Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

execute

2024-06-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
execute
Votey panel for execute
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 takes the philosophy of personal identity — specifically the teleporter problem — and turns it into a criminal justice scenario.

A person stands before a police officer and a judge (or official), enthusiastically requesting to be put in a Star Trek teleporter. They describe exactly how it works: it disassembles you, reconstructs you on the other side of the room with a body and mind that are identical in every way. Then comes the key philosophical claim: "except that they are not guilty of kidnapping and eating a jogger."

The caption at the bottom reads: "Philosophers are no longer allowed to choose their mode of execution."

The joke operates on the classic teleportation paradox: if a teleporter destroys your body and creates a perfect copy elsewhere, is the copy really "you"? Many philosophers argue the copy is a different person, meaning the original person effectively dies. This comic's criminal has weaponized that philosophical argument — if the teleporter creates a new person, then that new person hasn't committed any crimes. The original criminal is destroyed (executed), and the new copy walks free.

The punchline suggests this loophole was so effective (or at least so annoying) that philosophers have been banned from choosing how they're executed. It satirizes how philosophical thought experiments, taken to their logical extremes, can produce conclusions that are technically coherent but practically absurd.

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