But here’s the kicker: there’s no way for you to even press the button if you aren’t a psychopath. You may be tempted to do assign a probability to you being a psychopath, and then do an expected utility calculation. Then if you are a psychopath, pressing the button is a bad idea, and if you aren’t, it’s a good idea. Let’s assume you don’t know whether you are a psychopath. You either are a psychopath, or you aren’t.
Things get a little more complicated now: unlike in the previous analysis, your action now doesn’t causally influence whether you are a psychopath, and by extension whether you will die. We could also argue that whether you are a psychopath or not is simply a feature of your brain (present or absent from birth, perhaps), and your actions don’t have an effect on this. Whether you are a psychopath or not is already determined If we follow this line of reasoning, it’s clear you shouldn’t press the button: pressing it makes you a psychopath, so the button kills you as well. If you go around pressing buttons that kill huge amounts of people, you are a psychopath. One way to look at this problem is to say that it’s one’s actions that determine whether one is a psychopath in the first place. Pressing the button makes you a psychopath It seems to me there are two ways to analyze this situation. Given all this, should you press the button? Furthermore, you believe only a psychopath would press the button. What should you do?īefore we proceed, let’s assume the following: you believe the button does what it says, you believe killing all psychopaths is a generally a good thing, but you do prefer living in a World with psychopaths to being dead. On the other hand, you’re pretty sure only a psychopath would press the button, and you really don’t want to die – even if it means living in a World with psychopaths. One the one hand, you believe the World would be a better place without psychopaths. You take some time to contemplate whether to press the button. To your surprise, there’s a big red button inside with the label “Kill all psychopaths”.
You open the door and find there’s nobody there however, there is a mysterious box on your porch. You’re sitting at your couch watching Netflix, when suddenly, the doorbell rings. Hein de Haan Follow Would You Press the Psychopath Button?
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