So if you were in a room with two prisoners; a man and a woman, you’d never met, and the gender neutral soldier with the big gun told you to kill one of them, you’d automatically shoot the man?

tag yourselves I’m the gender neutral soldier with the big gun

i mean obviously this premise makes no sense and has nothing to do with literally anything based anywhere even in proximate distance to reality but sure, yeah, in a dystopian world where i’m put in a room with two prisoners and a gender neutral soldier with a big gun tells me i have to shoot one of them i’m definitely shooting the man if for no other reason than i’m on more equal footing if i have to hand-to-hand combat a woman, just like, size-wise

Ok but what if the woman is like Brienne of Tarth sized and the guy is like pre-serum Steve Rogers sized? I think we need to consider every angle of this very strategically. There’s no room for error here.

GOOD point. my reasoning is based on a fallacy of body stereotypes. given no other information about these two individuals other than gender, even assuming that lietliet is wrongly equating gender with sex, it’s impossible to know which of the two would be the more take downable in hand-to-hand combatant. i was assuming that both prisoners were at their most emaciated and unwell, just based off of being held captive in a room where a stranger is coming in to shoot them for no reason.

even correcting for this, however, i think i still shoot the man because studies have shown that in a single-instance social dilemma, women are more cooperative than men, and in mixed-sex groups men are less cooperative than women. therefore, i want a woman on my single-instance social dilemma team.

i mean i know it sounds harsh but that’s just science

I mean, is no one gonna suggest shooting the gender neutral soldier when they’re unprepared and taking the man and woman and running like hell? I cannot be the only one who thought of that. Cause yeah, they have massive guns and all, but they probably wouldn’t expect you to shoot them so you’d even have the element of surprise on your side. This way you don’t have to shoot either of your fellow prisoners and also, fuck you gender neutral soldier. I do what I want.

of course i CONSIDERED shooting the gender neutral soldier but ultimately the question we are considering is “do you shoot the man or the woman” not “how do you get out of this situation,” which, while a natural extension of the original premise, goes beyond our perimeters and is therefore an irrelevant answer. we are, after all, trying to understand which gender we shoot, not which person we shoot.

were we to broaden the scope of our inquiry to allow for a wider array of possible answers, then in order to truly and appropriately consider shooting the gender neutral soldier we would need a host of additional information, including but not limited to:

• how many other soldiers are there present?
  
• are we in some kind of facility?
• what kinds of possibility of escape actually exist? is use of force and surprise the best method, or should we take the long view and act in a way that gains their trust?
• why was i chosen to shoot the prisoners? am i a prisoner myself? or–and we cannot ignore this possibility–am i, too, a soldier? is the gender neutral soldier my CO? 
• are all the soldiers in this army gender neutral? that wouldn’t affect my decision-making, i’m just curious.

again–i see what you’re all saying. but ultimately you are answering a different question than the one posed to you.