Is Murder Ever Justified or Moral, or Not Really "Murder?"

[Ken Carman]

I'm going to set the scenario here. Feel free to set your own scenarios too, but please at least initially respond to my scenario...

Time travel is a reality. You have it at your command: a one time chance. That chance will never come again to anyone. You have a chance to travel once, back in time, and kill Hitler in the crib, and then return to whatever the new future holds.

Would that be murder? Justified? Moral? A necessary act? Was Hitler born evil? Predestined?

There are a lot of issues and concerns here. It's a bit tough for me, but I have decided it would be murder, unjustified and results: questionable. How are we to know that "Hitler" wouldn't simply have another name, be another person: perhaps worse?

To me Hitler, the baby, was an innocent. I am not saying we are born an empty slate. I think genetics and work done on transformation grammar indicate: not. But innocent enough that murdering baby Hitler would be morally wrong, no matter how tempting.

Now: let's add a monkey wrench to the mix. What if you had a chance to abort Hitler, with no consequences except the better ones: those who have an abortion and don't suffer major emotional consequences.

NOTE TO ALL: I add last caveat to the previous paragraph because going on and on and turning this into another "effect of abortion" thread would be off topic. Or even just another abortion thread. Mods take note.

Would that be more moral? More justified? Personally I might take the chance, but then I'm caught up in my "the new Hitler without the name" conundrum. Frankly I think the time and the place were right for Hitler and eliminating one person: even Hitler, probably would change little or make it worse. If you've ever seen The Butterfly Effect I think you understand my concern.


Well, whatcha think?

[Questatement]

Distraught with guilt over the abortion, Hitler's mother immediately gets pregnant with twin boys. By pure happen stance, they grow up to be even more manical than Hitler and instead of Hitler dying in his bunker, only one of the two brothers dies in the same bunker and the other one goes on to conquer the entire planet.

No Jews, blacks, homosexuals, or mentally/physically defective exist to this very day.

[el ايمان]

Distraught with guilt over the abortion, Hitler's mother immediately gets pregnant with twin boys. By pure happen stance, they grow up to be even more manical than Hitler and instead of Hitler dying in his bunker, only one of the two brothers dies in the same bunker and the other one goes on to conquer the entire planet.

No Jews, blacks, homosexuals, or mentally/physically defective exist to this very day.

That'd be unfortunate, but it is impossible given the parameters:

with no consequences except the better ones

My ideas on the motion of our world through time don't allow for time travel, because the present disexists immediately after becoming the past. Were we given the chance to time travel, however, I would not abort the baby Hitler. I would wait for him to come to power in Nazi Germany and then assasinate him.

[Ken Carman]

Q

Chuckle. All I can think of after typing that is the Next Gen "Q" and it seems a bit appropriate given the challenges he gave the crew.

No Jews, blacks, homosexuals, or mentally/physically defective exist to this very day.

Unless you consider the very mindset "mentally defective," then after mass extermination they goosestep into the ocean and drown themselves.

My ideas on the motion of our world through time don't allow for time travel, because the present disexists immediately after becoming the past. Were we given the chance to time travel, however, I would not abort the baby Hitler. I would wait for him to come to power in Nazi Germany and then assassinate him.

Given that option it might be preferable, of course I tried to set this up so there were only two options. But I'm game. In my mind the conundrum may still exist. Assassinated leaders often do a phoenix of sorts and become MORE powerful in death. We had many years of Johnson after Kennedy and many of his programs were passed. Republican rule lasted a while after Lincoln, though the war certainly helped by all means.

So even if the actual assassins succeeded it may have also gotten worse.

Tough call. Maybe Germany had to be completely beaten and Hitler die in disgrace. Even then true believers continued to exist, though far more quietly for the most part, disregarding the Lincolns (irony in that name) and skinheads with Nazi emblems tattooed on their arms and asses. But, remember, martyrdom may have only complicated the situation.

Though not really the topic, there is time travel, of sorts: maybe. At the edge of a black hole. Going close to the speed of light. They say time passes differently even for astronauts, like those who went to the moon. But this is all future travel, if I remember right.

The past? Maybe not, unless we grow to understand time better and find it different compared to how we think of it now. I would not say impossible because we never know everything and one of the greatest mistakes humankind makes is when they think they know everything regarding the nature of things. They tend to be proven wrong, often.

One of my fantasies is that time is less linear than like sediment deposited by passage of events. We think there is only one direction because the path is well worn and, like a stream or river, that's where the current takes us. But if we learn to travel in other directions, through the sediment rather than let the river carry us: lower perhaps, or against the flow, maybe those past moments are still there, being acted out. Our present would still exist because others went there already, but if we made changes there would simply be more sediment elsewhere. A split, multiple, timeline if you wish. Multiple realities.

An odd, complex, analogy, I understand.

[el ايمان]

In that case, I would send someone else back in time to do the deed. I would feel bad about murdering baby Hitler. And I wouldn't want to give conservatives a feeling of pride when they call blacks

the leader in murdering the unborn

[Senor Hoint]

Distraught with guilt over the abortion, Hitler's mother immediately gets pregnant with twin boys. By pure happen stance, they grow up to be even more manical than Hitler and instead of Hitler dying in his bunker, only one of the two brothers dies in the same bunker and the other one goes on to conquer the entire planet.

Given the military circumstances which caused Hitler to kill himself in the bunker that would be an impossible task.

I've thought about this scenario before, and my answer is the same as it was then: messing with the past, even if it can be done, will always have unforeseeable consequences. By killing Hitler, for instance, you could change the world enough that you wouldn't be born, thus causing the universe's head to asplode.

I don't know if I would do it. Who knows if you'd actually be saving people? The best way would probably be to assassinate him...say...in 1921. If they'd shot him and a dozen other Nazis for treason after the Beer Hall Putsch they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble (he was given a prison sentence of a few years, and he served only a few months).

[theophilus]

I once say a Twilight Zone episode in which someone did go back in time in order to kill Hitler when he was a baby. She managed to get a job as a maid working for Adolf's father. When she had the opportunity she grabbed Adolf and ran away with him. The nurse whose job was to take care of him chased her and the only way she could carry out her plan was to jump in a river so that she and the baby both drowned.

The nurse was panic stricken over the punishment she would receive for her failure to take care of the baby. There was a band of gypsies camped near the place of death and one of them was a baby boy. The nurse persuaded the boy's parents to sell the baby to her and she took him back and managed to substitute him for the baby who had drowned. It was this baby who grew up to eventully lead the Nazi party and start World War II. The actions of the time traveller actually brought about the tragedy she had been trying to prevent.

[Sean989]

Murder is never justified unless in a self defense case and even then it can be questionable. Would I go back and kill baby Adolf? No as we cannot be sure that in the altered timeline he would be the one to rise and reign havoc so it would be killing in the hope that nothing had changed which we couldn't be sure of until it was to late.

[Ken Carman]

SH

Given the military circumstances which caused Hitler to kill himself in the bunker that would be an impossible task.

Probably true. And I agree about the universe's head. I love Butterfly Effect, and I am not the star's biggest fan. I just think it handles the topic well. Unforeseen circumstances indeed.

Th

I once say a Twilight Zone episode in which someone did go back in time in order to kill Hitler when he was a baby.

That was the new Zone, if I remember right. (Loved the new Outer Limits too.) Another display of the Butterfly Effect, for lack of a less commercial, yet well known, term. You're right, you could just be the cause what you were avoiding. Here's an interesting take on that. What if time travel was invented in the future? ("Was?" Tense is tough here as you shall see.) All the changes that happened have happened. We just don't know it. There will be an end date to humanity, of this there can only be the slightest doubt. So it's already happened. Just in the future. We go on thinking all this is purely linear.

Wow.

S999

Murder is never justified unless in a self defense case and even then it can be questionable.

One could try to make a case for self defense, but the baby hasn't done anything yet. What if we could go back and successfully kidnap him. Raise him differently. This goes to nature vs. nurture, predetermined vs. absolute free agents/free will. Boy that ads a layer to the discussion.

[Sean989]

'Hitler' as a historical character is impossible to avoid. Adolf may have turned out differently if raised in a different way but his impact is an unavoidable coincidence in the scheme of the universe. Every reaction has an opposite and equal counter-reaction. A lot of Adolf's actions can be attributed, I believe, to mental and general health problems (some of which were never in his control). His lifestyle made irreversible damage to his mental state which culminated in the killing of himself.

[Ken Carman]

Yes, S999, and we also must consider that the time was just right, in Germany, the conditions, for a Hitler like character to arise. Would we simply have had a "Hitler" with a different name? We can only speculate.

[Sean989]

Yes, S999, and we also must consider that the time was just right, in Germany, the conditions, for a Hitler like character to arise. Would we simply have had a "Hitler" with a different name? We can only speculate.

If we had have killed baby adolf, do you think von bismarck would have been removed before completing his work? Would he ultimatly have been better than hitler?