2011-06-13
Explanation
This comic features a woman at a podium delivering a pseudo-logical argument about the ethics of murder and war. She reasons: if one person kills someone, 50% of the people involved are victims; if 99 people kill someone, only 1% are victims. She formalizes this as V = the limit of K/X as X approaches infinity (where K is people killed and X is people involved), and concludes that for sufficiently large X, murder is a victimless crime. Her final conclusion: "So, the bigger we make a war, the more ethical it becomes!"
The joke satirizes the misuse of mathematics and logical reasoning to justify horrific conclusions. The speaker'''s math is technically correct in a narrow sense -- the percentage of victims does decrease as you add more perpetrators -- but the reasoning is absurd because it conflates the ratio of victims to total participants with the actual moral weight of the act. The number of victims (K) stays the same regardless of how many people are involved in the killing. It is a parody of how sophistic reasoning and misleading statistics can be used to rationalize anything, including war.
The votey panel offers a companion observation labeled "The more common version," showing someone saying "It'''s not a lie if we'''re ALL liars!" This draws a parallel to real-world reasoning where people excuse collective bad behavior by pointing out that everyone does it -- a dilution-of-guilt fallacy similar to the one in the main comic.