Current Events > Would it be unethical to change the past if one had the means to do so?

(+) Yeah! (+)

-Let's say that someone had the capability to travel through time, and had the means to make any change to the timeline that they wanted.
-In this scenario, time is a linear straight line with no branches, so any changes they make to the past will affect their original present, though the timeline will still make it so that they and the means they use to time-travel will still exist in some form or fashion.

They want to go back and stop and prevent certain atrocities that occurred in the past, some of which had very profound and significant effects on how their society developed in the years that followed.

Would this be unethical on their part?

Probably but I'd still go back in time and destroy the future

Under whose rules of morality?

In a sense yes, since any significant change to the past means certain people don't get born.

It would be a very busy job, likely involving multiple changes to avoid a nuclear war that was triggered during a timeline they modded in some way. Say for instance that WW2 ends early and the nuclear weapons program still finishes, but the first one is not used until more than one nation has it. Or that Rome doesn't collapse, and we either get to the moon or nuke ourselves 500 years early. Or that our traveler is a bit of a troll and goes back and makes cybernetic dinosaurs and giving them to whatever powers there be in the now likely even more drastically altered future (missing dinosaurs triggering butterfly cascades), since the timeline is only correcting for the time machine's user and thus will at least make sure humans are still a thing. But you now have humans that are being given weaponized dinosaur cyborgs at some point in history.

Depending how far back they go, and where, this could profoundly affect various nations too, not to mention languages and such (due to your rules, they and the time machine would be updated with any new languages, so this is not a concern for them).

That all said, the intricacy of your rules system indicates that the universe of our question is one with a very definite guiding hand of sorts guiding the timeline. And that whatever hand (i.e. God or something similar) is willing to let the time travel happen. Barring any mechanism to explain how the heck it works, a self-correcting timeline that is this specifically human in its rules is actually a reasonable piece of evidence for a higher power, even if only the time machine's user would ever believe it (no one else would remember the change).

Which begs a question for the more bible-literate among you:
Would God approve of history-rewriting time travel? Because regardless of the truth of our own world, there is a pretty big chance that They exist in the world this question applies to.

You'd be destroying the current world to replace it with your idea of a utopia. That sounds extremely supervillain.

Solar_Crimson posted...

They want to go back and stop and prevent certain atrocities that occurred in the past, some of which had very profound and significant effects on how their society developed in the years that followed.

Would this be unethical on their part?

Would preventing future atrocities also be unethical? They could also have significant effects on society's development.

Nah. Its not like anyone would know anyway.

Flauros posted...

Nah. Its not like anyone would know anyway.

Unless you have Reading Steiner, but that's a really rare skill anyway.

Kamil posted...

Unless you have Reading Steiner, but that's a really rare skill anyway.

Don't worry my meddling will ensure that nobody remembers because nothing will exist

you'd be creating a new reality so you wouldn't really be affecting the people in your original timeline