Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two people are stargazing and discussing moral philosophy. One poses the classic thought experiment: "Do you think there are fundamental moral truths?" The other replies that it's easy to prove there are -- you know a guy is good or bad based on whether, if you went back in time to kill baby Hitler, he would stop you. "We all instinctively evaluate that moral standing," the second person argues.

But rather than arriving at a deep philosophical insight, the first person points out that this "moral evaluation" is really just a stimulus-response reaction -- we're disgusted by villainy and attracted to heroism, but that doesn't necessarily mean there are objective moral truths, just that humans have consistent emotional reactions. The comic then cuts to its punchline: "Why do we take these long conversations when we have kidney transplant committees?" -- suggesting that if moral truths really were self-evident, we wouldn't need elaborate institutional processes to make life-and-death ethical decisions.

The Humor

The comedy works on multiple levels. First, there's the bait-and-switch of using the Hitler time-travel thought experiment (a well-worn internet philosophy trope) as supposed "proof" of moral realism, only to have it immediately deflated by the observation that gut reactions aren't the same as objective truths. The final panel's pivot to kidney transplant committees is the real kicker -- it grounds the abstract philosophical debate in a brutally practical reality where moral decisions are so difficult that we need entire bureaucratic systems to handle them, undercutting the idea that morality is simple or self-evident.

References

The comic engages with the philosophical debate between moral realism (the view that objective moral facts exist) and moral anti-realism or emotivism (the view that moral statements merely express emotional attitudes). The Hitler time-travel scenario is a staple of pop philosophy discussions. Kidney transplant committees are real medical ethics boards that must make difficult allocation decisions about who receives life-saving organs.