Trolley
Explanation
The Joke
The comic features what appears to be a philosophy professor or ethics lecturer addressing an audience. In the first panel, he announces: "Good news everyone. We've generated a trolley problem solver. Instead of trying to reason out how you should behave in the trolley problem, we have generated trolley ethics -- that is, grey-area-stage ethical rules."
He then explains the system: "At one extreme, all society members would be required to sacrifice themselves to save one other person. At the other extreme, we can only kill one. We can generate a scale of morally acceptable intermediate options." He continues: "We boiled it and can say this with five sigma confidence: the answer is exactly at the 50% mark. For any forced-choice trolley-style dilemma, it makes no difference. The person has no standing to claim that the problem has ethical content."
In the next panel, someone objects: "But wait, do real people regularly face trolley-style forced choices?" The presenter responds: "The only ethics questions real-life people regularly face involve total war and introductory philosophy classes." The final panel shows audience members saying "This must be abolished!"
The Humor
The comic satirizes the philosophical obsession with the trolley problem by taking it to its logical extreme. Rather than endlessly debating what to do, the characters try to solve it computationally, only to discover that the answer is essentially "it doesn't matter" -- the problem has no ethical content at the exact midpoint. The deeper joke is in the follow-up: trolley problems almost never occur in real life. The only contexts where people face genuine forced-choice dilemmas between lives are in total war and in introductory philosophy classes. This is a pointed critique of how much philosophical energy is spent on unrealistic thought experiments.
The final panel, where the audience demands the finding "must be abolished," satirizes how resistant people can be to conclusions that undermine their favorite intellectual pastimes.
References
The trolley problem is a famous thought experiment in ethics, first introduced by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 and later expanded by Judith Jarvis Thomson. It asks whether it is morally permissible to divert a runaway trolley to kill one person in order to save five. The "five sigma" reference is borrowed from particle physics, where five-sigma confidence is the threshold for declaring a discovery (a probability of about 1 in 3.5 million that the result is due to chance). Using this standard for an ethics problem is itself part of the joke.