Question asked originally on Yahoo! Answers - Original Link
A man rings your doorbell and hands you a box. He says that inside the box is all the money in the world. If you open the box, it is yours. However, if you do open the box, someone you don't know will die and it will only be because you opened the box. The choice is yours. What would YOU do?
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My answer: (selected as best by asker)
Very interesting question.
I'm sure that most people will say that they wouldn't open the box. But I guarantee you that if they actually were in that position that they would in fact open the box.
Almost everyone is driven by human nature. A very few people are able to overcome their nature and act rationally. Now, human nature is marked by behavior that attempts to satisfy their most basic needs. Among these needs is the need for power, comfort and acceptance. Money usually enables people to satisfy their need for comfort and power, while lying about how they would act nicely satisfies their need for acceptance. Which is why they would open the box even though they say they wouldn't.
However, here's the rational action. Based on the assumption that if you open the box someone you don't know will die, and that you're randomly given that opportunity, you have to think that it is likely that you are not the only person given that opportunity; this means that someone else could be given the same opportunity, and if they were to open the box, you might be the person who would die. Therefore, since you probably don't want that to happen to you, you should not cause it on someone else. Thus, a rational person would refuse to open the box.
Asker's Comment:
Wow. Thanks for putting thought into it. And you solved the puzzle, anyway. You are exactly right. The box could then be given to somebody YOU don't know and if they open it ...
9 comments:
I don't agree with the end of your statement about why someone should not open the box. First of all, if it has all the money in the world, then using logic, you are the only one that could have the opportunity because if someone else had it it would not be all the money in the world, correct? Second of all, lets say that for some reason that situation was possible: the fact that someone could be inconsiderate and kill you by opening the box is not a reason not to open the box but a reason to open it, because, since there is only one box and thus only one person gets the opportunity (because the one box is the only one that contains all the money in the world) if you do not open it and let the opportunity slip, the next person who gets the opportunity (for the simple fact that you didn't take it) could open the box and kill you, therefore if you value your life more then a stranger's (which most people probably do) you would open the box to save your own life. Therefore if one were to think logically about the situation, they would open it.
I'm ENTJ.
Your answer is based on the assumption that "all the money in the world" is an accurate statement and not an exaggeration parallel to "all the money you can possibly want"
I'm sure you would have some money on you, which means the box can't have "all the money in the world." Therefore the stranger is in fact, not telling you the truth in such a way as to confuse and coerce you to open the box, which is, in my opinion, yet another reason not to open the box.
But the question said all the money in the world, not all the money you could ever want so if you were to assume something other then the question asked, you wouldn't really be answering the question.
It's not a question of assuming anything.
If someone tells you that the Earth is flat, you don't just accept their proposition, you evaluate it.
The same applies here, if someone says they can give your all the money in the world, you don't just accept that they can, you evaluate that proposition.
When someone says to you that they have all the money in the world, that means that absolutely nobody else has any money, including you or anyone you know. It's rational, reasonable and likely that if every single person in the world had had their money taken away from them, that you would have come to know about it. And even if you can't be certain, you have to consider the probability of someone having all the money in the world inside of a single box.
If you evaluate everything objectively, the only rational conclusion is that #1, this person is probably lying about having all the money in the world. #2 If in fact he has the ability to have a random person die, which is in no way statistically abnormal, that you should not open the box, because when you give yourself the right to cause another person to die, you give everyone the right to do the same to you.
The way I would see that situation is that he's probably lying about a random person dying because you open a box, How would he make that work? But there is a good chance that inside the box is some amount of money, so my intuition would say to open the box since the reward is probably greater than the risk.
Okay now, let's go from that.
Your first comment was good, but it was based on the idea that if he had "all" the money in the world that then only one person could open the box, and therefore, if you opened the box and someone else died, that you would be safe.
But now you just agreed that he can't have all the money in the world, and therefore, you can't be sure that by opening the box that nobody else can.
As for having a random person die if you open the box, he could just as easily kill a random person, which is not that hard.
Back to opening the box, it's all about the Golden Rule. Do onto others what you would have done onto yourself.
The best way to keep others from opening the box and possibly having you killed it to serve as an example of someone who didn't open the box. Because if you open the box, then other people will say "if he/she can open the box, then why can't I?"
I did not agree with you I just said that if one were to look at it the way you said, meaning that he was lying about having all money in the world, then it is also probably likely that we was lying about having the ability to make the box kill a random person when it was opened, therefore, there is virtually no risk and probably somewhat of a substantial reward for opening the box. I don't think the question is so much about the golden rule, but about reasoning out what is morally right to do in a certain situation and weighing the risks vs the rewards of doing something. For me this question is over-simplified politics.
"but about reasoning out what is morally right to do"
Your own words.
What's morally right to do is follow the Golden Rule.
As for reasoning:
The question makes 2 main statements:
I have all the money in the world.
I can kill a random person.
You can't just accept both equally or say that because one is false the other must be false.
The chances of someone having all the money in the world? ~0%
The chances of someone being able to kill a random person? ~99%
The person necessarily lying about one because they lied about the other? An opinion, not a rational conclusion, that is, not good reasoning.
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