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Utilitarian Judge Slaps Shrimp Boat Captain With Five Hundred Million Consecutive One-Minute Sentences
🕑 Added 2025-09-18 17:01:06 +0000 UTCWhat’s so funny about the famous Utility Monster thought experiment is that the same line of reasoning it expects to be viewed as a self-evidently absurd extrapolation of utilitarian logic is ALSO deployed as a totally serious defense of animal consumption. Oh, so it’s completely ridiculous that we should all suffer for the whims of some hyper-sensitive fictional being? Got it. But it’s ALSO totally morally acceptable to put nine kinds of meat on your fuckass subway sandwich, because they’re just dumb animals that have lesser evolved brains than you, and don’t experience consciousness or suffering on the same level? Motherfucker, YOU’RE THE UTILITY MONSTER! Is it heinous moral absurdism, or a totally banal non-issue?
The shrimp thing was inspired by the latter part of this Alex O’ Conner video, where the two discuss an interesting and lesser-known angle of the horrors of factory farming. Admittedly, catching shrimp in the ocean is leagues more ethical than farming than, which is what is discussed in the video, but I held my thumb on the scale in this case in order to make the joke work in the last paragraph. Also had to thumb-scale the fact that shrimp-catching has been completely dead in the northeast for over a decade now, thanks to climate change and overfishing. Oopsie.
Is it the funniest comic ever? Does it comport to my usual style? No, maybe not. But the headline popped into my head and felt sort of ‘Onion’-y, which was a seal of approval in my book. I have a fondness for numeric hyperbolism, what can i say? I totally get now why Jewish Apocalypticists always mentioned that heaven had 365,000,000,000 of such-and-such flying around.
Utility monster makes his second appearance here, first seen in this comic, and Judge Paul Danser is of course a reference to Peter Singer, father of Utilitarianism.
