blame
Explanation
This is a long-form comic that explores the philosophical and social problem of collective responsibility, blame, and how societies deal with large-scale harm.
The comic appears to follow a progression of scenes where characters discuss and debate who is to blame for various societal problems. The setup involves characters at what seems to be a public forum or gathering, discussing how blame should be assigned for collective harms.
The comic walks through various perspectives on blame attribution. Early panels show characters debating whether individuals, institutions, or systemic forces bear responsibility for bad outcomes. Someone raises the point that textbooks of moral philosophy have been written on this subject, suggesting the question has no easy answer.
The discussion escalates as characters argue about whether it is fair to blame individuals for participating in harmful systems when those systems are all-encompassing, and whether recognizing systemic problems absolves individuals of personal responsibility. The comic touches on the tension between structural explanations for social problems (which can feel like they let individuals off the hook) and individual moral responsibility (which can ignore the constraints people face).
The conclusion appears to show characters at a gravestone or memorial, with text suggesting something like "A JUST SOCIETY" -- implying that the ideal of a perfectly just allocation of blame and responsibility may itself be dead or unachievable.
The humor in this comic is characteristically SMBC: it takes a genuine philosophical problem -- how to assign moral responsibility in complex systems with diffuse causation -- and follows it to an uncomfortably honest conclusion. The comic engages with debates from moral philosophy about collective action problems, the bystander effect, structural injustice (as discussed by philosophers like Iris Marion Young), and the challenge of holding anyone accountable when harm emerges from the aggregate behavior of millions of people. The darkly comic conclusion suggests that the search for perfect justice in blame attribution may be inherently futile.