The topic I'm here to discuss today is would you given the opportunity to travel back in time, to a point of your choosing within Adolf Hitlers life and kill him?
This is more of a philosophical question looking at the effects and importance of history, chaos theory, accountability, probability and a few other themes, I eagerly await to hear others thoughts on this philosophical topic.
I'll start by going over a few of the big questions.
Naturally there's far more than I'm able to cover here, this is a springboard for deeper (I hope) discussion.
The act itself
Could you kill another human, even one linked directly with great suffering?
We as humans generally for the most part, I would say are rational beings with an aversion to homicide, but even so if you felt capable one would have to decide the point in which to commit this act, when he's a younger individual who had not yet done anything, or as an older adult where plans had already been put into motion?
Can you punish a child for doing something you know it will eventually do but hasn't done yet?
Is it even worth committing the act once the plans are in motion, what would that really change? It could even potentially be worse.
Replaceability
Paying attention to his younger environment could give you more reason to be unsure whether killing him is a sure-fire way to eliminate the potential harms of an adult Hitler. Is there any reason to think that his environment as he grew up was unique? That his immediate family embodied parenting that was uniquely genocide-friendly?
If he had not survived to adulthood, do you think it impossible, or even unlikely, that someone else raised in the same cultural environment could not have taken the same political path, might have advocated for and instituted similar policies considering the political climate at the time? Hitler did not have to twist nearly as many arms in implementing his will as one might have hoped after all.
Chaos Theory
The butterfly effect is possibly the biggest thing to consider for me, very small changes in a very complex system can have very big effects especially when multiplied over time.
Hitler was not an insignificant person, so if you did succeed, given the impact he had on so many lives, you’d drastically alter the future/present, with unforeseen consequences.
Say whoever replaced him was ineffectual, the war ended with reduced loss of life and destruction. In this timeline, maybe no German rocket scientists ended up in the US. The space programme loses some of its best minds, and happens more slowly (or not at all?) The space race resulted in a breath-taking amount of scientific advancement all that would be lost.
But technology isn't just one thing, in saving potentially millions of lives you have also almost irrefutably 'killed' many more by way of them never being born, couples separated, families never to be, assuming you don't even erase yourself from existence too.
Would you consider it as killing if the people had never been born in the new timeline?
What makes the lives of one group more valuable than the other in your choice?
Do you think it's wise to attempt to alter such significant historical events with such devastating ramifications, or is history simply something better taken and learned from?
Be sure to vote in the poll and tell us what you think.
I hope this to be an interesting topic.
and remember be polite to all.
