ethics-7
Explanation
This comic satirizes the gap between ethical theory and practical moral reasoning. A professor explains that "Ethical theory is pretty funny because it gets you really good at things like 'how many really good chickens are in this year's batch' while also being unable to tell if a murder is wrong."
The professor then contrasts two major ethical frameworks. Virtue ethics cannot tell you if murder is wrong because "your theory takes up 75 percent of its time arguing if it even is a theory" and it "can't clearly delineate if having a man in your basement, eating him piece by piece while he's still alive, that's wrong, because what if it's Aristotle and he's into it." Deontological ethics (described as "gold, comedy gold") also cannot tell you, because "there's no way of knowing if a murderer is at your door."
The bottom panel reveals that philosophers have responded to this comic by being upset and wanting to argue -- which is itself an illustration of the professor's point about virtue ethicists spending most of their time arguing about definitions rather than reaching practical conclusions.
The humor works by taking a genuine critique of moral philosophy -- that its frameworks often struggle with cases that ordinary moral intuition handles easily (like "murder is wrong") -- and pushing it to comic extremes. The Kant reference about "a murderer at your door" alludes to Kant's famous argument that you must not lie even to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding, which is widely regarded as one of the most embarrassing implications of strict deontological ethics. The joke is fundamentally about the ironic disconnect between the sophistication of ethical theory and its occasional inability to deliver the obvious moral conclusions that any reasonable person already holds.