Saying “Lives are to be spent, that’s all” in a paragraph with chattel slavery isn’t generally the winningest strategy.

I think I figured out the biggest problem with Patrick’s philosophy. He claims to have an end goal which justifies the means, which could be argued is true. But he’s still only human and has failing. By putting himself in a position where he can kill people for no real good reason (“because it amused me to do so”), and by killing people (admittedly for good reasons) on a regular basis, he runs the risk of losing sight of the end goal and just killing people he doesn’t like.
Yes, deontology is generally less efficient, but I’m pretty sure Patrick is on the verge of just losing sight of his goal, if he has not already.

“How many pessimist does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“Why bother, it will just break eventually.”

Okay, a simplification of his argument, but his final point of “Why save anyone, they’ll die eventually?” just smacks of ethical laziness.

Well we are at least back to something like a conversation again.

…I think Patrick needs a therapist. I’m not being funny or anything. I really think he would benefit from someone to talk to, whose mind he cannot read. All this pouring out of him, going from one pole of heated anger, and the next to ‘why bother’ despair… Having a good idea but letting the doubt spoil it before it even gets off the ground?

Is Pat depressed?

Or does he have a knowledge of how to tug people’s (especially Alison’s) heartstrings, until they don’t know how they could ever have been angry at him?

…DAMN I love this webcomic. I never read a Batman comic that made me question the motivations of the villain.

“Everyone dies eventually.” Yeah, and everyone lives in a vacuum where their actions absolutely make no impact in the world or future. Yep, that’s how it works.
Allison was ready to punt Patty through the window in panel 3. “Rape is special type of evil” indeed.

The world has a tendency to do that, when seriously considered for any length of time.

Hahaha, she took him by surprise with her reaction !
And that helped him regain his composure, He’s answering to her speech again rather than direct thoughts.

I dunno, it’s been ages since I dabbled in the history of the American Civil War, but it always felt like the only way for the war to be avoided was for either a) The North to not push for the abolition of slavery, or b) let the south go peacefully.

And a) really just feels like it would have postponed the other question the Civil War was about (and honestly, despite the reframing, was probably the principle issue the war settled) which was the primacy of Federal Rights over State Rights.

I feel like Patrick seems to be ready to snap. He’s been swinging wildly between emotional states. Calm and friendly, to mocking, to disdainful and now… seems completely despondent. …If he’s taking in people’s minds and he can’t stop it, when does he get to release some of these thoughts?

I understand the analogy between “mental contact without consent” and “sexual contact without consent”, but I think we call rape “rape” thinking it’s something that leaves the victim worse off, and I’m not sure the scientists would be traumatized even if they found out they were pirated (and I think “mindrape” usually means telepathic *torture*, or perhaps brainwashing – not that you can’t use it otherwise). Besides, one could extend the analogy to “visual contact without consent” – do you want to? (Yes, abduction is bad, but Mary isn’t going against kidnappers for, say, money.)

As said elsewhere, it could be something else: people have been murdered for actual good reasons. Never raped.

“Also, do you really think that an order like that ends without innocents dying?”

Yes. If the one giving the order wanted that. Not that even the best professionals have 100% accuracy, but I think it’s close enough. That so many innocents died in Iraq even when it was the USA attacking was … a good part of the *point*.

And we live in a gynocracy, right?

I think so. Rape is a personal violation on an individual basis. Not everyone gets raped, but everyone dies eventually. Some of us more than once.

As someone pointed out above, his philosophy might not be internally consistent for a couple big reasons. The biggest one is that he got his powers when he was 14, and his brain doesn’t finish connecting the parts that control emotions and rational thoughts, respectively, until sometime when you’re 21.

So he had to deal with seeing how lost everyone is at the age of 14, and his brain, still developing to this day, is having even bigger issues dealing with it than an adult.

Really, just look up and find it. I didn’t get my point across as well as the commenter that inspired this did.

I don’t think he necessarily needs to be isolated from everyone, he just needs to find a therapist in another city and have sessions via phone.

The British abolition of slavery was in a very different context: slavery only existed in the colonies (it has been made illegal in Great Britain by judicial decision many years prior); Britain had already abolished the slave trade, without which the colonial slave system was unsustainable because slavery on sugar plantation was brutal to level that slaves died faster than new slaves were born; and the white colonists couldn’t have rebelled, because they were completely dependent on Britain both for trade and for protection (as black slaves far outnumbered white colonists); and slavery was not essential to the British economy.

In the American South, the slave system was sustainable without the slave trade, and had been for years; slavery was still brutal, but more people were born than died. Slavery was absolutely central to the Southern economy, with slaves being the most valuable commodity – the only comparable economic change in the present-day US would be if you tried to abolish land ownership entirely. Think about the chances of accomplishing that with nothing but moral claims as your argument for it.

From James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom:

In [1860], the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined..

And it wasn’t just an economic system, it was a social system. Southern white people with no slaves still supported slavery, because it gave them status over slaves, and it fed their economic aspirations: they might be poor now, but they could get rich enough to hope of owning slaves in the future. If slavery ended, they lost that status. Heck, the American South went to great lengths for 200 years after the Civil War to put in place a system that replicated slavery as closely as possible. They used sharecropping, tying black people to white plantation-owners’ land by exploiting the use of debt. They used terror, burning the homes (and often the occupants) of black families who achieved any success. They used prison, sending black men to jail for years for trivial offences such as “loitering” or gambling and assigning them to do forced labour (and often renting them out to landowners to labour on plantations). They used Jim Crow to re-introduce and entrench the social control and social inequality of black people that existed under slavery.

I can’t see a reason to think the South would have willingly abolished a system that they spent a century working with all their might to re-introduce.