Found on Bluesky:
@angus.bsky.social
Elder daughter just told me about the red button / blue button ethical dilemma that’s been going around, and | find it FASCINATING.
Short version: Everyone on earth has to press a button. If a majority presses the blue button, everyone lives. If a majority presses the red button, everyone who presses the biue button dies.
She told me about this, and my immediate response was “That’s not interesting at all. Obviously everyone just pushes the biue button.” And then she started explaining the red button folks’ arguments, and |realized that it’s a question about how you understand what it is to be a human in community.
Likewise, my first thought was to press the blue button. But then I thought that that would just give all the red button people what they wanted, and I’d end up dead while they could take all my stuff. But then I thought again, would I want to live in a world full of murderous bastards? And I was back to pushing the blue button.
You could cycle around and around this dilemma all day long. Entertaining, but I have better things to do.
This does have evolutionary implications. We don’t have buttons with global effects, but throughout our history we’ve had people meeting and having to choose between cooperating and expediently executing those who oppose us. I think in the long run, cooperation wins, but the problem with this thought experiment is that it compresses a billion incremental decisions into one final, immediate commitment, and that isn’t at all realistic.
Another take on the red pill versus blue pill metaphor. I guess the Matrix continues to influence culture. Another aspect of the unrealistic nature of the problem is the sharp dichotomy. Reality is seldom so extreme and sharply defined. Welcome to the land of gray.
It’s a terrible truth that reason alone drives a person to push the red button.
There is a zero cost and a non-zero potential benefit to pushing the red button, and there is a huge potential cost and zero potential benefit to pressing the blue one. Competing with that decision is that pressing red would make me feel like a shit human, while pressing blue would make me feel good about myself until my inevitable incineration.
We have evolved to cooperate. The problem is when we encounter outgroups.
But there IS a potentially huge cost to pushing the red button. You could be executing people you love, need, or otherwise care about.
In what possible sense is directly and purposefully contributing to the deaths of an untold but undoubtedly very large number of people “zero cost and a non-zero potential benefit”? Other people have no value? What the hell is wrong with you?
It would not make you feel like a shit human, it would make you be a shit human.
We should find a way to implement this – except that what actually happens is that it kills everybody who votes for other people to die.
It’s trivial.
Everyone presses the red button, and everyone lives.
The outcome of the game is the same, i.e. everyone lives, for p(defection) = [0, 0.5) and [1]. This doesn’t suggest any plausible biological scenarios to me. Can anyone think of an analogue? Having said that, I think it’s interesting as an exercise in examining people’s moral reasoning.
I had to think about this. It is about how the question is phrased. The same game could be stated “Push the red button to live and press the blue button to die. If more than 50% of people push blue button, everyone lives instead.” It is logically the same game.
I would push the button that activates the Eschaton. As it is basically an electric Time Lord I would thus delegate ethical issues to an entity better suited to deal with them.
Red is not “If more people press red, everyone who pushes blue dies”. That’s framing. The question isn’t even interesting, it’s meant to generate divisive conversation.
We finally have a moral quandary where the right choice is for everyone on earth to be selfish. It would finally be the best strategy. It’s objectivist bullshit. Fine. Red. I guess I’m finally not a second-hander.
Interesting choice of colors:
Red states, red hats, red button.
Blue states, ? hats, blue button.
Dunc@4–
trevorn was talking about the scenario within Game Theory, where costs and benefits are defined and the players are rational, self-interested, and fully aware of the rules of the game. Moral implications may follow, but they are not part of the game itself (which is one of several reasons Game Theory doesn’t always work in real-world situations, especially in economics).
chrislawson: @ #11: The fact that John Nash formalised his mental illness into a mathematically computable system does not change the fact that it’s insane. As soon as you start using game theoretic concepts to talk about human lives, you have committed what Granny Weatherwax defined as sin: treating people as things.
Basically: Blue button = followers of Jim Jones. Red button = everyone else.
I’d try to convince people not to follow the insane suicide pact.
I think you might frame this as an analogy of people’s reaction to the climate crisis. They can approach it purely from their personal benefit (press the red button, you know you’ll live, even if a lot of other people may die. This is like ignoring the crisis, because you want the best outcome for you, right now), or from the collective point of view (press the blue button, and everyone lives if enough of you are thinking the same way; do things to stop global warming, and it’s best for the world).
OK, on further thought, numerobis may have the better take. The problem would be that almost any decision can be got wrong by a small minority, even when people are given time to think about it, So no matter how well you argue that the entire world should press their red button, and then everyone would know both that they’re safe and so is everyone else, someone wouldn’t see it that way. And you might say “easier to persuade a bit over half the world to save everyone, than persuade every last person that they can act in their own interest, and so can everyone else”. But if you’re only somewhat successful in that argument, a lot of people could die.
I think there is interest in it.
I’m sorry Dunc @ #11, within the parameters of the GAME as presented doing anything other than pressing the red button would be insane.
It’s not a prisoners dilemma where the payoff if everyone cooperates is different to that if everyone betrays. In this game the optimal outcome is for everybody to press the same button, either red or blue. But if a mix of people choose red and blue buttons then the blue button has the potential to be suicide while the red button does not. So any logical person would dispassionately press red and a logical person who also had a strong moral conscience would hope that everyone else did the same.
I’m sorry, this is semi-off-topic, but all I can think about is the end of the Ren & Stimpy Space Madness episode with the “beautiful, SHINY button… the jolly, CANDY-LIKE button!”
Pretty much how I approached it. Though my tendency was to think of it in the added context of an imposed decision from powerful people who have to frame it as a false democratic choice, which made it become a question of solidarity with humanity against this vague oppressive force. I push blue because I’m not willing to throw blue under the bus to guarantee my own safety. After all, what’s stopping them from issuing another false problem like this where I’ll suffer later? First they came for the blues…
@5 Roy: If a majority presses the blue button, everyone lives as well. In addition you didn’t put anyone in danger of dying for not following your faulty logic.
So yeah, the choice is easy, press blue. If i die it’s a win, because I don’t have to share a planet with a majority of stupid psychos.
Exactly. The question is whether you want to live in the current world (blue) or a world where
1. Everyone is willing to destroy other people for their own benefit.
2. Everyone knows that every other person they meet is willing to destroy other people for their own benefit.
It effectively eliminates the ability to trust anyone. If life is a game of iterated prisoner’s dilemma (as game theorists like to portray) where the tit-for-tat strategy is optimal then everyone is a known defector, so defection becomes the optimal strategy and cooperation is dead.
Pressing red is effectively a vote to end civilization.
No matter what, the red leader will say the vote was rigged and kill all the blue folks anyway.
Knowing we all know the rules, clearly blues have to preemptively kill everyone who might be reds before they can press the red button. And reds have to preemptively kill the blues becuase the red button won’t work if the blue button hasn’t been pressed yet. /s
I immediately thought of the red/blue-Republican/Democratic analogy, but I quickly realized that it doesn’t work for a couple of reasons:
1. “If everyone votes for Trump, we’ll all be better off” strikes me as absurd.
2. Most Republicans don’t want everyone to be better off because they see it as a zero-sum game.
larpar@21: Yeah, that too.
Let’s reframe this to flipping a switch to have the trolley drive over a blue button or…
If I push the red button, then I have contributed to the deaths of everyone who pushes the blue button. If I push the blue button, then my hands are clean, and if I’m on the losing side, I’ll be dead, so I won’t care. Blue button it is. Unlike Newcomb’s Paradox, this is not an interesting philosophical problem.
What I lack is a reason for playing the game in the first place. What happens if I don’t push any button?
This is unlike climate change entirely: if we individually burn fossil fuels, we collectively choke today and starve to death tomorrow. If we individually don’t burn fossil fuels, we still choke today and starve to death tomorrow, but worse, we individually live longer because we’re in better health compared to those who drive everywhere. If we collectively stop burning fossil fuels, then we can start breathing better and … well, we are still in a tough spot tomorrow but maybe we can work things out.
I’d not push either willingly. I’m not much for being told what to do.
And if I had to do it via coercion, I’d push both if I could. Because fuck that shit.
Sometimes all you can do is walk away.
Given that logic isn’t many people’s strong point and that most people would choose which button to press more for emotive reasons than carefully-deduced rational ones, would it be fair to assume that the people who are more compassionate and more community-minded would be more likely to press the blue button than the red? If those thinking of pressing the red button were told that they risked wiping out a significant majority of those skilled in medicine and healthcare, thus putting their own health at greater risk in the years after the Big Press, what proportion would change their minds?
I think all of this hinges upon the opportunity for communication and discussion. If everyone on the planet had a box with the two buttons appear magically in their hands and were given just sixty seconds to make their choice or have it made randomly for them, the outcome would be very different than if the entire population was given a year to freely and globally discuss all the issues before the boxes manifested on BP Day.
Then again, a year is plenty of time for a heated discussion to get out of control and trigger a thermonuclear world war. Maybe that would be the real test and the boxes were never going to appear.
Yeah, well. Brexit is a perfect example of that.
There is only one red button we have to worry about. That is the one in the White House that has a demented, corrupt, grasping sociopath in charge. If he pushes that a whole lot of other red ones will be pushed in reply.
Is it stipulated that people can’t communicate with each other before deciding? Because this seems like a problem where one should decide based on facts (i.e. what other people say they will do) rather than principles.
Why would I be a bad person if I refuse to join a suicide pact?
Everyone in the world gets a poison bottle placed before them. They may either drink it and die, or refuse to drink it and live. But if more than half chose to drink, then Santa Claus will revive everyone that died to the poison.
Exact same problem.
The choice is a simple one to make for me.
If I press the blue button I am likely to contribute to the survival of everyone.
If I press the red button I am possibly assisting in the death of a potentially large number (billions) of innocent people.
I therefore press blue.
My dilemma is that if you press the red button and I and enough of my fellow decent human beings to make the majority also press blue, I get to share a reality that includes you but since this is reality right now anyway nothing changes.
But if I imagine this to be a real scenario with anything more than a few days to consider the options I inevitably conjure images of third-party spoilers – propagandists creating a “Press Yellow” party whose manifesto is to poison the discourse and convince some blue pressers that the blues are corrupt and don’t actually care about any of the red pressers so don’t press blue because, you know, those nasty liberal-minded blue-gooders want genderless bathrooms so are therefore all sick demons the world is best rid of – again because this it the reality of the world such as we have made it. Then all those yellow pressers get to live happily ever after with those red-pressing dickwads without any blue-pressers to damp down the base brutality of a society made up largely by those who preferred the death of billions with the rest not caring either way. But at least they got rid of the genderless bathrooms!
This is just another stupid game fucking with peoples lives. We should grow the fuck up.
[nice allegorical parable, Nick. Not subtle, but very nicely multiplexed.]
You’ve got Ukraine staring you in the face. It’s a legitimate war. You might not like how they’re fighting it, but they are. Choose a side.
I’m pushing the red button.
I can’t fight if I’m dead.
Dunc@12–
You’ve stigmatised game theory, John Nash, and mental illness just so you don’t have to retract one poorly-considered comment. Please reconsider.
@fishy: “I can’t fight if I’m dead.”
If I’m parsing that right, you decided the buttons would kill the wrong cohort and—accepting that as the likely outcome—you’d tilt the scale in that direction to join the bloodthirsty reds, so you can personally kill survivors in the post-rapture hellscape to continue a legitimate war?
@CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
(shrugs)
So, who’s with me?
It’s all fun and games until the suicidal guy presses both.
Re: “reason alone makes people push red” or “per Game parameters only”.
The death of people choosing blue (if ends up as minority) is persistent and not reverted after the game result is carried out. Therefore, the game DOES NOT RESOLVE UNTIL EVERYONE DIES (from this choice or not). This explains all the “I don’t want to live in a world with selfish murderous a–holes” because those are reasonable.
IMO artificially draw the boundary of the game immediately after the result is revealed is wishful thinking at best.
Prison’s dilemma does have long-term effects but the analysis still stands if you draw the boundary at the 5-year point.
Well, not me.
Also, if your survival strategy depends on other people not using the same strategy, I don’t like your chances. I get it; it’s a sort of personal ‘survival first, then resistance’ strategy, but of course, Brexit.
Basically, I reckon this is a crowd‑dynamics problem, not an individual moral‑reasoning one, so it requires a different level of analysis.
Meh. Blue. I wouldn’t want to live in a world populated only by red buttoners.
There’s a movie version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4GAQtGtd_0&t=49s
@ ^ John Morales : Ah yes. Thought that would be the ”Batman – Dark Knight’ one before I saw it!
Fiction of course but a great example.
Contrived as fuck but then this whole thing is.
@26
thank you!
it is stupid
I don’t see it as particularly interesting. If you have to choose, pushing the blue button is the only remotely moral choice.
Most people, in my experience, need to think of themselves as good people. Some are, some aren’t, but most of them seem to think they are. You can’t be a good person if you push the red button. Therefore, I don’t realistically see any scenario in which more than half of humanity chooses red.
I am a bad person, but I’m not so bad that I want to murder almost half of humanity. Mind you, I’m a particularly bad person, so I wouldn’t be averse to, say, rigging all the nuclear weapons in the world to launch if the majority presses red.
I just hope I’d have time to scream “ALL! SHALL! BURN!!!” loud enough that the whole world hears me, all-caps and multiple exclamations included, before the red button takes me, ‘cause if you gotta go you might as well go out doing what you love. Me? I’m a great big spiteful ham to my rotten little core.
Is that silly? Yes. It’s also exactly as serious as both this “thought” experiment (and the arguments for pushing the red button) deserve.
Basically, you press one button and help everyone live or press the other and know that you are potentially murdering people. A whole lot of people. yeah, I know what button I can live with myself after pressing there.
Tangent but why those particular red and blue colours I wonder not say yellow and green or black or white?
The blue button. No question. I’d rather be dead than haunted by the ghosts of everyone who pressed blue.
The probability of everyone choosing red seems very low, so choosing that with the idea that no-one will die if everyone does that does not seem rational or justified to me.
There are far better chances to save everyone by at least 50.0001% of people choosing blue.
Interesting how many people jump to red, more than I expected, wonder if it indicates they are willing to kill\do nothing to stop other people dying, or something else going on.
This goes through logic if interested
https://youtu.be/bY7OeqrGfGY?si=FFbw4N-X1EwfNsTk
chrislawson, @ #39: No. As far as I can see, game theory teaches us basically 2 things:
If you stack your conditions, pre-suppositions, and definitions of things like “rational self-interest” carefully enough, and then declare all of those choices out-of-bounds for discussion, you can make any outcome you like seem “rational”, no matter how cartoonishly evil or immoral it may be.
A disturbingly large number of people will fall for this bullshit.
Really, these sorts of “thought experiments” are absolutely no different to Sam Harris’s “ticking time-bomb” justifications of torture. Oh, look, if you completely rig the rules of the game, you can force people to accept the outcome you wanted anyway. How informative!
The real question is: why is it that all of these carefully-contrived and utterly unrealistic scenarios always seem to point to the conclusion that it’s “rational” to be a selfish arsehole?
@kurt1: claiming some-one’s logic is faulty but not identifying the flaw is unconvincing. When you don’t know what the logic was, it’s even more unconvincing. When you then use an emotional argument you have relegated yourself to the point-and-laugh category.
Why would anyone say that people pushing red buttons might be responsible for others’ deaths?
They aren’t. That responsibility lies with whoever set the scenario.
Nor does pushing blue buttons save any lives. Not just because there shouldn’t be any lives to save, but also because you’d only give other blue-button-pushers a temporary respite before they are strapped to a tramline, stranded at sea or surgically connected to a violinist.
@John Morales #32:
Brexit is a terrible comparison. We had had 25 years of anti-EU propaganda (including flat-out lies by a future prime minister) slowly poisoning the issue. In 2013, polling showed that EU membership still came in only 7th on the list of the electorate’s concerns. A complex situation with many, many ramifications was reduced to simplistic (and inaccurate) phrases like “they need us more than we need them” and “a great deal on Day One” backed by self-serving millionaires who didn’t want to pay taxes like the rest of us have to. It was so polarising that some morons still deny verifiable reality and say that the country is better off now than it would have been if we had stayed in; it directly led to the promotion of three ministers to Prime Minister who were successively inept, mendacious and incompetent.
Choosing which button to press may have some potential complications, but nothing as tangled or as open to abuse was was Brexit.
I like to modify these things a bit to tease out where boundaries might be. So: What if supposing the majority press red, then only 1 blue dies? Or 10, or 100, or 1000? Would that change the answer for you either way?
Me. I dunno, I am trying to come up with a real world analogue where the reasoning applies one way or another.
Rich, re “Brexit is a terrible comparison. We had had 25 years of anti-EU propaganda (including flat-out lies by a future prime minister) slowly poisoning the issue.”
Sure. You did. But that was not my point.
Again:
25 years is a lot more than one year, sure, but it’s what you were talking about, no?
Not an instachoice, that is. A considered choice.
(I quite well remember that actual event, BTW; I noted at the time how stupid a choice it would be, then how it was razor-thin result and how it was originally proposed as non-binding. A decade ago)
@roy 54: The fault is the assumption that it’s a trivial and obvious choice. Since PZ in his initial post as well as a lot of people commenting here would press the blue button you might have killed them. If your goal is for everyone to live, there is absolutely no point in pressing the red button.
Label the buttons “i don’t mind dying” and “i want to live”. Problem solved.
@60 erik333
You could also label them “I want everyone to live” and “I don’t mind other people dying”.
erik333.
Let me correct you there…
“I don’t mind you dying” and “I want us to live”.
Gives the options different ‘colours’, no?
@kurt1: I wouldn’t have killed anyone. Whatever entity produced this scenario killed them.
Try “I want everyone to live, and am willing to die if we don’t achieve that” vs “I want everyone to live, but am not willing to die if we don’t achieve that”.
All you need to do is a massive publicity campaign. “Have you met people? Do you honestly want to pin your hopes on most of them wanting to be morally superior enough to risk death? If you understand game theory or human nature, press red, or you can be sure as shit that you’re going to die.”
Not very interesting because pressing the red button comes with no inherent risk to oneself so people would press it just to ensure they don’t die themselves. How about if the majority presses the blue button, everyone who pressed the red button is highlighted and branded for life.
Now you have to actually make a good guess of how social you think people as a whole are.
@20 & #61.kurt1 : Any chance you’ll answer my questions for you here please?
0
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/17/humans-are-awful-creatures/#comment-2298887
Isn’t the “red button” just current MAGA logic – “Our enemies will all press the blue one, so we should all press the red one, then legislate the blue one out of existence after. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this! Oh, wait, why the F are everyone rejecting our policies, and hammering the blue button all of the sudden? I We need to press the red one faster to stop it!!!”
@StevoR: It seems you do not understand my replies under that blogpost, otherwise you would know why I am not answering any longer. If you had read the introduction I made on this site, which John Morales kindly linked for you, you could answer some of them yourself. It is also rude to ignore my explicit wishes to not constantly rehash the same debate about voting ethics in topics that have nothing to do with elections.
I would doubt whoever imposed this game on us was telling the truth. Perhaps the outcome would really be that only the red button pushers die. Or maybe the only people who win are those that refuse to play.
If we postulate a world, which as libertarians we must, where communication and cooperation are impossible before we make a decision , yes society will fall. The trick is to not presuppose libertarianism is a natural state.
If blue is in the majority, there’s no penalty for anyone. If red is in the majority, there’s a penalty either way: For blue-pushers, the penalty is dying, and for red-pushers, the penalty is having contributed to the deaths of blue-pushers.
But there’s no penalty in either situation for the not-pushers. A not-pusher won’t die if blue or red is in the majority, and won’t have contributed to deaths either.
So the best option is not to push either button. Fuck off, false dilemma!
I was curious about where this thing originated from, and ddg found this reason post:
https://reason.com/2026/04/30/you-should-press-the-red-button-never-the-blue-button/
Note that the author strongly advocates for being a red-pusher. Yay, libertarians.
The re-wording actually is a good point, but there’s still no penalty for being a not-pusher.
I note the following:
Reason sometimes has good points but this is very much not one of those times.
Anyway, Reason is not the source, but links to the sources on Xitter :
Tim Urban
https://xcancel.com/waitbutwhy/status/2047710215265730755
MrBeast (following up on Tim Urban)
https://xcancel.com/MrBeast/status/2049273335742435617
(Links changed to xcancel so as to avoid Musk’s xitty tracking and javascript bloat)
Both polls ended up with a blue majority.