AndrozBlaze

Here’s an answer nobody seems to have contemplated: how about don’t kill the baby? Can an Objectivist, from a future where WW2 has happened, a future that, in fact, depends on the fact, justify, by eliminating the cause of the conditions of his life, and the lives of all he holds dear, saving a few anonymous millions through a basely immoral act? You can’t answer this question honestly until you consider the fact that it isn’t simply the lives of 50 million (or whatever) Europeans between the years of 1937 (not 1942) and 1945 that are at stake. Another point: if you remove Hitler from the original question, and just have it be some random kid, then the question of killing one versus, through inaction, killing millions becomes meaningless: there’s no evidence, hypothetical or otherwise except some phantom ‘certainty’, that the kid will do what the situation insists he will. The fact remains that this is Hitler: you have appeared, through unrealistic methods, in one instant in his life, and you face the choice to let him live his life, which historical evidence indicates will yield a certain outcome without your intervention, or intervene, in the provided case through force, to destroy his life, and the history on which you base your ‘certain knowledge’. If you choose not to intervene, you are objectively moral, because whatever his future actions, Hitler is still a child, innocent of crime, and still has every opportunity to choose not to do the things he did. Determinism is a contradiction I will not entertain in my response. If you choose to intervene, you are objectively immoral, because you have overridden an innocent child’s ability to choose for himself whether to grow up to be a mass-murdering lunatic, or not. Not only that, you have violated the necessary historical conditions that led to your own life, and everything involved in it: by killing Hitler, you’ve essentially proven you have no regard to yourself, your life, or any sort of values you held in the twenty-first century, and have decided that sacrificing yourself is worth preventing World War 2. It is precisely these types of situations that Objectivism condemns as wrong. *phew* How’s that for a first post?