2012-11-21
Explanation
This comic depicts the overthinking that can accompany a simple household problem. In the first panel, a man notices a spider on his windowsill and panics. In the second panel, he launches into an extended philosophical monologue: "I want to kill it, but it didn'''t do anything I wouldn'''t have done in its place. But is that even a meaningful statement? Maybe it'''s just a mechanism, not a mind. Or are all brains just on a spectrum? Oh no, what if they are? Then I can'''t kill it. I can'''t have its death on my conscience haunting me forever, day or night, sleep or wake."
This agonized internal debate satirizes the experience of someone who has absorbed just enough philosophy of mind to be paralyzed by a trivial decision. The man cycles through questions about consciousness, moral agency, and the nature of minds -- all real philosophical questions, but hilariously disproportionate to the situation of dealing with a common house spider.
His solution, shown in the final panel captioned "Soon...," is to delegate the moral burden to his cat: "See the spider, kitty? Do whatever comes to mind." By outsourcing the killing to an animal he considers a non-moral agent, he avoids the ethical dilemma entirely -- a clever bit of moral cowardice dressed up as problem-solving. The votey panel shows the cat thinking "Hooray! I destroyed a mind!" which is the darkest possible punchline: it confirms that the spider did have a mind after all, and the cat -- far from being an innocent non-moral agent -- is gleefully aware of and celebrates the destruction.