Ask Lemmy

Power does not corrupt. It reveals. If you have the power to do whatever you want, it becomes apparent what you wanted to do. If having this power makes you do evil deeds, it means you already wanted to do evil deeds but lacked the power to.

Dude. they ain't morals if the only thing stopping me is consequence

Honestly I think I would mostly use it for naps. So many naps.

This is an awful lot like the idea that the only thing keeping people from raping and murdering is belief in god. It says a lot more about the person claiming it than anyone else.

your morals would go out the window.

Why would they? I don't enjoy hurting people, and I wouldn't start enjoying it if I could magically get away with it.

If I had the power to stop time I'd stop it, travel all around the world putting live grenades in the pockets of every type of evil greedy cunt I could find, then start it again and wait for the fireworks to ensue. Every time someone starts making psychopath money again? Suddenly a grenade appears in their pocket. Funding wars, poison and incarceration? Every person with a finger in haliburton or monsanto, turned into red mist at a board meeting. Shareholders, exploding in hot tubs, saudi princes splattered in their shitty lambos. Every jordan belfort wannabe fuckstick exquisitely morphed into charcuterie.

Grenade morality.

The measure of a man's true character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Weird self report. The only thing stopping you from being evil is social pressure?

If I had the power to stop time, my morals would suddenly become enforced.

Your morals wouldn't be changing.

Your behavior would.

Those kind of darker 'realistic' shows have a very cynical view of human nature where people are inherently bad and the social contract is what keeps us at bay from becoming monsters. I dont agree with that assessment (though I did as an edgy teenager)

The rich and powerful act the was they do not because they can but because they have nothing to strive for. IMO people require a certain amount of conflict and struggle in order to truly attain happiness and a fulfilling life. You also need to learn new skills to have fresh experiences. See this excellent documentary on the mouse utopia experiments.

You cant really appreciate success until you've failed miserably and earned it through blood sweat and tears. If you live your whole life being too rich to fail, and get everything you've ever wanted without having to work and struggle for it, then you eventually run out of things to want and life becomes hollow. Food looses its taste, drugs no longer get you high, regular and even kinky sex looses its appeal, luxury and convinence becomes meaningless as does social status. The only thing left is the thrill of depravity.

Time powers wouldn't make a normal person with proper life goals and average moral values instantly go off the deep end. Only people who think money and power buys happiness.

Just because The Boys is gory and pessimistic doesn't mean it's realistic

Losing my morals? Goodness no! My morals would be the only thing left, as there would be no one who could stop me. Justice for the wronged, help for the needy, and punishment for the wicked that knows no limits.

Is there a tyrant that threatens peace? Bound and delivered to the United nations. A disaster trapping civilians? Every injured person into the first hospital bed available, worldwide in a moment. Hell, I could read every medical book ever and become the most studied doctor ever.

Consequences aren't the only thing that cause people to act they way they act. It's certainly one reason some people don't do certain things.

One reason Homelander is the way he is is because how he was raised. If tomorrow I got all Homelander's powers, I wouldn't instantly become a psychopath. I mean it might occur to me that any action I might take, and no one could stop me or punish me. But as Homelander observed (at least in the prior season, I'm not entirely caught up) that alienation from his fellow supers is actually a consequence he deals with.

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.

You know that those were still written by humans to tell a story, right? I wouldn't derive any universal laws from them.

If you're honest with yourself about your morals, they wouldn't change

Mine wouldn't

Honestly, I'd primarily use the power to sleep

I genuinely believe it'd depend on the person.

First: Most people who use cheats in video games eventually either stop using them or stop playing the game altogether, because it gets boring.

Many people who win the lottery get a bit of splurging out of their system, then invest the rest into financial security but keep living their loves mostly like before.

So there genuinely might be some people who will eventually settle into just fixing their most glaring problems and then just keep living "regularly", possibly with the occasional minor indulgence.

Then there's people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce their beliefs even without superpowers - imagine super-powered criminals and terrorists, but also super-powered firefighters, doctors or scientists.

And then there's everything in between.

So, if it's just one (or maybe five) people getting superpowers, it'd probably be a roll of the dice. Maybe there'd just be one person going through life easier. Maybe we'd get lucky and someone solves a major problem for us. Maybe we get unlucky and every president that doesn't reinstate segregation gets assassinated.

If it's more people getting powers... well, there's already a lot of fiction exploring that in-depth.

I think it depends. Most people could already get away with a lot of immoral or antisocial behaviors without super powers, but most of us still don't.

The Boys is an interesting one because there are hundreds of supes out there, enough to have a community of depravity. If you were the only one with super powers and you decided to majorly abuse them, you'd be a social outcast, even if you didnt face strict punishment, which most of us would really not want.

Well, a lot of people would suddenly find themselves with their pants down in public. So better put on clean underwear, people. The Timestopper is in town.

Ah, the Christian argument.

Me, personally? My morals are not defined by my own ability to weild power. Except maybe where the power to make someone else's life better is morally right.

The average person is a fuckingidiot and would expertly execute the "time travel" equivalent of taking a shit with their pants on.

I'm a little tired of everyone being such a doomer all the time tbh. No they wouldn't, and The Boys isn't realistic, it's cynical. Maybe you believe you would start doing immoral things given this power, but that doesn't mean that everyone else would. If the only thing stopping you from doing it was the potential consequences, then you didn't have those morals in the first place; you always wanted to do those things, you just didn't have the ability.

That being said, I would totally do things that are illegal but not against my own morals. Do you know what you could do with that kind of power? You'd be like Dr. Manhattan, the only superpowered individual in the world. Anything you want to be the case (physically), given enough time, you could make it happen. Whether your desires are good or bad, there's really no reason not to enact them. TL;DR: Things go very differently depending on who gets this power.

You get that power, you use it on people who are making the world a shittier place first.

Now, that's not precisely moral, but let's be honest, beyond a bit of minor larceny there's not a whole lot of personal gain you can realistically achieve.

Steal a truckload of cash? Sure, but then you've got to launder the heck out of it, and I've seen Ozark, that's more drama than I want in my life even if I had the skills, which I don't. And nobody pays cash even for groceries any more, have to wait for one of the non-card registers to open up and it's a pain in the ass. Maybe you could rig a horse race or something, but the people involved in serious gambling are very good at spotting anomalous wins, and your life wouldn't be worth dick the second time you tried it.

That pretty much leaves pranks and murder, and you're a damn fool if you bring that within a dozen miles of any kind of personal connection.

Which pretty much only leaves assassination of high-level assholes as something that would a:) make a noticeable difference, b:) keep you under the radar and c:) be immensely satisfying.

Honestly I'd love the power of being able to see any point in space and time. To witness the birth and death of stars and look around alien shores. To peek at the absurdity of the diversity of life eons before human history.

I'd probably go mad pretty fast but hey, it'd be pretty neat.

Yes but I would take out every dictator on earth I could before. A knife and a bicycle, go right over the DMZ and then make sure Putin gets his.

This only applies if your morals are based on nothing more than consequences, which I would argue is no moral code at all.

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.

Studies suggest that autistic folks would be much more likely to stick to their morals. So there's that.

This one time in high school...

(I didn't want to declare my gender, because 'the site that shall not be named' is an absolute dick to women, but I'm feeling like that might not be as much of a thing, here)

... I came across a group of 5 or 6 huge 6ft footballers, in a circle, kicking this small indigenous kid around and taunting him, I'm half their size, a girl ,probably 12, and just about the shyest quietest kid in school, but when I saw that, the pure rage that welled up in me, has no equivalent on earth, my muscles all lock up and knot and I (somehow) came out with a deep booming growl of a voice, that made all a these blokes just freeze dead, I boom at them, "what the fuck do you all think you're doing!!" , and in a slow angry tone I add "do you all feel like big men, a heap of you, beating up on one guy" . And I stood there, all rage, staring them down. The indigenous boy noticed they were all frozen and scattered along the ground and grabbed his bag and pelted.

I realised this needed to end, and he had escaped, so I tried to throw out some finalising statement of 'do you feel proud' or'this better never happen again' or something, I don't really know, because by this stage, I'm gripped with ultimate terror of what I've done. These guys are twice my size, and happily beat up kids smaller than them. If they snap out of this and realise, I'm easy prey, I'm done for. I fake a hold on my rage, turn and (painfully) slowly walk away and proceed to lock myself in the girls toilet and cry for the rest of the day, expecting a mob of footballers to be out there, after snapping out of their trance, ready to dust me. But I made it home, unscathed. Those footballers gave me death stares, the rest of high school, but none of them ever spoke to me or gave me trouble, really. A taunt here and there, but always when surrounded by classmates. The indigenous boy came and found me and thanked me, later, I asked him if that had happened since and he said, yeah. But he still really appreciated me sticking up for him, that day.

I didn't really think about what I did that day, those words to those footballers just fell out of my head, they rose up from the depths of my soul, I didn't really feel like I controlled it.

But also, I know I'd do immoral shit, if I got superpowers, I'd go around and kill all the billionaires and dictators. I'd probably give them an ultimatum, give away your money or die.

I feel like the boys just represents a more realistic subsection of humans, there would be a percentage that are narcissists and have powers, and a percentage that are highly moralistic, like in gen v. And I could see capitalism being the real bad guy, in real life, just like in the boys.

Not at all. It's easy to get away with things even without superpowers. If I don't do something, it's because I don't want to be a person that does that thing.

This is an idea that has been around for very long time. Plato used the Ring of Gyges to talk about it - which went on to inspire Wells' The Invisible Man - and influenced Tolkien among others.

My morals wouldn't change at all, my behavior would change since I don't need to worry about consequences of fixing systemic injustice by doing "sick crimes"

For some I’m sure that’s the case and would behave pretty remorselessly.

Others have a conscience.

Others still would engage in shitty behavior but probably destroy themselves pretty quickly dealing with the mental problems of doing what they know is shitty.

Be honest? Yeah, I’d do stuff I shouldn’t. But nothing I couldn’t sleep at night over. But one thing I know I’d do is find some way to bring down everyone fucking over regular people. Even if it’s as simple as stopping time, placing a recording device in a boardroom, and letting it record them plotting to fuck over whoever, and then retrieving it for public display.

Don’t know how much good it would do.