moral-relativity
Original: moral-relativity on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Woman with dark curly hair: I'm a moral relativist.
Woman with red hair: Like, you don't believe in the concept of moral truth?
Panel 2:
Woman with dark curly hair: No. I base my ethical system on my velocity relative to Earth.
Woman with red hair: That makes no sense.
Woman with dark curly hair: It's the only view that makes sense.
Panel 3:
Woman with dark curly hair: The closer I am to lightspeed relative to other humans, the more they appear to me to be living their lives in an instant.
Panel 4:
Woman with dark curly hair: The more fleeting their lives, the less significant they seem to me.
Panel 5:
Woman with dark curly hair: How does one assign personhood to a creature that might live and die in the span of one breath?
Panel 6:
Woman with dark curly hair: I just don't think, for instance, you should be allowed to kill someone just because they have a slower reference frame.
Voice (shrinking into distance): What quaint Newtonian morality!!
Votey:
Woman with dark curly hair: My theory explains why people get more misanthropic on planes.
Woman with dark curly hair: I'm a moral relativist.
Woman with red hair: Like, you don't believe in the concept of moral truth?
Panel 2:
Woman with dark curly hair: No. I base my ethical system on my velocity relative to Earth.
Woman with red hair: That makes no sense.
Woman with dark curly hair: It's the only view that makes sense.
Panel 3:
Woman with dark curly hair: The closer I am to lightspeed relative to other humans, the more they appear to me to be living their lives in an instant.
Panel 4:
Woman with dark curly hair: The more fleeting their lives, the less significant they seem to me.
Panel 5:
Woman with dark curly hair: How does one assign personhood to a creature that might live and die in the span of one breath?
Panel 6:
Woman with dark curly hair: I just don't think, for instance, you should be allowed to kill someone just because they have a slower reference frame.
Voice (shrinking into distance): What quaint Newtonian morality!!
Votey:
Woman with dark curly hair: My theory explains why people get more misanthropic on planes.
Alt text
A six-panel comic. Two women converse against a snowy mountain backdrop. A woman with dark curly hair says she's a moral relativist; a red-haired woman asks if she doesn't believe in moral truth. The dark-haired woman explains, with increasing earnestness, that she bases her ethics on her velocity relative to Earth: the closer she is to lightspeed relative to other humans, the more their lives seem to pass in an instant, the more fleeting and insignificant they become, and the harder it is to assign personhood to a creature that might live and die in one breath. She concludes you shouldn't be allowed to kill someone just for having a slower reference frame. In the final panel, the visual joke lands: the two women are revealed to be on a sled racing down a steep snowy slope, and they shoot off a cliff edge. As they fly away into the distance, a tiny shrinking speech bubble calls out, 'What quaint Newtonian morality!!' Votey (aftercomic): a hand-lettered note reads, 'My theory explains why people get more misanthropic on planes.'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.