[NekkoDroid]

And where in the original post is specified who does "the murdering"? As far as I see blue pressers are explicitly putting themselves in harms way and red pressers have fuck all to do with it.

Just because someone jumped infront of the train and died doesn't mean the conductor is a murderer.

[gpm]

The red pressers commit murder. If people don't press red, the blue pressers don't die.

Train conductors and companies take reasonable precautions to avoid killing people - they aren't indifferent to it. If they just built tracks and started running trains on them without taking measures to avoid mowing people down they absolutely would be guilty of murder.

[NekkoDroid]

> The red pressers commit murder.

For it to be murder it would need to be unlawful (lets just assume this entire hypothetical is unlawful) and planned, so unless red pressers are specifically doing it to kill blue pressers it is factually not murder. Blue pressers have put themselves into the situation of possibly dying, which was entirely their choice and isn't the responsibility of anybody else (ignoring the "forced to press a button by some mystical force/being").

There is a reason why even "duty to rescue" laws usually do not require the rescuer to endanger themselves doing it, which in this case would most certainly be the case (going from 0% of death to "who knows, this is entirely out of my control but non-negligable chance of dying" % of death).

> If they just built tracks and started running trains on them without taking measures to avoid mowing people down they absolutely would be guilty of murder.

Most stations in the world do not have any guardrails to the tracks themselves. If someone decides to walk onto them as the early end of a station they will most likely die if the train is arriving. The tracks were there, the train was scheduled just the person decided to put themselves into harms way. At most it would be considered manslaughter.

[gpm]

> For it to be murder it would need to be unlawful

You have this backwards. It is unlawful because it is murder and we have laws against murder, not the other way around.

You might be thinking of "felony murder", which is a way some places promote crimes that wouldn't otherwise be murder to murder if someone happened to die in their commission (e.g. you intended to rob a bank, and the bank guard shot someone else trying to stop you, so now you get a murder charge) but that's not necessary when you are the one intentionally performing the action that you know will kill people.

> so unless red pressers are specifically doing it to kill blue pressers it is factually not murder.

This isn't how "intent" works. This would be like saying "I shot the opposing soccer player so I could win the soccer game, not so that he would die, so it's not murder". Intent requires that you intentionally performed the action that could result in death, not that death was the goal. I.e. the intent requirement means tripping and falling and accidentally pressing the red button wouldn't be murder, choosing to press it would be.

Similarly if you're falling off a building, and you somehow have the option to pull some bystander off the building throwing them to their certain death but saving yourself, it would be murder to do so.

> There is a reason why even "duty to rescue" laws usually do not require the rescuer to endanger themselves doing it,

We're not in a "duty to rescue" situation, merely in a "duty not to commit murder" one. There is no duty to press the blue button, merely one not to press the red button. That the scenario apparently leaves no other choice but to press the blue button is irrelevant.

You could imagine a 3-choice game. If more people press the red button than press the blue button everyone who presses the blue button dies, but you can also not press any button and not be at any risk. Pressing the red button is still murder, but you're under no obligation to press the blue button and put yourself at risk to potentially save other blue button pushers. Doing nothing is not a crime... but the red button is just as much murder in the 2-choice game as it is in the 3-choice game.