fuzzy-borders
Explanation
The Joke
A couple is lying in bed discussing ethics, specifically the classic "would you go back in time to kill baby Hitler?" thought experiment. One partner raises the complication that ethical borders are "fuzzy" -- if it's ethical to kill baby Hitler, what about killing gay baby Helen Keller? This leads to a chain of increasingly absurd edge cases: you'd have to rank every human who ever lived and find the exact cutoff point for "deserves time-traveling murder." And then what about the median baby -- can you kill the median baby?
The other partner tries to resolve it by saying you simply scale the punishment to the offense: the median baby deserves a spanking, baby Helen Keller gets a piece of cake and a friendly pat on the head. The final panels reveal the absurd conclusion: if time travel were possible, people wouldn't just start assassinating history's greatest monsters -- they'd be delivering the full spectrum of proportional responses across history. The punchline imagines "time-traveling baby-spankers" as "the most paradoxerous explorers."
The Humor
The comic takes a well-known philosophical thought experiment (killing baby Hitler) and extends it to its logical -- and completely ridiculous -- extreme. The humor comes from applying strict logical consistency to a moral question that was never meant to be treated as a slippery slope. The idea that time travelers would need to rank all humans and deliver proportional punishments to babies throughout history (including spanking the median baby) is a perfect reductio ad absurdum. The word "paradoxerous" in the final panel is a delightful portmanteau of "paradox" and "dangerous," capping off the escalating absurdity.
References
- The "would you kill baby Hitler?" thought experiment is a famous ethical dilemma frequently discussed in philosophy and popular culture, often used to explore questions about utilitarianism, the ethics of preemptive action, and determinism.
- Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author and activist who was deaf and blind, widely regarded as an inspirational figure -- making her the perfect contrast to Hitler in this scenario.