[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

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      5 hours ago

      such a low probability overall you probably up on the whole deal if you use that money to help other people.

      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.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 hours ago

      It sounds disturbingly utilitarian

      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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        5 hours ago

        how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars

        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?

        From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost

        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.

        the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme

        I guess that’s what I’m getting at.