consequent
Explanation
This comic is a deep dive into meta-ethics and moral philosophy, satirizing how every ethical framework has exploitable loopholes.
The comic opens with a character noting that "all humans have similar intuitions, but we have multiple ethical frameworks that people can't agree on." He lists several: virtue ethics (people who concern themselves with character), Kantian deontology (universal maxims based on duty), religious traditions (following divine commandments), and consequentialism (evaluating outcomes).
He then makes the key observation: "Take any of those traditions and consider any behavior they permit that consequentialism doesn't believe is ethical, and vice versa. All of them have edge cases where something terrible is permitted." In other words, no matter which ethical system you pick, there's always some horrifying act it technically allows -- deontology can't handle trolley problems, consequentialism can justify terrible means, virtue ethics is vague about specific situations, and so on.
The punchline comes when a second character asks: "You know that joke about how 'exploring all possible ethical frameworks and finding none satisfactory' is basically ethics' version of being an atheist?" The first character responds: "I'd like to write a paper on this, just for the sheer pleasure of watching hamsters explode" -- implying that the intellectual exercise itself is more important than arriving at a moral conclusion. His companion notes that "hamster explosions are the most cited measure of utility," turning even this into a consequentialist joke.
The comic satirizes how academic philosophy can become an infinite regress of framework-critique, where the process of demolishing ethical systems becomes its own reward, divorced from any practical moral guidance.