Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2022-06-16 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Explanation

This comic is a lengthy discussion about the trolley problem that escalates through increasingly absurd variations. It begins with the standard trolley problem, then introduces the surgeon variation (where a doctor can kill one person to save five with organ transplants). A character argues these are not equivalent because the trolley scenario is a freak accident while the surgeon scenario creates perverse systemic incentives -- if surgeons could harvest organs at will, nobody would visit hospitals, and society would collapse.

The discussion continues to spiral as one character points out that the trolley problem was meant to be an abstraction about morality, not a realistic policy proposal, and the other counters that abstractions must still be internally consistent. The comic ends with the observation that to truly "solve" the trolley problem, you would first need to solve the entire structure of the universe -- a reductio ad absurdum that pokes fun at how moral philosophy thought experiments inevitably expand in scope until they become intractable. It satirizes both the trolley problem industry in philosophy and the tendency of smart people to over-complicate simple moral intuitions.

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