How do you kill that which has no life paradox

Brief moral and political points on South Park's 'how do you kill that which has no life' - and origin of fart jokes.


This will come as no surprise to South Park fans, but it should nevertheless be mentioned. In the episode "Make love, not Warcraft" (season 10, episode 8), there is this hilarious scene:

So here comes the paradox then: how do you kill that which has no life?

South Park raised the bar regarding every aspect of humor: it is equally provocative as obscene, there is always something to be said about poo, and it remains hilarious to be point of soiling yourself.
Nothing South Park has done is original, they admit as much in "Simpsons already did it!" episode (season 6, episode 7). In fact, the very idea of a fart joke goes back as far back as Aristophanes (c. 446 BC - c. 386 BC):

SOCRATES (To STREPSIADES) Did you hear their voices mingling with the awful growling of the thunder? STREPSIADES Oh! adorable Clouds, I revere you and I too am going to let off my thunder, so greatly has your own affrighted me. (He farts.) Faith! whether permitted or not, I must, I must crap!

(Aristophanes' The Clouds, 419 BC)

But what about this paradox? If we take the paradox more seriously, the idea of killing something that has no life is not necessarily that problematic. This all depends on definitions of life and death (or technically killing) - philosophy reduced to semantics.

So let us look at killing from a moral point of view: is killing, as one of the commandments dictates, morally 'problematic' - or bad/evil as Christians would have it? Perhaps what this paradox shows us is more in the direction of hypocrisy (if not another paradox) - our Western civilizations (all in fact) have murdered without a second thought - and what is worse, they still do. So the question we should ask is not so much whether killing the other is morally 'problematic'; but try to think when it is and when it is not. Interestingly enough (and yet again paradoxically), this is not a question for ethics - but one for politics!

I am sure to return to this point more often, so I will it at that - to keep the humor going.
Full episode of "Make love, not Warcraft" can be found on Vimeo.
For US visitors, full episode of "Simpsons already did it!" can be found on Hulu.