1y ago

Be honest: if you had the power to stop time, your morals would go out the window.

Pretty much the title. I've been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality.

I think it's easy for us normies to respect other people and their property because there are clear consequences for violating social norms. But what would the average person do if they had super powers?

You're viewing a single thread.

273 comments

I feel like the average person wouldn't become immoral but they would probably become kind of a jerk. At least personally I wouldn't hurt anybody but damn would I use super speed or invisibility to pull some incredible pranks.
- I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I'd feel so uncomfortable with myself that I'd hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.
  
  Bro planned out his whole character arc
- Yeah everyone in this thread spouting social control theory forgets that humans have millions of years of evolution for social living, and the scale of moral ambiguity definitely scales with that to some degree. Most people would likely stop short of things which would seriously harm their community, and the knock-on effects of fairly small amounts of deviance would likely become apparent enough to keep most people from anything more than victimless crimes and simple mischief.
  It's really no different than the time travel paradox in a way. You assassinate a tyrant, and see the horrific civil war it causes and then try to intervene to correct that mistake and it all spirals out of control until it's legitimately way worse than before. Most people would take that lesson and build a much more limited moral code around their powers, if they didn't do that from day one.
- I'd put a fruit loop on 16 billion pinky fingers

273 comments