You are handed a box with a button. If you press it, £1,000,000 will appear in your bank account. Simultaneously, somewhere in the world — a country you'll never visit, a person you'll never meet — someone will experience significant physical pain for exactly 10 seconds. They will recover fully. They will not know who pressed the button. No one will ever know you pressed it. Do you press it?
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Question

You are handed a box with a button. If you press it, £1,000,000 will appear in your bank account. Simultaneously, somewhere in the world — a country you'll never visit, a person you'll never meet — someone will experience significant physical pain for exactly 10 seconds. They will recover fully. They will not know who pressed the button. No one will ever know you pressed it. Do you press it?

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Accepted Answer

38% chose "Press it — the harm is minimal and temporary" and 62% chose "Don't press it — causing harm for personal gain is wrong regardless". This is Robert Nozick's 'experience machine' problem in reverse — rather than asking whether you'd enter a pleasure simulation, it asks whether you'd cause minor real harm for major personal gain. The anonymity, distance, and minimal nature of the harm are designed to lower the moral stakes as far as possible. Most people don't press it, despite the logic — suggesting that causing direct harm to a real person crosses a moral threshold that indirect harm doesn't, regardless of magnitude.

The button that pays you to hurt a stranger

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