As an activity in one of this troper's classes, the professor introduced a scenario of a man living in a small Chinese village in 500 AD and told us that if we unanimously chose to kill him, there would be world peace. Naturally, it was impossible to come to a unanimous decision in a class of opinionated college students, and in fact most people were adamantly in favor of letting him live. More and more details were added to his story -- he committed some petty crimes in his youth, his village is experiencing a famine, etc. -- but we continued to vote in favor of sparing this man's life, in spite of some lively debate, even if it put world peace out of reach. Finally, we were told he was diagnosed with a fatal illness and was given just 20 days to live and managed to kill him off with a slim majority. The final message the professor read to us was both poetic and euphemistic: "All of us have a candle to guide the world. When you chose to put this Mandarin man's candle out, in turn the flames of all of our candles were put out. Congratulations. World peace." This troper half-expected to hear this page's title at the end of it.

Did nobody ask ''why'' there'd be world peace if you killed an otherwise insignificant man? I mean, it sounds pretty illogical.

We did ask, but we weren't given any information that wasn't on the card. It was supposed to be an issue of morality, not practicality. Of course, the point was kind of rendered defunct after we found out we were tricked...

...this mandarin's mancandle?

You do not want to know how we put it out

This is the sort of question that can only be answered with TroperTales/GenreSavvy, really. "Don't kill him, because that's the obvious answer!"

It still doesn't make sense.

How did you get "a slim majority" on what had to be a unanimous decision?

Forgot to add this...We had to bargain with the teacher for her to allow us to end the exercise with a majority for the final card. A good chunk of the class was just interested in leaving class early.

Seems to me like an abstraction of an (more or less) old ethic experiment which goes something like this: If an empty train would head full speed right into a train station full of people where it would crash, killing many of them and only you could rescue them by setting a switch to guide the train to another railtrack, would you do it? Yes, obviously. But there's a twist: Theres a man standing on the other, unused railtrack whitout knowing what's going on, so you would kill him if you tried to rescue the other people. Would you still do it? The logical answer would be "yes", but most people answer "no". The example with the Chinese man above seems to be similar.

Train tracks aren't very wide, and you said the guy was just standing there. If he doesn't have the sense to simply step off the tracks to get out of the way, then maybe he really was TooDumbToLive.

Seconded. what's he doing on the rails anyway? better him than a station full of people minding their own business

Sounds like it teaches more about dealing with a LiteralGenie than anything about ethics.

In fact, such a small change in the past would create a ripple in time, so no one living today would've been born at all. So the professor was right.

He only had twenty days to live. Not much would be accomplished in twenty days.

SpaceWhaleAesop, anyone?

Did anyone ask what the man thought? Some people, if told his or her death would result in world peace, would consent to death.

Actually, since the professor knew what was going to happen, but chose not to tell despite being a human himself, he was the one who did a NiceJobBreakingItHero : destroying humanity by choosing not to tell all he knows if it were real, and from a teaching point of view, turning an interesting ethical debate (Are you allowed to kill innocents to save others, and if so, how many?) into a pre-determined YouBastard with plenty of FridgeLogic. You can either have an ethical dilemma or a practical dilemma. Pure ethics is only applicable when you have all the information, and if this were a practical dilemma, your professor would be at fault for hiding significant information. You didn't commit the heinous act, your professor did.

This troper was part of a weird exercise where a bunch of characters were made up and put in a situation, we would all try to change the world in small ways to get the characters to do what we wanted. Unfortunately, we all liked one character and not the other. The character interpreted our extremely frequent messages as some kind of omnipresent being trying to watch and control him (oops) and ended up completely flipping out and killing all of the other characters before being gunned down by the police.

This troper had a Calculus class where the teacher was going to give about twenty minutes of lecture before handing out the weekly quiz, after which we were free to go. So said troper talked her into skipping the lecture for another day and just giving us the quiz so we could leave earlier. The teacher agreed... only for us to find out that her planned lecture included an example of a problem that was in the quiz, that we had never gone over otherwise. Derp.

this troper once cleaned up all the dishes for his mom .It was all fine until I got to this one pan filled with grease. I dumped it out and cleaned it. When she got home she told me she needed that grease to cook something and dumping it in the sink could clog it up.

In an RP on fanfiction.net, Welcome to Planaria, Kouya breaks basically everything. Yeah, that cool guy there with the glasses, Cormac? He has been using you to get his enemies off his back so he could summon an EldritchAbomination, drain the abomination of its power, and then pass along the power to some idiot with a God Complex, all to make himself look like TheHero when he kills said idiot DeaderThanDead and make Kouya look like the BigBad in the process. Thanks for killing the Five Aura Knights, Kouya, thanks a lot.

This troper is a bassoonist. Couple her clumsiness with the fact that bassoon reeds break if you so much as look at them the wrong way, and you have a very bad combination. A little while ago, she ordered three bassoon reeds from the internet; two of which broke. She used the good one for a couple of weeks, and decided that she should try breaking in one of the bad reeds. She then proceeded to adjust aforementioned bad reed. And then she realised that she just adjusted her good reed. Now she is stuck with one leaky reed, one reed that plays too sharply and loudly, and one completely useless reed. And there's a concert in two days. And band festival in a week.

On this one site I was on there was a discussion where someone said a radical feminist claimed ALL males are the root of every problem and they should ALL be eliminated (as in zero males are around anymore). In the interest of proving this to be retarded I played the genie who granted the wish. All men are gone, along with the evils they apparently caused... and the ability to create future generations to live in this utopia. I can't exactly say the feminist is a hero, but she did a nice job of breaking "it" in this fictional situation.

There would still be sperm around. And pregnant women.

All men would probrably include fetuses with an XY chromosome, thus meaning they would be gone. And plus the sperm left behind wouldn't last forever.

This troper had to help his dad fix a well pump that his dad had run over a few months earlier.

This troper's sister once hung up when some random person who she didn't know called our house. Normally, that would be fine, except for the fact that this person was calling to confirm if we wanted our only garage door fixed. I will also mention that our only car was stuck inside our garage because of this. Yeah.

Some people call this troper lazy. I'm not; I'm just a living embodiment of this trope. The people who know me are always quick to say, 'Thank you for offering, but we've got it handled. Go read your book/play on your computer/sit in the corner out of our way.' When I finally convince the people who don't know me that I am willing to help, it usually doesn't take them long to tell me the same thing. I remember I once broke up an argument in middle school by beginning to cut something for home ec. class. One of the boys noticed what I was doing, immediately backed out of the argument, and demanded I carefully hand the knife over before I hurt myself.

Here in the UK we have a Referendum on the voting system coming up. I'm jaded and disillusioned with all politics and was going to not vote (counting as a small "No" vote) I was not sold at all by the "Yes" campaigner who spoke to me. It was only when a "No" campaigner spoke to me and insinuated pompously that I(And all voters) was too stupid to understand AV and couldn't vote intelligently thus should vote no. (Oh I understood it I just didn't care) I was so offended and furious at this clown talking to me like that I switched sides to "Yes" PERSUASION FAIL!

Averted. The "No" campaign won that referendum.

The PowerRangers, VRTroopers, and BeetleBorgs series all got added to Netflix (except the latest season of Rangers). Saban Brands then took down most other (illegal) sources of the shows, which apart from MightyMorphinPowerRangers are off air and thus a case of KeepCirculatingTheTapes. Those of us who don't live in the United States and thus can't access Netflix are pissed off to say the least. Nice job alienating the fandom, Saban.