[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
1 in 8 billion is pretty good odds though.
Exactly. Look at the odds of winning the NYS Powerball. 1 in 292,201,338 and I’ve lost so many lotto tickets. By all rights I should be able to press this button at least 30 times without any fear whatsoever. 100 times is still far below any risk of danger. If I or someone I know were to die after pressing this button 100 times it would be proof that God has a vendetta against me. He would have discarded mathematical probability just to make me suffer.
Depending on how rich you are, $100,000 might do exactly nothing to your lifestyle, but dying would.
Risk reward. Someone with nothing, but living in an extremely low cost of living area, might end up with life changing, never have to work again money (assuming it’s able to be used with no loopholes), but a billionaire couldn’t even find the change buried in their day to day noise of the market changes.
Once you’re a billionaire, no amount of money will impact your lifestyle, but they keep hoarding wealth anyway.
There are people who become billionaires and it’s not their fault. They inherited money, or their company explodes and is suddenly worth ungodly money, so I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that there’s no way for a moral person to become a billionaire.
But there’s absolutely no moral excuse for remaining a billionaire or seeking additional wealth.