2014-08-10
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a fake "Life Tip" that reads: "Anything philosophers have never bothered considering can be said to have no ethical justification." Below, a child excitedly tells his father "Daddy! I found a turtle!" and the father responds by swatting the turtle away, shouting "There is no ethical justification for turtles!"
The Humor
The comic mocks a particular style of pseudo-intellectual reasoning where someone takes the absence of philosophical discussion about something as evidence that it is ethically unjustifiable. This is a parody of the appeal to authority fallacy combined with an argument from silence -- if the great philosophers never wrote about turtles, then turtles must be ethically indefensible.
The absurdity is amplified by the father's extreme reaction: he physically rejects the turtle as if it were something morally repugnant, based entirely on his misapplication of this ridiculous principle. The comic satirizes people who use philosophy as a blunt instrument to make sweeping pronouncements about things that philosophy was never meant to address. It also pokes fun at the idea that everything in existence needs an "ethical justification" to be permitted.
References
The comic plays on real philosophical traditions that do attempt to provide ethical frameworks for our treatment of animals (such as Peter Singer's work on animal rights), but humorously extends the concept to the mere existence of a species rather than how we treat it.