021 [text

[worksmart]

Comments

[girlwithabow]

No. What is it?

[worksmart]

An exercise in pushing buttons.

[girlwithabow]

And what did it prove? That people push buttons for a prize?

[worksmart]

Nope. They got paid for showing up. It proved that people will push buttons.

[girlwithabow]

Did they show up knowing there would be buttons or were they just told that they'd get paid for nothing?

[worksmart]

They showed up knowing they were going to take part in a study.

[girlwithabow]

And nobody asked what the study was about. And you still haven't said what the experiment proved.

[worksmart]

It proved that people's ethical limits are far more flexible when they're absolved of responsibility.

[girlwithabow]

Like now. I get where you're going with this.

It's depressing to see it actually happening and to see people continuing to press the button.

[worksmart]

But it's human. Repeated experiments showed that most of us will press the switch.

[girlwithabow]

Just because most would do it doesn't make it right.

[worksmart]

I never said that it was.

[girlwithabow]

The 'but it's human' kind of made it seem like you were.

[worksmart]

I wouldn't hold humanity up to the microscope of moral righteousness. Would you?

[girlwithabow]

I would hope I wouldn't need to for as something as simple as do you press the button and cause misery or don't press the button and leave people alone.

[worksmart]

And Milgram's results would say you're wrong.