The Role of the Script.

[dream_weaver]

Robert Tracinski writes a short article for The Federalist called Why Killing Baby Hitler Is The Debate Of Our Era.

He concludes his piece with:

That’s why a debate over killing baby Hitler is so emblematic of our era. It’s not about a real challenge in a real context with real risks and trade-offs and uncertainties — such as the Syrian civil war, Ukraine’s fight for independence from Russia, or Venezuela’s slide into socialism. It’s just modern posturing about your “progressive” feelings concerning a scenario that is safely impossible, so that you will never be called to act upon your pronouncements.

He cited, from back in May, he had previously addressed this in The Hypothetical Iraq War Question Everyone Is Asking Is Completely Stupid:

Think about it: you could single-handedly prevent the rise of a monstrous dictator, save the lives of millions of Jews, and prevent the world’s most horrific war. But in the actual moment, of course, you would just be murdering somebody’s baby, which would make you the monster. This is the basic problem with retrospective hypotheticals. They invite us to ignore or rewrite the actual context of past decisions; they allow us to make easy assurances that we would have gotten everything right and never made any mistakes; they tend to confuse more than they enlighten.

Setting aside such questions as Can time travel actually change history?, or Can we actually determine what the ramifications of killing Hitler would be?, or the moral agnosticism enshrined in the notion If we can't know killing Hitler is right or wrong can we know if anything is right or wrong?, there is another issue that is emblematic of our era. It is not as straightforward as the example given about modern posturing. It seems to be alluded to in the observation that these hypotheticals invite us to ignore or rewrite the actual context.

In the Dual Between Plato And Aristotle, Peikoff sees philosophy as the prime mover of history, if man is the conceptual being. In lecture 6 of part 1 of The Founders of Western Philosophy, the coverage of the Hellenistic age of philosophy, proposes a transition from the height of Greek thought, beginning its descent with Epicurus, declining further with the Stoics and Skeptics, sinking deeper with Plotinus, prolapsing with St. Augustine and the subsequent entrenchment of Christianity.

Philosophy, in this sense, is the director of the play unfolding it on the world stage. If an actor is unable to complete the run of a particular play, another actor can readily be cast into the part. In essence, the script can still be executed. If the director is unable to run the full run of the course, one would discover that the script can still be adhered to, even with a different director.

Man has free will. In this sense, until he exercises it to rewrite the script, the outcome of the play will remain essentially the same.