Red hats, white hats, P1, P2, P3 ... where is your moral
outrage?*
Here's another solution: We cannot know what color hats any
of the prisoners are wearing.
Remember that it is the guard who is telling the prisoners
to guess hat colors, and the guard, as they say in lit crit,
is an unreliable narrator. Guards cannot dispense justice or
decide the terms of an amnesty. Guards are merely assigned
to keep watch over prisoners.
Not only is the guard lying about the amnesty, he is also
lying about the number of red and white hats. At the very
least, his information is so unreliable, the prisoners
cannot make any informed deduction about their hat colors.
It could be that Prisoners #1 and #2 state they cannot guess
their hat colors because they see the blind prisoner #3 is
wearing a purple, paisley fez and they know they are merely
playthings of the sadistic guard.
After they guess hat colors, they are all taken outside and
shot.
Channeling Sextus Empiricus, Eric
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