Philosophical question

[Bud Gray]

I recently got my hands on a copy of Wings of the Valkyrie, and it got me thinking. The adventure puts the players in the position of deciding whether to let Hitler be killed and create a grim future or save him and let him do everything he did in history. The decision doesn't seem that difficult as the future created by letting him be murdered is pretty much worse than the one created by letting him live. This kind of story has been played out before, and I don't have a problem with that. It just seems to me that the morality of the situation is pretty clear cut when you know what the consequences of you actions are before you do them.

 

So I'm just wondering, what if, by murdering him before he comes into power, you change nothing. Everyone who died because of his actions still die, and there is still a WWII, you just change some of the specifics.

 

Or what if you simply don't know what will happen? You just find yourself with the oppertunity, and you know what will happen if you do nothing.

 

And what if instead of having the chance of killing an up-and-coming-politician Hitler, it's the 6-year old child Hitler?

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: Philosophical question

 

(This thread is probably better-suited to the Non-Gaming Discussion area than the Champions forum, just 'cause it's likely to stray heavily into heated areas of politics and morality. So don't be surprised if a mod moves it. )

So I'm just wondering' date=' what if, by murdering him before he comes into power, you change nothing. Everyone who died because of his actions still die, and there is still a WWII, you just change some of the specifics.[/quote']If it doesn't change anything, and you know it won't change anything, I don't see any value in killing him. True, you could at least prevent him from profiting by his evil, but you'd just be allowing someone else to profit by the evil. If it doesn't change, it doesn't change.

Or what if you simply don't know what will happen? You just find yourself with the oppertunity' date=' and you know what will happen if you do nothing.[/quote']I'd kill him. No question. While it's theoretically possible that the consequences could be even worse, the consequences as they occurred were so horrific that I'd take that chance in a heartbeat.

And what if instead of having the chance of killing an up-and-coming-politician Hitler' date=' it's the 6-year old child Hitler?[/quote']Yes again. I know that sounds callous, but coming at this from the perspective of someone who's lived after his evil came about, I know he'll become one of the main driving forces behind it. A better option would be to try and change the path of the young Hitler's life, to try and prevent his later evil and rise to power without having to kill him as a child. But if the only choice is to either kill him as a child or allow WW2 and the Holocaust to occur, then yes... I'd kill him as a child.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Philosophical question

 

And what if instead of having the chance of killing an up-and-coming-politician Hitler' date=' it's the 6-year old child Hitler?[/quote']

 

IIRC, there was an Outer Limits or Twilight Zone or some similar show where somebody was sent back to kill Hitler as a baby. After much agonizing, the person either kills or kidnaps the baby... so his nanny kidnaps someone else's baby to put in his place. And it was *that* baby that became the Hitler we all know and despise.

[wylodmayer]

Re: Philosophical question

 

How could I resist a thread with the word "philosophical" in the title?

 

The bit about killing him and knowing it won't change anything seems disingenuous. It would have us believe that every decision he made would have been made identically by someone else, or that none of the decisions that were "personal" in nature (that is, that would have been made differently by another person) had significant moral consequences. Either one seems highly implausible, so I'd take that off the table right off the bat.

 

Robbed of certain knowledge of the consequences of killing him, some might choose to make some argument about "changing the future." I find such arguments unpersuasive. We're constantly changing the future, with every action we take. Unless we can be certain that "our" timeline has some moral primacy to it, which seems unlikely (how would we come by such knowledge? what would moral primacy even consist of?), there's a default moral primacy of the present. In short, you act upon your moral principles now, based on what knowledge you DO have; i.e.: that the child in front of you is likely to grow up to become a psychotic dictator. We can consider your knowledge of the future in this case to be analogous to having the results of a detailed simulation from current conditions.

 

On that analysis, however, killing Hitler is far from the only option - it may not even be the most attractive one. One the one hand, there would be dozens of ways to sideline him from a political career if one so chose (check out the movie "Max," or just read about how Hitler first became involved in politics in Shirer's brilliant "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - it was by no means foreordained). On the others, given the conditions in Germany at that time, it's quite possible that simply killing one man - even Hitler - would be insufficient to guarantee a better outcome. It is no accident that much of Europe succumbed to totalitarianism from either the left or the right in that era; if not Hitler, than it is distinctly possible that someone else would have risen to commit other atrocities. When dealing with genocide and despotism, it is notoriously difficult to make classifications of "better" or "worse." The huge number of victims dissolve into mind numbing lists of crimes that seem to indicate nothing short of pure evil - and pure evil admits to no shades of distinction.

 

If that's what is meant by "not changing anything," of course, I not only think it's plausible but likely - however, the devil, as they say, is in the details. The argument that it *might* not work, or that only *certain* atrocities will be prevented by such-and-such a moral act is not a good argument for not doing it. The "kill Hitler as a child" choice is a pseudo-dilemma which reveals a very unsophisticated view of morality and historical circumstances. The truly moral option, if one found oneself in Germany around 1900, is to set about trying to shape society as best one could to make it more stable and less vulnerable to totalitarian dictatorship.

 

To illustrate this point, let me use an example that's closer to home and perhaps clearer for being less clouded by the actual atrocities committed. Suppose a particular person (a Mr. Wayne, for instance) is murdered in a slum by some thug looking for some cash. It seems logical to assume, especially if Mr. Wayne did not frequent the slum in question, that Mr. Wayne's life could be saved (at least at that juncture) by killing this thug as a child. But is that moral victory? Or an instrumental one? At best, we've ensured that a specific murder didn't take place by substituting another one. Even if Mr. Wayne is a better citizen and so on, we've gained only a little in the larger moral picture - the real gains in this case are all specific, practical. The act only seems logical if we want to save Mr. Wayne specifically, rather than a life generally. On this reading, the act looks a lot less like a moral decision and more like a calculated, pragmatic or even self serving one. Furthermore, who's to say that this thug didn't, the day before, kill some other thug, who, because of our act, then murders some OTHER person down the street on the very night when Mr. Wayne was originally killed?

 

Obviously, if the moral principle here is that we want to prevent the crime generally speaking, rather than just prevent it because of who it happened to, the real moral option when transported back in time is to try and clean up the slum and make it safer for citizens. Even if it doesn't save Mr. Wayne, it is likely to have a greater effect on crime in general and thus positively impact more lives than just one. If we honor the principle that Mr. Wayne's life should not be more valuable to us than the lives of the other potential victims in that slum, we would be committed to a more general effort, rather than focusing monomaniacally on saving that particular life.

 

 

So, just my thoughts on the subject.

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: Philosophical question

 

How could I resist a thread with the word "philosophical" in the title?

 

The bit about killing him and knowing it won't change anything seems disingenuous. It would have us believe that every decision he made would have been made identically by someone else, or that none of the decisions that were "personal" in nature (that is, that would have been made differently by another person) had significant moral consequences. Either one seems highly implausible, so I'd take that off the table right off the bat.

 

Interesting tangent: this is one of the options of "How to Avoid Paradox in a time travel game", in GURPS Time Travel. Basically, if from your frame of reference, you know an action occured, then that action WILL occur. It's a sort-of psychic form of the Uncertianty Princple, as applied to time travel.

 

If it is recorded in your timeline that Hitler rose to power and you are aware of that information when you go back to try and kill Hitler, then Hitler, by definition, (or someone who matches up with the historical records who is called Hitler) WILL rise to power. There may be small details that the history books get wrong, but it will pretty much occur as you recall.

[Balabanto]

Re: Philosophical question

 

The other option is more complicated and assumes the existence of temporal police, monitors, whatever you call them. See Simon Hawke's Timewars for a really good idea of how this works.

 

Temporal Monitors detect that Bob has killed Hitler in 1931. This drives a spike into the timeline, creating not one, but TWO futures. These two futures are coextant and simultaneous.

 

However....

 

Time is like a river, and periodically, along the two timelines, they try to rejoin. Sometimes, this creates pools of time called confluence points, where you can switch timelines automatically and suddenly find everything different.

 

Unfortunately, sometimes, you can also get large explosions. If you're a smart GM, superpowers COULD come from this.

 

Regrettably, and here comes the kicker...

 

If you are at the signature event where such a thing is happening, you may be set upon by TWO groups of temporal monitors, one that is trying to PRESERVE your timeline, and one that is trying to DESTROY it.

 

And they look...exactly the same...heh...heh...heh...

 

Chew on that, True Believer...

[Pschic Avenger]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Ok instead of Hitler you made it JFK and stop the Assassination from Happing only to return to a world where because JFK was Around he managed to Cause Nuclear Holocaust.Said Pc return to the past and Become the 2nd Gun Man

[Pariah]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Given the social and political forces in play in Germany after WWI, it seems almost inevitable that someone like Hitler would come to power eventually. By killing Hitler, doesn't that open up the possibility that whoever did come to power wasn't a total nutcase and actually knew how to run a war?

 

It seems to me that the main reason German lost WWII, in the end, is because Hitler just wasn't very capable as a military leader. By filling his slot in history with someone who knew what they were doing, doesn't that make it a lot more likely that the Wehrmacht doesn't collapse under the incompetence of its leaders, the Nazis win the war, and everyone's speaking German by 1948?

 

THAT'S a really scary thought, Mein Herr.

[Vondy]

Re: Philosophical question

 

I suspect its easier to build a better tomorrow than to try to anticipate the effects of changing the past - and more sensible.

[wylodmayer]

Re: Philosophical question

 

I suspect its easier to build a better tomorrow than to try to anticipate the effects of changing the past - and more sensible.

 

Exactly my point, sir.

 

And, in response to Pariah's point - isn't it, though? It reminds me of one of the amusing, subtle touches in the "World at War" third party expansion of Axis and Allies. The German player can try, once, during the game, to assassinate Hitler. If he fails, Hitler purges the officer corp and he loses a couple of units, if I recall correctly. If he succeeds, on the other hand, German becomes tougher.

[David Johnston]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Given the social and political forces in play in Germany after WWI' date=' it seems almost inevitable that someone like Hitler would come to power eventually. By killing Hitler, doesn't that open up the possibility that whoever did come to power [i']wasn't[/i] a total nutcase and actually knew how to run a war?

 

It seems to me that the main reason German lost WWII, in the end, is because Hitler just wasn't very capable as a military leader. By filling his slot in history with someone who knew what they were doing, doesn't that make it a lot more likely that the Wehrmacht doesn't collapse under the incompetence of its leaders, the Nazis win the war, and everyone's speaking German by 1948?

 

THAT'S a really scary thought, Mein Herr.

 

But not a plausible one. As a military politician Hitler wasn't incompetent except in one way. He didn't know when to back down. A replacement Hitler who lacked that flaw wouldn't be taking over the world because he'd realise that the world is too big to chew. He would have stopped at Czechoslovakia. The result would probably have been a nasty dictatorial Greater Germany that would have lasted for decades but there was no realistic chance that it would be taking over the world unless our replacement Hitler is a Vandal Savage armed with technology from the future, which is always fun.

 

As far as running Wings of the Valkyrie is concerned, I think it's more interesting if you give a choice about whether or not to stop the time-travellers before you know what the consequences are. As it stood, WotV was too linear.

[Peregrine]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Ok instead of Hitler you made it JFK and stop the Assassination from Happing only to return to a world where because JFK was Around he managed to Cause Nuclear Holocaust.Said Pc return to the past and Become the 2nd Gun Man

 

As I have recounted elsewhere on these boards, I ran a single-player game on that premise once, a few years ago. The game started in a cyberpunk world where JFK was not assassinated. A 'crackpot' scientist in the PC's present-day discovers that 'time is unraveling' (or some pseudobabble like that; I forget how I phrased it) and traces it back to the intervention of time travelers from a different timeline. The PC gets sent back to stop the time travelers. The plot was constructed so that the PC would have to pull the trigger on JFK to prevent time from going haywire. Sadly, the campaign never got past initial character generation.

[wylodmayer]

Re: Philosophical question

 

But not a plausible one. As a military politician Hitler wasn't incompetent except in one way.

 

I'm afraid I must disagree quite forcefully. Hitler's list of mistakes would take a book, but a few of them include:

 

1) An inability to appoint competent subordinates to handle important affairs. Lacking experience and understanding as a politician, he appointed crackpots like Ribbentrop and Funk to high and important office (the latter replacing the extremely talented Schacht as Minister of Finance, without whom the Reich would have never gotten off the ground). As he gained greater and greater power, he ironically became more and more insecure of dealing with individuals who could think for themselves. Those who were actually good at their jobs usually wound up out on their rears - Goebbels is the exception that proves the rule, and it's debatable how good he really was.

 

2) He lacked real leadership ability. He was good at whipping up the masses, sure, but it has been attested by many sources that he mostly let his subordinates run their own little baronies within the government, often working at cross purposes and dabbling in matters in no way related to their portfolio. Rather than imposing his presence to focus their efforts, he seemed more interested in letting them fawn over him, and often, when there was a conflict, made decisions about which program to favor based not on the merit of the thing in question, but on who was the better bootlicker. This only compounded his poor judgment in choosing ministers.

 

3) He may have been bold, but the boldness which won him some early victories masked a thorough ignorance of military strategy. He consistently failed to appreciate the importance of sea power, of proper air power (as demonstrated by the ruinous policies he allowed Goering to pursue with regards to the Luftwaffe, and the fact that the Waffen-SS eventually established its own air wing), the value of strategic maneuvering, etc. The fiasco at Cyprus only illustrates his inability to perceive how pieces fit together to form the big picture - better control of the Mediterranean and better air power could have prevented British sorties from Cyprus against Rommel, which would have very likely made the difference in his campaign to capture oil fields in the Middle East. And more oil would have dramatically changed Germany's fortunes in the War. But Hitler's grasp of all this was only rudimentary at best - he understood battles, conflicts of armies. In chess terminology, he was too focused on material, and not focused enough on position.

 

4) Corollary to his willingness to put incompetents in important positions was his willingness - almost eagerness - to dismiss valuable military officers and bureaucrats. His enormous arrogance and narcissism (the OSS psychoanalysis of Hitler makes *fascinating* reading) convinced him that not only were his "instincts" about people a more reliable indicator of success than actual facts, but that so long as he was in charge, it didn't *really* matter who was taking care of the details. In fact, just the opposite was true, especially as the war ground on and Hitler began distracting himself the from unpleasant failures of his policies by basically ignoring whatever he didn't want to hear, diverting his attention to elaborate plans to remodel Berlin and so forth.

 

I could go on, but that's sufficient, I think, to show the breadth and depth of Hitler's failings as a leader. His energy and willingness to go forward with seemingly insane risks propelled him to a leadership position early on - where others quailed, he strode boldly forward. However, he was anything but a visionary. So many followed him because his attitudes were relatively pedestrian in many ways - he was a product of his times, tapping into the zeitgeist of the last days of the Weimar Republic. And the risks he took were almost all bad ones, ones that should not and would not have paid off were it not for a diabolical confluence of events. The leaders of Europe were too fresh from the last war, and too unprepared for Hitler's unorthodox approach. Like a man confronted by a raving lunatic, they could only stare as he armed himself, not realizing until too late that they had missed a perfect opportunity to smack him down during his bluster and show. If anyone in France, England, or Russia in that crucial period had just ignored the man's bold confidence (and delusionals often seem very, very confident) and made the decision based on the facts and figures indicated by their intelligence, Hitler would have become a footnote in history. But Hitler's early successes bouyed his estimation of himself and inflated his reputation for "genius" to future generations. He had some talents, but the descriptions to be had from the OSS reports and from William Shirer sound more like a talented but undisciplined man who coasted on admittedly sharp instincts until he hit really knotty situations demanding actual, polished skill, at which point the wheels came off.

 

I highly recommend anything by Shirer, especially the seminal "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," as well as "Hitler's Army" by Bartov and "Hitler's Generals" by Barnett. There's no end of analyses of of the military situations themselves - an easy read for the layman, if not exactly a deep analysis, is Alexander's "How Hitler Could Have Won World War II."

[saiyanslayer]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Personally (time travel paradoxes aside), I feel that killing the baby Hitler would be wrong since he has yet to do anything wrong. What I would do in that situation is create or train an organization/group of people to prepare for what is to come. They would have years of preparation, and when Hitler first issued those orders for mass executions and invasions, my team would be ready to pull the plug.

That seems like the only moral thing to do. You are assured he is what he is, and you spare the life of an innocent child.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Ok instead of Hitler you made it JFK and stop the Assassination from Happing only to return to a world where because JFK was Around he managed to Cause Nuclear Holocaust.Said Pc return to the past and Become the 2nd Gun Man

 

They did this on Red Dwarf, by time travelling back and accidentally knocking Lee Harvey Oswald out the window before he could kill JFK (or "Jeff K" as Rimmer said). They went forward a few years to escape the cops, and discovered Kennedy had been impeached and imprisoned (something about diddling a mafioso's girlfriend), and the Russians got nuke missiles in Cuba while the US was in political turmoil. But none of the RD crewmen wanted to be the Second Gunman.

 

 

So they grabbed Kennedy (from after the botched assassination) as he was being taken to prison and convinced *him* to be the second gunman. As Lister said, "It'll drive the conspiracy theorists nuts!"

 

[Alverant]

Re: Philosophical question

 

 

 

So they grabbed Kennedy (from after the botched assassination) as he was being taken to prison and convinced *him* to be the second gunman. As Lister said, "It'll drive the conspiracy theorists nuts!"

 

 

So would that make JFK a victim, murderer, suicide, or martyr?

 

[Alverant]

Re: Philosophical question

 

I'm afraid I must disagree quite forcefully. Hitler's list of mistakes would take a book' date=' but a few of them include:[/quote']

 

I think his biggest mistake was to betray the USSR. From everything I read, they had a sweet deal going. I know Nazis hate Communists and all, but if they would have waited until they secured the rest of Europe (and for spring) before invading the USSR, things would have been very different.

[wylodmayer]

Re: Philosophical question

 

I think his biggest mistake was to betray the USSR. From everything I read' date=' they had a sweet deal going. I know Nazis hate Communists and all, but if they would have waited until they secured the rest of Europe (and for spring) before invading the USSR, things would have been very different.[/quote']

 

Indeed. The personal accounts of those closest to Stalin reveal that he was genuinely shocked and dismayed that Hitler betrayed their compact. Naive, perhaps, especially for a sociopath, but what can you say? Again, however, this just underscores Hitler's flaws as a leader; he never made cost-benefit analyses of his actions, hedging against failure. He never said to himself, "Yeah, but if I'm wrong, the cost will be far too high." As far as he was concerned, he was NEVER wrong - he had this very bizarre belief in his "intuition." By his own account, and the accounts of those he worked with, he never studied the number, consulted with experts, or anything like that. When he had to make a knotty decision, he retreated off alone, by himself, and waited for the answer to "come to him." For some reason, he believed that whatever answer then "came to him" would be, unquestionably, the right one. So, yeah... no allowances for personal fallability, there. Not real bright.

[TaxiMan]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Interesting tangent: this is one of the options of "How to Avoid Paradox in a time travel game", in GURPS Time Travel. Basically, if from your frame of reference, you know an action occured, then that action WILL occur. It's a sort-of psychic form of the Uncertianty Princple, as applied to time travel.

 

If it is recorded in your timeline that Hitler rose to power and you are aware of that information when you go back to try and kill Hitler, then Hitler, by definition, (or someone who matches up with the historical records who is called Hitler) WILL rise to power. There may be small details that the history books get wrong, but it will pretty much occur as you recall.

 

In that case, I'd do my very best to alter my memory of the future. All other efforts seem doomed.

[TaxiMan]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Y'know, I seem to recall that Hitler was a genius that lead Germany to take over the world. Then some troublemaker went back in time and messed with his upbringing and set him up to become insane.

 

Supposedly, this was done to unify the world with a fight against demonstrable "evil". Not sure how all that turned out.

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: Philosophical question

 

In that case' date=' I'd do my very best to alter my memory of the future. All other efforts seem doomed.[/quote']

 

From what I recall of the campaign descrciption, it means that time-travelling agents are extremely well-informed regarding the day-to-day activities of the time period they are going to , but are extremely and intentionally UN-INFORMED regarding large-scale historical events. They are essentially kept in the dark and isolated from any information that may compromise their ability to change the timestream.

 

In contrast, their leaders are extremely well-informed about history and the past, if only to be able to assign missions. However, those mission breifing are extremely circumspect, in order to keep from compromising the agent's psyches.

[Bud Gray]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Where I was really trying to go with this thread wasn't so much to discuss the consequences of altering history. But rather, is it morally right to murder someone, in cold blood, for crimes they have yet to commit? Should a 6-year-old hitler be held accountable for the actions of a 50-year-old hitler? For that matter, should you hold a 20-year-old hitler accountable for the actions of a hitler 30 years older? Some of the responses really do go into some nice detail, and give me a lot to think on. All the responses have been good, even the ones that are a little off topic. So, thanks and keep it coming.

Also, sorry I didn't respond a little sooner, it's been a busy week.

[McCoy]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Again' date=' however, this just underscores Hitler's flaws as a leader; he never made cost-benefit analyses of his actions, hedging against failure. He never said to himself, "Yeah, but if I'm wrong, the cost will be far too high." As far as he was concerned, he was NEVER wrong - he had this very bizarre belief in his "intuition." By his own account, and the accounts of those he worked with, he never studied the number, consulted with experts, or anything like that. When he had to make a knotty decision, he retreated off alone, by himself, and waited for the answer to "come to him." For some reason, he believed that whatever answer then "came to him" would be, unquestionably, the right one. So, yeah... no allowances for personal fallability, there. Not real bright.[/quote']

Anybody else got a weird feeling of deja vu?

[Checkmate]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Back to the original question: No I would never kill Hitler. Even as a child (especially as a child), even if I knew it would prevent the holocaust.

 

I have to take a look at what Hitler did: He took a country decimated after WWI and in a few short years, came dangerously close to taking over the world. He did a lot of good for a lot of Germany.

 

Now that alone probably doesn't outweigh the evil he perpetrated on his country, so I have to think about things I'll never know. What happened as a result of Hitler's exsistance? What steps were put into place so that something like this could never happen again? What did it teach the world? Who was inspired to make up for this evil? What "good things" came out of the restoration of German, and ALL the world?

 

I don't know the answer to any of those questions and I doubt anyone could answer all of them. So if I had a gun, and 6 year old Hitler, I would use the gun on myself so I wouldn't have to live knowing I could have stopped what happened.

[clsage]

Re: Philosophical question

 

Ok instead of Hitler you made it JFK and stop the Assassination from Happing only to return to a world where because JFK was Around he managed to Cause Nuclear Holocaust.Said Pc return to the past and Become the 2nd Gun Man

 

Tangentally, there was an excellent episode of "The New Twilight Zone"

entitled "A Profile In Silver" which dealt with the whole issue of temporal

ripples caused by a historian from the future (who happened to be a distant

relation of the Kennedy clan) who couldn't stand by and let his ancestor

be assasinated. After saving JFK, the world starts to go to crap and, in

an effort to save the future, the historian leaps back and replaces his

ancestor....Thus the discrepencies in the autopsy data, etc.....

 

-Carl-