This is not going to be a post on the rights and wrongs of having a death penalty, we in Britain do not. I fancied flexing my philosophical muscles a little bit, so I thought I might do a few posts using the materials I developed during the years I studied. My output has become repetitive and somewhat stale as of late, it mostly just forms a catalogue of criticisms of things I am involved in or view on TV. That’s not to say that I won’t continue to be a critic of all things, just that I intend to take a break from it for a little while. Let’s get back to thinking about interesting things…

A death row prisoner is to be killed by lethal injection, there are 8 buttons, one of which operates the syringe that will inject him, the rest will do nothing.

The engineer that built the device doesn’t know who will press what button and won’t be present during the pressing, he/she has also built randomness in by making the active button cycle through the available options so that each time it is a different button that performs the task. The 8 volunteers, one for each button, will not know which button actually kills the prisoner.

The intention of this setup is to remove from the actual doer of the deed the awareness of doing it, and to share that burden with others. Each participant can safely feel that there is a greater possibility (7-1) that someone else released the contents of the syringe and killed the prisoner. By doing this we can allow the participants to feel easier about their participation.

Is each person the instrument of the prisoner’s death? Are none?

Two tricks are going on here, the first is about odds making us feel unlikely that we are the killer and that doubt is enough for us to feel okay about being involved (we may not have willingly participated if there was one button and just us), the other is the nature of shared responsibility diminishing the act of an individual whereby it is easier to do a thing in a group than it would be on our own.

If we remove the odds and change the circumstances, let us say now we are in a group and if we act we might be acting alone, but we would definitely know that it was us that acted. Would this make our action more difficult?

Plural inaction is the act of not acting because other people do not act. While observing an injustice from afar we may feel that we would act if we were local to that injustice. We often internally harbour an ego hero version of ourselves in our mind that we are rather sure of, you know the guy that wins the fights in the daydreams, he would definitely act!

But let us contend that you are in a situation where there are many onlookers, and you feel strongly that something amiss is going down. Do you spring into action, or do you look round to see if anyone else is about to beat you to it? It is an observed phenomenon that people do not act, they stand by, they are onlookers, bystanders. This is not an unnatural situation, often we are shocked into inaction, I know this one happens to me personally and I miss the moment. Another I must admit to is fear, I’m naturally scared to engage in physical conflict, that is not an admission that I am weak in that area, just that I prefer not to go that direction primarily.

To press the button that kills the criminal we need people that can press the button, but we cannot guarantee that they will actually press it when it comes to the time. This is what is referred to as an embodied problem, things seem a lot easier to do when you do not actually have to do them. Right up until the point where you had to do it this task would seem rather easy. You may agree with the verdict (we can assume that if you are there) and you may feel that you are doing something that needs to be done, but you still may not be able to press.

To solve this, our designer may program some logic in to make sure that if at least some of the buttons were pressed the injection would then happen, in the event that the randomly selected button was not pressed. Only then would the non presser know that they definitely did not commit the act, but the rest of the participants would not know that the odds had been shortened.

My question is this, would you press, if you knew you had the active button, if you knew you didn’t, if you didn’t know either way?

Paul S Wilson

From a conversation with David J Watts