Time travel and ethics? If I had to kill someone and then use a time machine to travel through time and prevent them from being killed, can I still be guilty of killing them, assuming that the time line where he was killed is zero and void?
Guilty, as in your own mind.
Yes you! you committed the act in a moment. The fact that you challenge the act is really unimportant, they are two different acts. Surly the timeline would be null and void to provide the person you killed was not 't destined to die at that moment, in this case, preventing them from being killed may be a greater crime than kill.
if it never happens you can not be charged
Yes and no
A crime has been committed in the timeline - A
No crime was committed in the timeline - B
And then there's the timeline - C. The one in the sequence which includes parts of A and B that you, the time traveler lived. Timeline C is a crime.
Here's the thing. Change does not erase the past in the future, he can establish an alternative. In both time line or time line of C, it is a crime that can not be prosecuted. As time traveler, you can never take the B line of the time, but if you're the only one who knows the C line time and keep your secret, you can avoid prosecution.
You must make a distinction between facts and culpability here. If at any point you cause a person living death, no matter what happens next by means of time-travel, medicine, or magic, you've actually killed someone.
However, if you would be guilty of a moral offense in doing so is another question. There were a number of explanations of what makes killing bad people, and one of the most dominant is that it deprives the victim of the value of their future. If a murder takes place, but no value is deprived of the victim, it would be difficult to call the killing morally wrong, but there are many other reasons why no killing would be morally wrong, regardless of subsequent actions or events. Kant, for example, could include such behavior as a lack of respect for other human beings which makes the bad deed, even if nothing bad ever happens because of it.
Posted on April 23, 2010.
