2013-03-28
Explanation
This comic tackles the trolley problem -- a famous thought experiment in ethics -- but takes it to an absurd extreme through the lens of neuroethics. A woman poses the classic dilemma: you'''re on an out-of-control train heading toward five people, and you can divert it to hit just one person instead. Rather than choosing one option, her companion proposes a radical third path: she would remove the part of her brain that governs empathy, which she identifies as the source of ethics. The remainder of her would then be an "inhuman computing machine" with no moral dimension, making whatever choice follows merely amoral rather than immoral.
The logic is twisted but internally consistent: if a person makes the choice, either option is immoral, but if a machine makes it, it'''s amoral. Since amoral is preferable to immoral, removing your own empathy is presented as the "most ethical choice." When challenged about whether removing the empathy part of her brain was itself unethical, she counters that it didn'''t alter the final outcome'''s level of morality. The conversation concludes with one character observing that "neuroethics is kind of disturbing," to which the other replies, "I wouldn'''t know. I removed the neuroethical part of my brain."
The comic satirizes how philosophical reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, can produce conclusions that are technically coherent but deeply unsettling. It parodies the way some thinkers use clever logical frameworks to sidestep genuine moral responsibility. The votey panel adds a meta-joke: "If there'''s a bad neuroethics joke, I haven'''t heard it!" -- a playful boast from the cartoonist about the niche subject matter.