Is it Irrational to be Rational in the Button Press Scenario?

Every time we discuss the button press issue, whether as ourselves or as the philosophers we are studying, we always end up with the same three scenarios: either we push the button first and ensure that, at the very least, we are saving the people in our classroom; we do nothing and risk getting killed, because the people in the other classroom push the button; or no one in either room pushes the button and everyone gets away with their life. For the sake of the argument, let’s pretend that there are an equal amount of people in each room.

According to Mill, the morality of an action is determined by the consequences of that action; therefore, technically speaking, the moral thing to do in this situation is not to push the button. After all, if no one pushes the button everyone lives thereby creating the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. This, I think, is the point Larshay was making in class that everyone so vehemently protested against. Regardless, I think we were all more caught up in the fact that this is not a situation in which we could expect people to think or act rationally. After all, our lives were on the hypothetical line here. We need not look any further than Stanley Milgram's obedience study to prove that normal functioning adults, when put under pressure, can do things that completely overrule their ability to think and act rationally. That being said, I take after the great Philip Zimbardo in thinking that people who are inherently good, or in philosophical terms rational and moral, can commit bad actions when put in stressful and unfamiliar situations. In Mills's philosophy as well as in psychology, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and in this case, past events have shown us that people would push the button.