is it ethical to kill others so your family has healthcare and food?
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Depends.
Are you killing an authoritarian who has denied you it?
Or are you killing an innocent person to be granted it?
right, in short is there a good impartial way to determine a priori whether use of force, especially use of lethal force, is ethical? see, i'm primarily an absurdist and use of force is the absolute last thing that comes into my mind. i know there's a lot of literature out there and unfortunately so much of it is copaganda.
part of me just wants to say "pffff l'antisémitisme" but then i'm falling for another trap.
Everyone is going to have their own moral code on that.
My personal belief is that violence is justified when used for defense, my definition of defending goes beyond mortal peril and into more abstract, i.e. health insurance ceo's.
There's too much literature at times, I feel some people get hung up on the who said what rather than the general concepts being discussed. I prefer less theory and more praxis.
The comic is far too optimistic.
The kid would have been shot and/or detained as well.
The kid isn't even wearing handcuffs - this is obviously fake.
Whoa there friend, we need someone to continue the cycle into the next generation
Who said capitalism doesn’t think long term?
Of course, a system that perpetuates poverty and offers that option as the only promise of a dignified future has nothing to do with it.
I don't know, I'm not American and it's clear that when it's your house that gets smashed up, those considerations don't matter, but I also don't think that oversimplification helps.
Yes, but isn't it so much more refreshing to create a fictional everyman that commits murder while wearing a uniform? This is in the same class as a Stonetoss comic.
"I'd rather argue with strawmen than parse out the complicated reality," is all this comic says.
Strawmen? Are you kidding me. I have this argument multiple times a year with shitstains who think it’s acceptable to join the military to escape hardship.
Real, honest question here: how are they defining "hardship"? That's a huge range of subjective circumstances there.
To be clear, I'm not going to fire back by saying "well, that's justifiable". Rather, I'm curious where said "shitstains" are coming from and how they frame their choices. I only have the broad strokes here, and would love some more nuance to this story, however anecdotal. Cheers.
I blame the system.
There are parts of the country that prop up a rather sinister dichotomy: live here and flirt with the poverty line, or enlist and better your economic prospects (and maybe take a bullet). You can see these outcomes in the faces of the homeless, the working poor, and veterans that are functional members of society. Our society does the rest by having almost no social safety net, lavishing the wealthy with praise, and vilifying poor people, all at the same time. Lastly, recruitment targets 18-22 year olds, which are people whose brains are in the final years of their developmental cycle, and have not yet begun to understand how the rest of the world works. This all operates together to push people towards putting on a uniform.
Solve any of the problems above and the comic will start to look like a thing of the past.
Edit: While we're on the topic, the IT industry has a tidy white-collar equivalent: You can make more money and get more job security, but you have to be indifferent about how your work is used. Usually, the more ethically grey (or outright evil) the job, the more it pays.
Ethical? No war is never ethical. Necessary? Yes these conflicts have escalated to the point of violence.
Ethical? Hard to say. But certainly heroic, no? Thank you for your service!
I don't think they got your sarcasm.
Poe's Law hitting me hard today.
The comic is depicting an ICE agent who has killed a child's parents and is trying to justify it to the child.
This occurred either literally through a no-knock raid or perhaps metaphorically through the systemic abuses of the detainment system which through neglect has killed many people.
It is pointing out that willingly becoming an active cog in that machine is in and out itself an act of evil despite the desperate reasons the government has manufactured to force some of its citizens into it.
Maybe you knew this in which case we disagree but I think there's a non-zero chance someone could misinterpret it as being about soldiers and warfare so I figured it was worth the explanation.
The comic is depicting an ICE agent
Where does it say ICE?
Picked it up from context clues.
The biggest context clue for you should be the US army uniform and 3rd Infantry Division patch on the helmet. This is probably commentary on two decades of deployments in Afghanistan.
Ah that makes sense, I guess they're just bringing home they've been exporting to the globe for centuries.