The question of, "Would you abort/kill baby Hitler," has been in the news lately, both as a survey question and one posed to Dr. Ben Carson.

In the former case, it was a question about the morality of killing someone who goes on to kill many people.



30% is a lot of conflicted people, with possible more leaning that way.

The question as it was posed to Dr. Carson, known anti-abortion believer that he is, was clearly designed to either make him give a hypocritical answer, or appear to "support baby Hitler".

This reminds me of the "have you stopped beating your wife" question. It's designed to make the answerer look bad either way.

On the whole, I find this a pretty interesting question. It is assumed in the question, at face value, that if you kill Hitler before he kills other those lives would be saved.

It also assumes the idea of "knowing what we know now". This is tricky to me because all we know now is that Hitler rose to power, lots of people died, Hitler made some mistakes, Nazis ended up losing WWII.

If you simply remove Hitler from the equation, there is nothing that says a worse, more cunning dictator wouldn't have taken his place. Perhaps this new dictator doesn't make the same mistakes and the Nazis actually win WWII. Would it have been good to have killed Hitler in this case? Of course not!

I'm sure somewhere like the History forum has had a lot of discussion about alternate realities where Hitler wins or is displaced by a more powerful dictator or whatever else. But given the question has been posed more lately in the media, it may make for a good discussion in this forum.

#NOTALLFETALHITLERS

Hitler wasn't even the founder of the Nazi Party. Germans wanted to hear what the Nazis were saying. **** goes back to Martin Luther. Had it not been Hitler, there was still Heydrich, Rohm and the rest.

It's a pointless question because of the amount of pre-knowledge that would be needed to make the decision. OF COURSE you would stop a Hitler if you could*. It's finding them that is the problem.

*This also assumes that without Hitler then WWII and the Holocaust wouldn't have happened, which is also debatable.

Its like SMP mutated and went viral.

Nope. Red Alert innit.

The obv answer is no because the hypotheticals attached to the question are stupid.

Are we also assuming that with all the knowledge we have of his future Hitleriness that the only way to actually prevent any of that would be to kill him?

Given that Mussolini exists, perhaps Germany was just a ripe environment for a person with Hitler's qualities to come along and do bad things. If we abort fetal Hitler, how do we know that a more effective ruthless dictator wouldn't have replaced him?

Hitler wasn't even the baddest of his contemporaries. Some estimates put Stalin or Mao ahead as the deadliest ruler.


It's possible that Genghis Kahn killed 10% of the world's population.
http://www.history.com/news/history-...t-genghis-khan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casual...f_the_Iraq_War

You have no way of knowing if a baby is going to become Hitler. Thus, either answer is valid. If you know he was going to become Hitler then yes. But, that is impossible so no.

Am I allowed to take the morality of "changing history" into account? I'm semi-serious here, idk this question just doesn't make sense to me. Seems a lot of people above also feel this way.

Stephen Fry wrote a book Changing History on this subject.

It's okish. Not a patch on his classic, 'The Liar'.

There should be no moral problem with "changing history". We are all changing history for the future, and it's our god damn right. Just make sure to do what's good at all times and everything will be great. As a rule, don't kill babies, unless it's hitler.

It's good to see people catching up. Abortion, This thread, ID, evolution, religion, moral issues etc etc.

Obviously we dealt with it more conceptually but the application to politics is fairly straightforward.

Yes this is absolutely true but this literally going back in time makes it more complicated than that. If I go back in time and "Kill Hitler" or even just the act of going back in time itself would cause different sperm to meet every egg in every sex act following the event, and the people alive today would be 100% different set of people that are alive today. So I'd be "killing" everyone alive today. Is this overthinking it it?, lol this was literally my first problem with this.

Now technically my making this post right now and everything I do in this moment is "killing" anyone who could have lived in potentially different universes 100 years from now as well... ugh.... I need to stop :/
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Let's just rework the question. A baby is born right NOW. And I have the ability to tell you with 100% certainty this baby will go on to commit mass genocide unless you kill it right now. Is this action moral? Somehow if I don't call this new baby "Hitler", killing it seems harder for me. Even though I'm telling you the baby will become just as evil.

It avoids all the paradoxical time travel **** but if you're trying to think of it as a practical moral issue then how you need to know how you know that this kid will kill so many in the future.

If for example you're some god like creature telling me this abut the baby then my only moral action belongs to family of solutions that include telling you to **** off.

lol right. We will just say for the sake of having the problem that we somehow "know with 100% certainty" .....

We also could have the two questions

1) Is it moral?
2) Assuming you answered yes, could you actually go through with it?

We don't have any real clue to the answer to your question as we cant imagine a world in which we know that with 100% certainty.

This isn't a nit about needing to be 100% certain as we have no idea what a world would be like where we could know something like this with anything like a degree of certainty. Something is significantly different about this imagined world and it's different in a way that matters to the answer.

IDK, I invented a machine which has been tested countless times ... that can tell the future. But the ONLY thing it can determine is if a newborn baby will grow up to be a genocidal maniac.

Haha, I mean I can't answer your question without getting absurdly silly, maybe you're trolling right now, not sure.

The problem is you cant make this world sufficiently understandable to make a moral choice without getting absurdly silly.

May as well go back to the original time-travelling example and just say would we abort Hitler if we knew it would result in a magnificently better world and there were no other alternatives and no possible bad consequences of any kind. Sure, in a heart beat but not because it's Hitler.

I don't see why I can't. Is the world of Superman for example not understandable? It's basically Earth, except it is also true that people from Krypton exist. The fake world is Earth as usual, except I have the baby prophecy machine. Everything else is the same.

Th existence of the baby prophecy machine and everything else being the same means I know I have no idea what's going on except that there's something 'mystical' going on that makes no sense.

I'm not killing a baby in that situation. Apart from anything else, it's far too likely I'm delusional.

100%

Cheezebrain is incapable of answering simple questions. Slightly complex ones send his drunken mind off the rails.