Also, say you have a child that you, for whatever reason, don’t want to have. Specifically, you wish you’d never had him or her.
No problem. You travel back in time and prevent that child’s conception. You tell your earlier self to wear a condom, or feign stomach flu, or whatever.
You are then able to travel back to the future, where you are delighted to discover that it worked – you’re without child. That child, anyway.
Was this murder? Was it a kind of abortion? Was it wrong to erase your child’s existence?
This is, of course, hypothetical, unless someone’s hiding the functional time machines. But I imagine that this kind of question would come up, were we to invent time travel.
Hmm, let’s say the person who invented time travel decided they didn’t like your idea, and went back in time to prevent YOUR conception. Would you consider that murder or “wrong?” Think for a second how you’d feel to be on the receiving end of this and I think you’ll have your own answer to the question.
depends on how you define murder. I define it as causing someone to cease to exist as a person on our level of perception. so yes I would say yes you murdered them.
I think it would depend, heavily, on why you were wishing the kid out of existence.
Because his demands for food and attention are cramping your swinging lifestyle? Definitely Wrong
Because he regularly tortures small puppies and has already begun collecting serial killer how-to books? Ambiguous
I guess, in kind of a cop-out answer, I’d say that anyone with this technology should focus on correcting whatever it is that is causing the problem without “eliminating” the kid. Perhaps have your old self give up the baby for adoption or something along those lines…
Ah, well, but if you can’t know you were snuffed, because you never existed, then why would anyone have a reason to go back and prevent your existence if you don’t exist in the first place? You have to admit to alternate realities in the context of a discussion like this. So, you would exist in this reality, even if you wouldn’t exist in the alternate reality after someone went back in time to eliminate your existance. Either that or you have to say there’s no way to change the past because it’s already happened, in which case the entire discussion is moot.
So, again - how would you feel about someone going back in time to snuff you out before you were born? As you sit in your chair right now, how would you feel if you knew someone were able to go back in time and prevent your birth, creating an alternate reality where you don’t exist? I don’t think any of us would like that, nor do I think it’s “right” to do it, especially for as petty a reason as simply wishing you’d not become a parent. If it’s something like what belladonna implied, which is to stop them from turning into a killer, I’m still against it because it would essentially be punishing someone before the crime was committed.
But then, I wouldn’t be for changing the past anyway - none of us would learn or grow as people if everything were idyllic all the time because someone’s gone and removed all the negatives from our history. Nevermind the removal of free will for everyone else by changing history to suit YOUR view.
If there are alternate realities, then I don’t feel particularly guilty at all about changing the one I’m living in. If I haven’t irrevocably undone my child’s existence on every conceivable plane, then all I’ve done is added something to the universe (multiverse?) – namely, an alternate reality.
I can honestly say that this doesn’t creep me out in the slightest. But maybe my sister, born four and a half years after me in an alternate reality where my younger brother wasn’t conceived, has a different opinion.
Let’s muddy up the scenario a bit: no alternate realities, however many paradoxes that implies. You go back in time and convince yourself to hold off on sex for a day, or even an hour. You or your partner still gets pregant, but a different sperm met that egg so you have a different kid. You’ve used time travel to exchange kids.
Is that wrong? You’ve still got a kid. And if it’s wrong, how could or should that be fixed? Does the “second” kid get undone to restore the first? That hardly seems fair.
Well, the entire discussion is admittedly hypothetical. I doubt that anyone’s going to invent a form of time travel that allows people to change the course of events, whatever the mechanism of that change might theoretically be.
By that logic, you could give yourself permission to do anything you like in this reality, based on the idea that there is an alternate reality where you didn’t do such things, so it doesn’t matter what you do here. I would not care to live by that rule.
No matter what scenario you throw out, I’ll not change my stance - mucking with the past, changing events to suit your wishes, would be arrogant and selfish. What gives you the right to determine how things should turn out for others? Even in the case of your own child, do you think that child would have had no effect on others? That its birth didn’t have an impact on the world around it, no matter how small? “It’s a Wonderful Life” (corny as it is) illustrates the point pretty well, if you’re not sure what I mean.
And yes, I’m quite aware it’s a purely hypothetical discussion with virtually no chance of ever becoming a real issue. My point is there are certain “givens” in the context of this type of hypothetical situation - without allowing an alternate reality, there can’t be time travel due to the paradoxes (i.e., you go back to stop something from happening, but if it’s never happened, you have no reason to go back, so it happens . . . ).
Perhaps that would be true if there were time machines, but I don’t believe any exist. And, I remind you, I’m not the one who introduced alternate realities to this thread. My assumption is that there are no alternates, and so it matters a great deal what you do in this reality.
I think the IAWL example cuts two ways: What if it turned out that the universe you created that didn’t contain that child was demonstrably superior to the “original” one, in which you did have that child?
Note for the record: I don’t have a child I want to undo. I’m just wondering about the moral/ethical ramifications of this for the heck of it.
It would be unjustified, unless you examined the consequences of that child’s birth. For example, on Star Trek, a woman was killed, indirectly creating the Federation. McCoy went back in time accidentally and saved her life. Were Kirk et al. wrong to go back for the purpose of thwarting McCoy?
That said, it’s arguably more humane than abortion. It’s also very risky, in terms of the alteration of the timeline.What if, as the result of having that child, you decided that nobody should have to go through that and successfully communicated that message to teens?
(Sorry this is somewhat incoherent, I’m running low on sleep)
Alright folks, we all remember the Simpsons episode in which Homer gets transported back in time and screws up all of reality… I would have hoped that you all wouldn’t gotten the clue that mucking about with time is bad business!
So, if I were to disregard all of my beliefs about the feasibility of time travel and the existence of alternate universes and whatnot…I would say it’s wrong. Because from your perspective, the kid existed and you took away that life…the fact that you intervened before it was life changes nothing, you “ended” its life, so it’s wrong!
But seriously folks, no sneezing on dinosaurs if you’re ever transported back in time!
