The nearest I can come to making sense of your claim is that it’s some sort of imaginary Prisoner’s Dilemma: you can cooperate by saving a random child instead of your own, and in symmetric cases other parents can cooperate by saving your child instead of theirs.
However, even if you are into counterfactual bargaining, I am pretty sure almost no other parent would cooperate here, which makes defecting a no-brainer.
I suppose to be fair I should imagine a world in which every parent is brainwashed into valuing other children’s lives as much as their own (I am pretty sure it would take brainwashing). In this case (assuming you escaped the brainwashing so it’s still a legitimate decision) saving the other child might be the right thing to do. At that point, though, you’re arguably not optimizing for humans anymore.
The nearest I can come to making sense of your claim is that it’s some sort of imaginary Prisoner’s Dilemma: you can cooperate by saving a random child instead of your own, and in symmetric cases other parents can cooperate by saving your child instead of theirs.
However, even if you are into counterfactual bargaining, I am pretty sure almost no other parent would cooperate here, which makes defecting a no-brainer.
I suppose to be fair I should imagine a world in which every parent is brainwashed into valuing other children’s lives as much as their own (I am pretty sure it would take brainwashing). In this case (assuming you escaped the brainwashing so it’s still a legitimate decision) saving the other child might be the right thing to do. At that point, though, you’re arguably not optimizing for humans anymore.