Test your own Morality

I thought of this question for months, and still never came up with an answer I am satisfied with:

Presented Situation: Mankind has come up with a time machine that will allow you to travel back in time before the Holocaust began. Your mission is to go back in time and assassinate Hitler, in order to prevent the Holocaust from ever happening. If you kill Hitler, the Holocaust will not happen, and all those lives will be spared

The PROBLEM: The Time Machine will only work once, and you only have enough power and accurate coordinates to travel to the time when Hitler was an infant. You have to kill Hitler when he was 2 years old. This will be your only chance to kill him and prevent the horrible atrocity that is the Holocaust.

Question: Can you do it ? Would you kill the baby Adolf Hitler to prevent the Holocaust from ever happening ? Is killing one infant worth saving millions of lives ?

Who says you would have to kill him? Why not just set him up for a better life, fix some of the things that could have made him into who he became? Or just have someone watch over him for his life.

I wouldn't do it. Not that its a baby Hitler. The morality of this isn't if I'd kill an infant to save all the lives lost in the Holocaust. It's if I'd take the chance of making such a dent in time as that. The Holocaust and WWII are huge parts of history. Not having them happen could have serious repercussions.

Without that, there probably wouldn't be the state of Israel. The "Holy Land" might be under Muslim control or Christian control. That'd be a huge difference in today's foreign policy.

Maybe one of the Jews killed would have ended up growing up to be an amazingly charismatic man who absolutely HATES Italians and would convince his Jewish brethren to exterminate all Italians.

I, personally, would not take that risk. The Holocaust was sad, yes. To be honest, I think most Jews would refuse to do this as well. I mean, what would they have to hold over the rest of the world's head? 😛

Why stop at Hitler?

Oh yeah . . . have you ever hear temporal paradoxes? I personally wouldn't kill Hitler becuase there's no way to know the real outcome.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Why stop at Hitler?

Oh yeah . . . have you ever hear temporal paradoxes? I personally wouldn't kill Hitler becuase there's no way to know the real outcome.

Yeah, I agree. Killing Hitler could have a major impact to the future of our world. For better or worse who knows, but I would leave things the way they are right now.

I wouldn't for several reasons.......

- no man should be punished for a deed until the deed is committed. Once I go back in time, there is no way to know if Adolf Hitler will even grow up to lead Germany....much less commit any atrocities.

- even if all events that have occurred in our recorded history were 100% garaunteed to occur again from the point I travel back in time....Hitler was never found guilty of a crime. While I am in no way a Nazi sympathizer, all we know of the "holocaust" is information given to us by Germany's enemies. The question of the holocaust has never been definetively answered. There are even many Jewish people who have led the search for information regarding the subject past that initially given to us during war and post war propoganda. One example, ofcourse, being the 300% inflation of the death toll from Auschwitz.......originally given as 4 million by Russia, accepted for decades until it was revealed the number was only 1.1 million........reducing the number of dead by 50% for all camps combined. While this was indeed horrible......not nearly as bad as reported by war/post war propoganda. Until all the facts are in....how could the man be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt when he was cleared of 3 million deaths over night that he was charged with for decades.

- I would never kill anybody. Killing one man is just as horriffic as killing 3 million.....even moreso as Hitler didn't actually kill them by his own hand, merely his orders. I would be worse than him.

Originally posted by Lord Urizen
I thought of this question for months, and still never came up with an answer I am satisfied with:

[b]Presented Situation: Mankind has come up with a time machine that will allow you to travel back in time before the Holocaust began. Your mission is to go back in time and assassinate Hitler, in order to prevent the Holocaust from ever happening. If you kill Hitler, the Holocaust will not happen, and all those lives will be spared

The PROBLEM: The Time Machine will only work once, and you only have enough power and accurate coordinates to travel to the time when Hitler was an infant. You have to kill Hitler when he was 2 years old. This will be your only chance to kill him and prevent the horrible atrocity that is the Holocaust.

Question: Can you do it ? Would you kill the baby Adolf Hitler to prevent the Holocaust from ever happening ? Is killing one infant worth saving millions of lives ? [/B]

I would not do it, because it would not stop the Holocaust. There were thousands of people involved in the Holocaust. One of the other main players may have taken power and not made the mistakes the Hitler made. So, instead of 6 million people killed there may have been tens of millions of dead people.

No. Everything that has happened or will happen happens for a reason. Not because of God, religion, fate or anything else, but because these things happen. If something that major is changed, the entire Earth would be completely different. Hasn't anyone read A Sound of Thunder?

Originally posted by Strangelove
No. Everything that has happened or will happen happens for a reason. Not because of God, religion, fate or anything else, but because these things happen. If something that major is changed, the entire Earth would be completely different. Hasn't anyone read A Sound of Thunder?

Perhaps, There is the other side of the idea; no one can change the past.

Originally posted by Shakyamunison
Perhaps, There is the other side of the idea; no one can change the past.

Originally posted by Strangelove
Yes, but if it could, we shouldn't anyway

True, we could not say for sure what the out come would be.

Allow me to rephrase the argument:

If we presume that killing Hitler as an infant is the only way to prevent the Holocaust, and if we further presume that one has the means and opportunity to do so, would you; why or why not?

No I wouldn't do it.

A) we need the knowledge we gained from the second world war and what happened during.

B) I seriously doubt that killing Hitler would have stopped the second world war, before it even began. The world was so screwed up during that period that war was almost inevitable.

Originally posted by Adam_PoE
Allow me to rephrase the argument:

If we presume that killing Hitler as an infant is the only way to prevent the Holocaust, and if we further presume that one has the means and opportunity to do so, would you; why or why not?

No. Preventing the Holocaust from happening would be tantamount to depriving humanity of an important lesson, one which it needed to learn.

Originally posted by Strangelove
No. Everything that has happened or will happen happens for a reason. Not because of God, religion, fate or anything else, but because these things happen. If something that major is changed, the entire Earth would be completely different. Hasn't anyone read A Sound of Thunder?

How does that test my morality?

Also, how can you think about such bullshit pseudo philosophy for months?

There is some crazy RETARDED logic being used in this thread.

Originally posted by Soleran
There is some crazy RETARDED logic being used in this thread.

Really? Would you care to elaborate?

Originally posted by The Black Ghost
Who says you would have to kill him? Why not just set him up for a better life, fix some of the things that could have made him into who he became? Or just have someone watch over him for his life.

You only one hour to spend with baby Hitler....you can't change his life in one hour....you either kill him or let him live

Originally posted by Strangelove
No. Everything that has happened or will happen happens for a reason. Not because of God, religion, fate or anything else, but because these things happen. If something that major is changed, the entire Earth would be completely different. Hasn't anyone read A Sound of Thunder?

If the theory of the existance of alternate realities is correct, than this point means nothing.