evm
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is a lengthy philosophical exploration of the expected value of murder, structured as an ethical thought experiment. A character argues that most ethical frameworks agree that stabbing someone to death is wrong, yet "they never do the math." The comic walks through a series of increasingly absurd utilitarian calculations: if you randomly pick two people and flip a coin to decide whether to stab one, the expected number of deaths multiplied by two attempts is still one death. It then escalates to pointing out that we maintain large power grids, drive cars, and engage in activities that statistically cause some number of deaths per year, asking whether personally stabbing someone is worse than contributing to a system that probabilistically kills people.
The argument continues: since you as an individual contribute only an infinitely small fraction of systemic risk, and the probability of your personal contribution causing any single death approaches zero, "the expected value of murder -- if you perform badness below the level of perceptibility -- doesn't meet the threshold at which the universe cares." The comic concludes with "Also quantum mechanics would suggest it can come in imaginary quantities... which explains conspiracy theories."
The Humor
This is a classic SMBC "reductio ad absurdum" comic, where a character takes a legitimate philosophical or mathematical framework and pushes it to a ludicrous conclusion. The humor lies in the tension between rigorous-sounding expected value calculations and the obvious moral intuition that murder is wrong. The comic satirizes a failure mode of pure utilitarianism: by distributing moral responsibility thinly enough across enough people and systems, you can make any individual act of wrongdoing appear to have negligible expected harm.
The title "evm" likely stands for "Expected Value of Murder," itself a darkly comic abbreviation that treats an outrageous concept with clinical detachment. The final non sequitur about quantum mechanics and conspiracy theories serves as an additional absurdist punchline, mocking the tendency of certain internet intellectuals to invoke quantum mechanics to justify essentially anything. The comic also lampoons the style of rationalist or effective altruist discourse, where everything is reduced to expected value calculations, sometimes to the point of losing contact with basic moral common sense.