2014-08-09
Explanation
The Joke
Two people are walking through the woods discussing free will. One asks "Do you think we have free will?" The other responds that it is a "vacuous question" because a vast assemblage of neurons, many of which are in open competition, can be said to have "free will." When challenged on how justice works if there is no free will and people cannot be held responsible for their actions, the philosopher dismisses it as "one of the hard consequences of realism we have to live with."
Then the philosopher casually mentions: "I overfed your goldfish today. It's dead." The other person shouts "WHAT?!"
The Humor
The comic skewers the way philosophical arguments about determinism and free will can be conveniently deployed to avoid personal responsibility. The philosopher gives a sophisticated-sounding argument about how free will is a meaningless concept and that we simply have to accept that people cannot truly be held responsible for their actions -- then immediately reveals that he killed the other person's goldfish through negligence.
The punchline exposes the hypocrisy: his abstract philosophical position that "people cannot be held responsible" was actually a setup to dodge blame for a very concrete act of carelessness. The other person's outraged "WHAT?!" shows that philosophical arguments about determinism tend to evaporate the moment someone wrongs you personally. The comic highlights the gap between intellectually accepting that free will may be an illusion and emotionally accepting the consequences of that position when it affects you directly.
References
The free will debate is one of the oldest problems in philosophy, with determinists arguing that all events (including human decisions) are determined by prior causes, and libertarians (in the philosophical sense) arguing that humans possess genuine free will. Compatibilism, which the first philosopher seems to gesture toward, attempts to reconcile determinism with a meaningful notion of free will.