beyond me.
And things would have been better if Trump had lost the election. I would have thought that would be obvious to people, just as you think it should be obvious that things are better when we cooperate. But I wouldn’t have bet my life on the outcome.
And things would have been better if ‘anti-cooperation’ Trump had lost the election. I would have thought that would be obvious to people, just as you think it should be obvious that things are better when we cooperate. But I wouldn’t have bet my life on the outcome.
You recognize that different people will vote blue for different reasons. I assume that means you appreciate that means some will not use the value of trust or the idea that things are better when people cooperate. But you do suggest that trust will be the predominant reason blue voters will give for their vote. One way to look at the different reasons people will vote the way they do is to see them through the lens of your own reasons. The role ‘things are better when people cooperate’ serves in your ethics seems to be that of a trans-cultural structural fact.
Its logic is available to any person in any period of cultural history anywhere in the world, because their factual co-existence with others in the social world validates this ‘ought’ all the time. So one may look at the different reasons people give as reflecting their own trans-cultural structural reality , which may be secular or rest on divine law. The thing about an ‘ought’ which is seen as trans-culturally embedded in, and thus reliably extractable from, our universal pragmatic social engagements in a shared world is that it exerts a pull on decision-making such that people will ultimately come to see that trust is better than self-interest.
But there are others who believe that all ethical stances are contingent and relative to particular cultural systems. For them, any one form of ethical reasoning only exerts a pull on decision-making for those who participate in that specific socio-ethical system.
So when I imagine my blue vote as not just representing my one share of 8.3 billion votes, but as speaking for an unshakably persuasive ‘ought’, this ‘ought’ is not a universal gravitational pull, but a locally constructed and contingently operative compass of action.
If there is anything like a transcultural, universally agreed on idea to be located in the game, it would be that it is better for all the world to survive than for only half of it to. But that consensus itself is no help in deciding which way to vote, unless you believe you directly deduce incontrovertible reasons for voting blue from that.
So you see your reasoning as representing a faction of voters that has some special gravitational pull over all other factions due to its supposed universal logic. I see your reasoning as having no greater claim to such a logical pull than the reasoning of any other faction.
Trump voters and their ilk around the world, postmodernists and many other groups in between will not respond to the pull of your reasoning, because it is not inherently ‘better’ from their perspective on the world.It seems to me that without universals on your side (or any side) all that is left is the politics of competing factions.
Curious how these folks wish to talk about something—anything—other than the actual scenario.
“What if we changed it like this…”, or irrelevant rubbish about Trump.
If most vote blue, everyone lives. Best outcome.
Yes, let’s leave out the rubbish about Trump and engage with the actual scenario. I’ll repeat my engagement with it. Please respond.
You recognize that different people will vote blue for different reasons. I assume that means you appreciate that means some will not use the value of trust or the idea that things are better when people cooperate. But you do suggest that trust will be the predominant reason blue voters will give for their vote. One way to look at the different reasons people will vote the way they do is to see them through the lens of your own reasons. The role ‘things are better when people cooperate’ serves in your ethics seems to be that of a trans-cultural structural fact.
Its logic is available to any person in any period of cultural history anywhere in the world, because their factual co-existence with others in the social world validates this ‘ought’ all the time. So one may look at the different reasons people give as reflecting their own trans-cultural structural reality , which may be secular or rest on divine law. The thing about an ‘ought’ which is seen as trans-culturally embedded in, and thus reliably extractable from, our universal pragmatic social engagements in a shared world is that it exerts a pull on decision-making such that people will ultimately come to see that trust is better than self-interest.
But there are others who believe that all ethical stances are contingent and relative to particular cultural systems. For them, any one form of ethical reasoning only exerts a pull on decision-making for those who participate in that specific socio-ethical system.
So when I imagine my blue vote as not just representing my one share of 8.3 billion votes, but as speaking for an unshakably persuasive ‘ought’, this ‘ought’ is not a universal gravitational pull, but a locally constructed and contingently operative compass of action.
If there is anything like a transcultural, universally agreed on idea to be located in the game, it would be that it is better for all the world to survive than for only half of it to. But that consensus itself is no help in deciding which way to vote, unless you believe you directly deduce incontrovertible reasons for voting blue from that.
So you see your reasoning as representing a faction of voters that has some special gravitational pull over all other factions due to its supposed universal logic. I see your reasoning as having no greater claim to such a logical pull than the reasoning of any other faction.
Trump voters and their ilk around the world, postmodernists and many other groups in between will not respond to the pull of your reasoning in this game, because it is not inherently ‘better’ from their perspective on the world.It seems to me that without universals on your side (or any side) all that is left is the politics of competing factions.
Youre treating Foote’s and Anscombe’s arguments as if they straightforwardly overturn outcome-based reasoning in any scenario involving harm and benefit.
Anscombe’s target in Modern Moral Philosophy is a very specific picture, that morality can be reduced to calculating consequences while ignoring the structure of action, intentions, descriptions of what one is doing, and the moral significance of certain kinds of acts, like murder. Her point is that you can’t understand ethics without concepts like intention and virtue. But she doesn’t give a general decision rule that tells you, in a probabilistic mass-coordination scenario, that self-sacrifice is required. She’s suspicious of abstract, decontextualized moral puzzles of this sort.
Similarly, Foot tries to clarify distinctions like intended harm vs foreseen harm, doing vs allowing,
and how rights and negative duties constrain action.
But the blue/red game doesn’t map cleanly onto those distinctions. Pressing red isnt obviously “intentionally killing others” in the way Foot analyzes. It’s closer to refusing to take on a serious personal risk in a situation where the causal connection between your act and others’ deaths is massively diluted. That’s much closer to cases where Foot is actually cautious about imposing strong positive duties.
You assume that choosing red counts as a morally prohibited kind of action (like intentional harm), when it’s not clear it does. In this setup, the deaths of others are not straightforwardly your act in the sense required by Anscombe or Foot. theyre outcomes of a vast aggregate process in which your individual causal contribution is negligible.
Anscombe’s framework cares about what you are doing. But what are you doing by pressing red here? Preserving your own life in a context where your refusal to sacrifice yourself has virtually no effect on others. That is not obviously vicious or irrational in a virtue-ethical sense.
Anscombe and Foot’s critiques of simplistic “just calculate outcomes” reasoning doesn’t extend to situations
where causal responsibility is extremely diffuse, individual agency is non-pivotal, and the cost demanded of the agent is extreme.
Under those conditions, its not necessarily true that their frameworks support the claim that pressing red is irrational. If anything, their emphasis on intention, action description, and limits on moral demandingness gives resources to defend red as a potentially reasonable choice.
I’d say it’s a sad state of affairs when such questions are even debatable. There should be no questions nor a second of hesitation. Blue, of course.
Now with game-theory and all this crap you have people thinking how would this benefit me? The choice is not I benefit vs. others do not, it’s everyone benefits.
Maybe I’m making much ado about something trivial, but this again is sad.
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That’s a horribly constipated repetition of the same shallow stuff.
Again, most folk will indeed vote blue.
How to explain this?
I suppose it’s because they can move past the egocentric calculation to the simple fact that if most vote blue, things stay pretty much the same.
I don’t see much at all in your reply. Sure the world is full of contingency and factionalism. And sure, some of those systems will favour self-preservation. That doesn’t give us an “ought”.
The empirical evidence is that nevertheless most will vote blue.
So if your suggestion is that the factionalism will favour red, it seems you are mistaken.
I’ll maintain that the choice to press blue expresses a belief that a majority of others will also choose blue, reflecting a baseline level of trust in humanity.
Yes, this is a dismissive reply. The responses from red are becoming desperate, and others seem to have moved on. The thread is now pretty much the red voters attempting to justify themselves.
Poll results:
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Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) on X, April 2026 — this poll went viral with over 22.5 million views and more than 95,000 votes, and results showed 57.9% choosing blue and 42.1% choosing red. https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/2047710215265730755
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MrBeast’s poll — blue button won there too, with 56% choosing Blue. https://x.com/MrBeast/status/2049273335742435617
So one question is why the result here is so close.
With 25 votes one vote accounts for 4 %. We don’t have a large enough sample to compare, so I don’t think we can conclude anything.
Yep. Too small. But one might have hoped for more consideration of the ethics of the situation in this context. Too many engineers.
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