2014-11-27
Original: 2014-11-27 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1 (teacher, a woman with dark hair, addressing the class): Suppose you're in an out-of-control train. The tracks fork, and you can either continue ahead or turn right.
Panel 2 (teacher): If you do nothing, you ram into Hitler.
Panel 3 (teacher): If you turn right, you ram into TEN Hitlers.
Panel 4 (teacher): You could argue that if you ram ten Hitlers, you've killed more evil people, and you are therefore more ethical.
Panel 5 (teacher): Or, you could argue that by ramming only one Hitler you allow nine remaining Hitlers, the evil prequel that would single-handedly stop Hitler from rising to power.
Panel 6 (teacher): And that is the difference between virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics.
Panel 7 (teacher): Maybe we should just try to find out who's cloning all these Hitlers.
Panel 8 (caption / bottom banner): PRAGMATISM IS NOT WELCOME IN THIS CLASSROOM!
Votey:
A hand-drawn diagram. A line forks into two arrows. The left arrow is labeled "1 Hitler" and the right arrow is labeled "1 Decahitler."
Panel 2 (teacher): If you do nothing, you ram into Hitler.
Panel 3 (teacher): If you turn right, you ram into TEN Hitlers.
Panel 4 (teacher): You could argue that if you ram ten Hitlers, you've killed more evil people, and you are therefore more ethical.
Panel 5 (teacher): Or, you could argue that by ramming only one Hitler you allow nine remaining Hitlers, the evil prequel that would single-handedly stop Hitler from rising to power.
Panel 6 (teacher): And that is the difference between virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics.
Panel 7 (teacher): Maybe we should just try to find out who's cloning all these Hitlers.
Panel 8 (caption / bottom banner): PRAGMATISM IS NOT WELCOME IN THIS CLASSROOM!
Votey:
A hand-drawn diagram. A line forks into two arrows. The left arrow is labeled "1 Hitler" and the right arrow is labeled "1 Decahitler."
Alt text
An eight-panel comic. A dark-haired woman teacher addresses her class with a thought experiment. She says: suppose you're in an out-of-control train; the tracks fork and you can go straight ahead or turn right. If you do nothing, you ram into Hitler. If you turn right, you ram into ten Hitlers. She lays out two ethical readings: ramming ten Hitlers kills more evil people and is therefore more ethical, OR ramming only one Hitler lets nine remaining Hitlers survive. She declares this is the difference between virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics. In the next-to-last panel she muses, 'Maybe we should just try to find out who's cloning all these Hitlers.' A bottom banner caption reads: PRAGMATISM IS NOT WELCOME IN THIS CLASSROOM! Votey: a simple hand-drawn diagram of a line forking into two arrows, the left one labeled '1 Hitler' and the right one labeled '1 Decahitler' (i.e., ten Hitlers, a play on metric prefixes).
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.