The Harm of 'What If Everyone Did This?' — And How to Answer It

You have heard some version of this:

• "What if everyone decided to skip voting?"
• "What would the world look like if everyone just did what benefited them?"
• "If everyone thought that way, everything would collapse."

Or the childhood version: "If everyone jumped off a roof, would you jump too?"

The argument is presented as a moral or logical objection. It is actually a psychological defense called rationalization. Understanding the difference is useful.

What Rationalization Is

Rationalization is when a person constructs apparently logical reasons for their behavior or inaction — reasons that, to the person offering them, sound airtight, but that often exist primarily to cover a different and unacknowledged motive, usually fear.

The tell: a well-constructed rationalization tends to seem valid only to the person offering it. Everyone else in the room finds it transparently insufficient. The classic example — "it's not cheating if we used protection" — is absurd to everyone except the person whose self-image requires it.

"What if everyone did this" is a more sophisticated version of the same mechanism.

The Logical Error

The argument is built on a premise that does not exist: a world that is uniform. In reality, the world is not uniform. It never will be. People have different values, different fears, different motivations, different circumstances. No action anyone takes will produce a uniform global response where all humans simultaneously adopt the same behavior.

Basing your personal decisions on this imaginary uniformity is logically equivalent to saying "I won't take an umbrella because if everyone took an umbrella, the umbrella industry would collapse." The uniformity never materializes. You just got wet.

More precisely: if you choose not to act in a certain way because "what if everyone else did", you simply become a person who doesn't act, while the world continues to be populated by people who act however they choose. You have unilaterally transferred the advantage to whoever would have acted anyway.

As Jordan Peterson observes: if you claim you are incapable of cruelty because "what kind of world would it be if everyone was cruel" — you have made yourself a guaranteed victim of anyone who is capable of cruelty and chooses to exercise it. Being capable of something and choosing to deploy it are different things. Eliminating the capability in the name of abstract morality just removes your options.

The Real Motive

When someone uses "what if everyone did this" to justify not doing something, the underlying structure is usually:

• 1. There is something I want to do, or something I fear to do
• 2. I am not comfortable acknowledging the fear or the desire directly
• 3. I construct a moral argument: I won't do it because if everyone did it, things would be bad
• 4. This allows me to appear principled while avoiding both the action and the honest disclosure of my reason for avoiding it

This is why the argument is most commonly used for inaction rather than action. "I won't do X because the world would be terrible if everyone did X." The world doesn't care. The people who do X will continue doing X. The person not doing X has simply opted out while maintaining a self-image as someone making a principled choice rather than a fearful one.

How to Answer "Would You Jump If Everyone Did?"

This is the adult version: "You're just repeating a phrase that everyone says."

The correct response to the argument in its more sophisticated forms: "The world is not uniform. It never will be. My decision doesn't create global uniformity, and I can't make decisions as though it does. The question is what I will do, given the actual world — not the imaginary uniform one."

And if the argument is being used against you to coerce a particular behavior: recognize that you're being presented with a false premise designed to override your individual assessment. The world you actually live in does not share your choices uniformly. Your choices are yours.