A philosophy question

This came up in a class I had this past semester. Here is the question;

Lets say you have a box. On this box there is a button and every time you press that button you get a million dollars. The catch is that every time you press that button not only do you get your million dollars, but pressing it causes someone in the world to die. It's not someone whom you know though or who would ever have had an impact on your life. Do you press the button and if so how many times?

Depends. How many porn sites does a million bucks get me into?

bucket, that is from an episode of tales from the darkside I believe where a couple is given a box that has a button and are told that if they push it they would get $250,000 and that somebody they don't know would die. They spend the entire episode trying to figure the box out and how the guy would know they pushed the button. The couple needs money desparately and decide to push the button, after all people die all the time. Almost instantly after they push the button the guy shows up with money and takes the box and tells them he will give the box to somebody they didn't know.

Excaliber75 wrote:

I heard another variation on this when I was in grade school. In it, the box is given to a married couple, who argue about it for a while. The husband says absolutely not, while the wife knows how badly they need the money. So the next day, while he's at work, she presses the button. The husband immediately has a fatal accident... and a quarter-million dollars is paid out to the wife by his life insurance.

People in power make decisions all the time based on money that allow people to die. So what is the difference between politics and this box?

Until very recently, I would have said that I would push the button over and over again. However, after the loss of my husband, I would have to say that I would not push it at all....ever. The person that died would be known and loved by someone, even if it wasn't you.

Stepping down from the soapbox now.

The only decent thing to do is to smash the damn box to pieces.

otiscleotus wrote:

thumbs up to you.

otiscleotus wrote:

You say decent, and I agree. But, if we're indeed given a chance in real life. I'm not 100% sure if I would destroy it. I'm not sure. I think I would ponder about it for so long that if I do press it, I would be old and feeble that I wouldn't be able to spend the money anyways...

A very tricky question to some that may be in a desperate situation. I could see many never touching it for the sake of pure greed. However, if a million would save a loved one or a dieing offspring, the temptation may be far too great.

How about if it was modified to say that only someone who'd pushed the button before you would die? Would you be more or less likely to do it then?

as long as ı am not a murder, i think it is not possible for me to press that button. but bush can be the richest man in the world that have ever lived with a box like that.

No.

Really depends on your perspective, doesn't it? What do you think about human beings in general, since the point of the way the dilemma is structured is that it is impersonal, that the person whose life you must consider ending is not anyone you know. Thus it is a referendum on your personal opinion of humanity at large, rather than a question about whether or not you could kill a specific person.

Several previous posters have mentioned war and politics, and of course, no individual gets to the sort of jobs that make those choices if they are kind, caring people who love humanity as a whole. If they did, they would not have been morally able to do the things 'necessary' to get to those jobs. There is no heirarchical power structure in the world, be it political or economic, that is a meritocracy. The only way to advance is to step on the people below you. That's how it works. So an interesting philosophical side-topic to this question is why do we entrust these kinds of decisions to individuals who by definition have demonstrated that they are the last people who should ever be entrusted with this sort of decision?

Anyway, back to the original dilemma. All personal connection is eliminated by the question structure, so it simply is a question about whether you think the average human life has some intrinsic value, or whether you think the average human life (excluding your own friends and family) is of no special value.

On a purely rational and objective level, one would look at the carrying capacity of the habitat for any organism and determine whether the population was too large; in our case, the carrying capacity is 100 million humans for the entire planet...which is somewhat shocking when you consider that were are rapidly approaching 10 billion. Through short-term technological tricks that are simple putting off starvation and water shortages into the not-too-distant future, and at a severe cost to our own system in the form of mass extinctions (humans are the first organic cause of a mass extiction in the history of life on Earth) of other species and planet-wide destabilization, we are temporarily sustaining a massive overpopulation. One would - from the outside as the aliens in sci-fi stories like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" - look at the system and see a single species destroying the habitat as an invasive parasite that should be removed.

The emotional extreme at the other end of the spectrum is to assign the same importance to all human lives that we do to our families, and believe that not a single human life deserves to be taken for any reason, despite the countless lives of other organisms that is the cost.

So stripped down, the question is about where on the spectrum between the impossibly rational and the impossibly emotional do you fall? It's an interesting question for introspection.

Not much to think about.....it's a shitload of money and there's a shitload too many people in the world.