What if Captain America just gave the Soul Stone to Hawkeye and Black Widow? Sure you may get a time loop there but it would save a life.
I don’t think Steve is remotely a utilitarian. Also, that logic seems like it leads pretty directly to “Thanos was right,” territory. If adding people to the world is unethical, because they will experience suffering, wouldn’t painlessly snapping them out of existence be an ethical act, since they won’t be able to experience pain anymore?
Sure, there’s a lot of future events that will get invalidated pretty quickly if he starts acting on what he knows about the future. (How much you want to bet that, in the MCU, Kennedy’s assassination was a Hydra plot?) But he also knows a lot about what happens on other planets, that won’t be effected by any changes he makes on Earth. No amount of smashing Hydra cells on Earth will prevent Thor from being exiled to New Mexico in 2011, for example. And he knows about people and organizations that pre-date the bifurcation of the timeline, but that he didn’t personally encounter until the early 21st century, like the wizards of Kamar Taj.
Your second point in particular bothers me, because how is that not a question that applies to literally everything you do, regardless of time travel? How did he know stopping Hydra in Winter Soldier wouldn’t lead to a worse outcome than letting them win? Maybe if he’d let Red Skull win WWII, the Earth would have been in a better position to stop Thanos in 2018? He sure as hell was taking a big risk with the future when he opposed the Sokovia Accords and split the Avengers. Any action you take in any context could potentially have unseen disastrous consequences. This isn’t an argument against meddling the time stream, this is an argument against doing anything, ever.
But he couldn’t get that Stone until Black Widow died. At best, you would create an alternate timeline. At worst, you create a paradox that rips the multiverse apart. No matter what, Widow will always have had died in our timeline.
So when we first saw Thanos in Endgame - armor hung up to make a scarecrow, slowly picking a few vegetables for dinner, painfully making his simple stew - were the Russos trying to present him as a sympathetic character?
Naw see, it could just go like this:
Red Skull: You should know, it extracts a terrible price. Soul holds a special place among the Infinity Stones. You might say, it is a certain wisdom. To ensure that whoever possesses it, understand its power. The stone demands a sacrifice.
Clint and Natasha look at each other, they tense up, each preparing to make the sacrifice so the other can have the stone. Suddenly, Captain America flashes in front of them.
Captain America: Oh, hey guys. Why don’t you take this?
Clint and Natasha look at each other again, they look at Captain America and then over to the Red Skull.
Natasha: Yoink!
Clint and Natasha run off with the Soul Stone and back to the spaceship while Captain America flashes away to return the next item on his list.
Red Skull: Well, nuts…
I’m not a utilitarian either. But it doesn’t go into Thanos’ direction: bringing something into being is quite different from ending its existence. In particular, it’s possible to both hold that it’s wrong to bring new life into the world, and that it’s wrong to end existing life (not a position I hold, but not an inconsistent one, either).
And I wasn’t talking about the level of individual lives, but about the aggregate.
It doesn’t apply to literally everything we do because we can’t help but act on the knowledge we have, which is, in our case, exclusively past knowledge. In Cap’s case, that’s not so: he knows that if he doesn’t do anything, then things will come out mostly OK—or at least better than on lots of alternatives, which include, say, total global annihilation. So our choice is always just to make our best possible guess as to bring about things we hope will end up being OK, while Cap’s choice is between options one of which he knows for a fact will turn out mostly OK. There’s a world of difference.
He was as we found out when we see him, injured.
Plus we saw him retiring to the simple life at the end of Infiniti War.
Sure, but all he does in IW is walk out of the hut & look at the sunset. We don’t find out he’s actually farming his own food, etc. My question is whether the directors were actually trying to make us feel bad for him.
I think it was to demonstrate that Thanos was getting his ‘reward’ - what he had wanted and what he said he would do after the snap. The only bit that I found ‘redeeming’ at all was Thanos destroying the stones to prevent it occurring again (or however he said it) - but I didn’t see any of it as intending for us to ‘feel bad for him’.
I think they were showing that he was no longer a threat or an enemy, mostly to rob the heroes (particularly Thor) of any catharsis for defeating (killing) him.
Is anybody else annoyed that when Old Cap returned to the present/main timeline, he didn’t arrive on the portal?
Except he destroyed the stones so that no one could use them to switch things back, basically. Oh, he SAID to take away the temptation, but the real reason that he obviously had been thinking of for a long time (since earlier Thanos brought it up) was so no one could come along and undo what he had done.
good point.
No. Why would he? He used the Pim particles to basically spin off a new timeline where he could have a life with the love of his life, then, probably when she died, he used (the last? He had 6 vials I think, though he could obviously get more) one to come back to our timeline. As he didn’t need a portal to enter those other ones, he didn’t need one to re-join ours, unless he wanted to come back at a precise moment.
There are a lot of things they play fast and loose with in these movies. This one didnt’ even get on my radar. YMMV of course. 
Ah, thank you. That makes a ton of sense.
No, because, as I interpreted the scene, he wasn’t “returning” to the present through the quantum realm – he was arriving at that moment in the scene from having lived through the previous 70 years. Presumably, he’d driven to the area near the destroyed Avengers base, and then walked over to the bench, for the appropriate moment when Bruce, Bucky, and Sam realized that he wasn’t coming back through the portal.
He didn’t need the portal because he just lived the years in between when he went back in time and when they sent him back in time. He just then had to travel to that location to meet them.
I don’t think so. At least, if that was the case, then it would break what they were saying earlier. Basically, if you change anything in the past you spin off a new timeline. Cap going back to have a life with Sharon Carter would spin off a new, completely different timeline that would not intersect with ours. If he wanted to give the shield to Falcon from our timeline and have his good bye moment, he had to use the time suit and Pim particles to jump to our reality.
Just to post again, per the Russos:
Exactly. I hadn’t seen this before, but glad the folks doing the movie stayed consistent. It also opens up a whole bunch of things they could do. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if this lets them bring in the X-Men, or Fantastic 4, or have a whole new timeline with Loki and, perhaps, even be able to have those converge or some cross over using the Pim particles and suits to access parallel realities. They already touched on this with the Spiderverse and have put in the hooks for it in this movie specifically.
Since I always liked the multi-worlds and multiverse concepts, I think it’s fairly cool.