Push The Button
We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.
To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.
It’s the best such moral-dilemma question we’ve ever seen, and the absolute key to the state of humankind as a species. It’s a near-perfect practical illustration of the concept of “suicidal empathy”, and suicidal empathy is the root of some of the world’s worst problems, including the debates around both gender ideology and immigration.
Because what it does is encode the idea that feelings, ego and virtue-signalling are more important than sanity or material reality.
Rationally, there is no reason for anyone to press the blue button. If you press red, you definitely live no matter what. You only risk your life by pressing blue, and you get nothing for it. And in the same way that there’s no reward for pressing blue, there’s no cost to pressing red. There aren’t a limited number of survival places. Everyone can press red and everyone will live. Nobody gets killed against their will.
Literally the ONLY thing you get out of pressing blue is the ability to tell people you pressed blue. It’s a chance to trumpet your empathy. And even then it makes no sense, because the question notes that it’s a private vote. You could press red and still TELL people you pressed blue, and nobody would know.
Press blue and you’re literally risking your actual life in order to virtue-signal, even though you could virtue-signal just as well WITHOUT the risk. That’s the “suicidal” part of “suicidal empathy”. Although the word “empathy” in that sentence would of course be better replaced with “stupidity”.
(NB Let us reasonably assume, or specify, that as with all other voting scenarios we don’t let children or the mentally incapable vote, and that only those who pressed the blue button actually get killed. Any children orphaned by their parent’s idiocy will have to be brought up by red-button people, which will probably be for the best anyway.)
Wings has actually already proposed something along related lines as a method of resolving the debate about capital punishment. And we’ve often quoted a pertinent clip from one of the greatest TV series ever recorded.
Because humanity really can’t afford to keep being stupid. This isn’t even a case like in movies where the villains in No Time To Die or Kingsman: The Secret Service are baddies because they want to massively cull the human population (ostensibly for its greater good) without consent. Here, no-one’s saying “sorry but we need to do this for the environment”. The rational outcome of this experiment is that NOBODY dies.
But in the event that the planet’s dumbest (and most harmful and annoying) tossers want to VOLUNTEER, well, if we’ve already explained why they shouldn’t and they’re determined to proceed anyway, who are we to intervene with their personal autonomy?
Earth thanks you for your sacrifice, dumdums. More food and oxygen for the rest of us, and maybe we can go back to telling the truth as well.
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(Choose your soundtrack to taste.)
