Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

agreed

2025-06-05 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
agreed
Votey panel for agreed
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic presents a mock review that reads: "Due to the lack of an agreed upon definition of beauty, no judgment can be rendered." It is given a rating of 3 out of 5 stars.

The caption below reads: "Reading philosophy convinced me that you can leave the same review for literally anything."

The joke works on several levels. First, the review itself is a parody of philosophical skepticism, specifically aesthetic anti-realism or the idea that beauty is entirely subjective and cannot be objectively defined. By this reasoning, no product, experience, or artwork can ever be properly evaluated because we cannot agree on what "good" even means. The review applies this philosophical position as though it were a practical tool for consumer reviews.

Second, there is a self-contradicting absurdity in the review: it claims no judgment can be rendered, and then immediately renders a judgment (3 out of 5 stars). The 3-star rating -- perfectly mediocre, the most noncommittal possible score -- adds to the comedy because it is the rating equivalent of shrugging.

Third, the caption points to the universality of the dodge. Since no field of human endeavor has a fully agreed-upon definition of beauty or quality, this identical review could be left for a restaurant, a novel, a vacuum cleaner, or a sunset. The comic satirizes both the paralysis that over-philosophizing can create (you think so hard about definitions that you cannot function) and the way philosophical jargon can be weaponized to sound profound while saying absolutely nothing.

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