What ethical problems might be involved in time travel?

Question

Has anyone addressed the ethics of time travel?

Time travel looks like a gold mine for moral dilemmas, but I don't know of anyone who addresses these issues.

For example:

• Am I morally obligated to go back in time and change a tragedy that already happened?
  • If so, how far back into the past is one obligated to "fix" things? Must we prevent the Black Plague? Do we stop the extinction of the Neanderthals?
• If the only possible way to stop a serial killer were to kill him while he was younger, would it be right (or even mandatory) to kill him while he is still innocent? If so, what about during his childhood?
• Is it okay to go back in time and preventing a child from being born? Is it any different from murder? Is it any different from birth control (or even not having children at the age of 13)?
  • Do we prevent the Black Plague (from the earlier bullet) if it will cause many of the current people to never have been born?
• How would the ability to change the past affect punishment for crimes? If a crime can always be undone, how bad can it be?

I'm less interested in answers for these sample questions (although it would be interesting to hear various opinions) than I am in knowing if there is any serious material regarding the issue.

Answer 1

Time travel and moral dilemmas are a common pairing in science fiction because they can take things so seriously. One of the difficulties with exploring implications of moral codes is that they always seem "right" within a narrow scope within which they were created. However, it is much harder to determine if they are right in a wider scope without challenging it.

Time travel has the advantage of being just barely on the edge of possibility (for instance, we've never seen it, but it can be defined in a General Relativity universe, if need be). It pushes the limit between "what we know" versus "what physically is," and often explores infinite looping implications on one's actions. These structures are very effective for challenging a moral code of conduct.

I don't know if it would be possible to find any synopses of time travel and morality issues, because each author has their own flavor of how to do it. The joy of science fiction is not everyone is expected to agree upon morals between their exotic worlds. It also helps that the many different flavors of time travel have very different implications. The moral implications of strange loops in Heinlein's books (All You Zombies is a personal favorite) are very different from the moral implications of HG Wells' The Time Machine.

Answer 2

I think you are looking at the entirely wrong moral problem. You seem to assume that with time travel into the past, you could make some predictable change to events. For example, take a serial killer who murdered ten people, shoot him before his first murder, and you have ten people alive and ten happy families.

But it's not that easy. It is practically impossible to predict the exact outcome of such an action. One of the saved murder victims could become a school bus driver and kill thirty school children by causing an accident. Saving the Neanderthals could directly lead to the extinction of all of mankind.

The moral problem is not whether it is moral to cause or not cause a predictable outcome; the moral problem is whether it is moral to meddle with things when the outcome is absolutely unpredictable. The problem isn't whether you should play god or not; the problem is whether you should use god-like powers when you haven't got a clue what you are doing.

Answer 3

Moral dilemmas of this sort are discussed by SF authors, for example Heinlein in his short story By his Bootstraps; and in the main stream of literature where its been influenced by such, ie Tom Stoppards The Real Inspector Hound; but quite amazingly not at all in the most famous time travel story, I mean that by H G Wells - The Time Machine - which is more in the tradition of Victorian high adventure, and earlier the epic.

This tradition, despite its intrinsic interest, is unlikely to appeal to practitioners of moral philosophy; as it has no bearing on actual moral problems; or even possible ones; given that the scientific consensus is that time travel is an impossibility now, and in the near or far future.

Still, its not an impossibility with enough ingenuity; for example Parfitt uses literary techniques from SF (cloning) to discuss a particular problem in the philosophy of mind (its unity and coherence over time and space).

Answer 4

Ethically, changing historical events without being able to predict the results is clearly immoral. At it's core, this is risking the existence of every person in "this future" for a (potentially) better one. Without their consent. With no real ability to predict the long-term outcome.

Another way to look at it is (to risk referencing TVTropes), "killing one man who did evil doesn't get rid of the circumstances and structure that put him in the position to do evil in the first place." You go back in time to kill Hitler, and when you return to the present you find the Soviet Union started World War II... this time, with nukes!

Answer 5

In line with robert bristow-johnson's comment, the only time travel is at a local rate of 1 second per second. That goes for everywhere, because across the board everything only happens at one moment, (even if the local rates are different due to different gravity etc.) So time-travel in the science-fiction sense is a logical fallacy, and time-travel ethics would be a nonsense.

Answer 6

This is a really great question, that was difficult to answer.

I would make the arugment that lack of action could be unethical. For example, if a child is starving and you have plenty of food. By not helping the child and allowing them to die of natural causes would be unethical.

With the assumption listed above, I would support the notion of using time travel to change the future for the greater good.

Now this becomes a very high risk behavior because potentially an action could have a ripple effect that could result in something as severe as nuclear warfare or mabye never leading to the scientific discovery of time travel. Also it is unclear have time travel would impact reality or if there is multiple demensions.

At the end of the day, I think it would have to depend on the type of change being proposed, the known risks, and how far back in time the travel is taking place.

Answer 7

There is a great confusion here stemming from language.

You use the words "past" and "already happened". But as soon as you invent time travel, those words don't mean the same thing anymore. If you can change it, then how did it already happen? If you change it and it does not happen, did it happen because it happened before you changed it, or did it never happen?

Our ethics likewise assume a linear, single-strand chain of events. One thing or another thing could happen, which one is better? This follows our understanding of time as being linear and single-stranded, i.e. there is one timeline.

Does this still hold true with time travel? Paradoxes are a main topic of SciFi literature, because you cannot have time travel and not create paradoxes. Any theory of how time reacts to time travellers needs to resolve paradoxes, such as postulating that minor events are smoothed out (e.g. the air molecules that time traveller displaces return to their "ordinary" position instead of causing a chain reaction). This creates a ton of physics problems (e.g. which force returns them to their position?) and is generally ignored in SciFi.

The best treatment of time I've seen so far is the Doctor Who approach - time is wobbly wibbly and unpredictable, and stop worrying so much about it because you can't predict the long run anyway, but you can do the right thing in the time and place you find yourself in.

From this flows a clear answer to the ethical question:

Assuming time travel is possible, you have to abandon your linear, single-causal thinking. Your ethical system just broke down completely, because you can no longer think like that. Between "Bob killed 10 people" and "I go into the past to kill Bob" and "I killed Bob, so Bob cannot kill someone in the future" there is no longer a simple chain of causes. Whatever paradox-resolution is found to be true, it will by necessity negate your logic. For example, if the above causal chain were true, the first statement becomes false at the conclusion of the third one, invalidating the whole chain.

You cannot ask the ethical question without resolving the physical first, namely how this all works. Time travel is not a small thing to add to the equation, it's an entirely new equation and will require an entirely new ethics.

Answer 8

Ethics depends on context. The Ethics of Time travel into the past is dependent on how physics of reality, (or beyond reality), manifests these disruptions. Is Time Immortal, eternal or is it finite? Is the Universe made up of Alternities- where each possible probability variation of each unit of spacetime flowing into its own branch of existing reality? Would such bifurcation operate only forward in time, or backward as well? Does going back into the past extinguish the original future? Are there Artifacts? Temporal clones or things that should not exist because their first cause has been made un-existent? Etc…. The Ethics of time travel needs to have variant reality interpretations for each ethical standard considered, much like psychology of the 20th century which needed multiple model interpretations because of both the limitations of model parameters and because of the sheer unknowing. Past Time Info/Travel is a wicked problem- Is it an omnipotent power? Does it need an omniscient awareness? Given F() & G() are both the total temporal Ethical sum of different universes; is it possible then that all F(good1,bad1) equals all G(good2,bad2)? Ethical sum constancy would seem probable if we begin to work in infinities, which an infinite time would suggests? Would ethics then merely be an illusion of the finite in an infinite world? If our understanding of ethics is present-consciousness-based and assumes cause and effect; and interprets 'ethics' as a relationship of 'intent-action-and-consequence- then is there some new ingredient(s) that need to be added to this formula, or are these ethical reference tools recursively scale-able to this new ethical dimension of reverse time? My guess is that this might deserve a whole school of philosophical thought and should be instrumental in helping to clarify previously intractable ethical problems of the past.

Answer 9

I now believe that there are laws in time. If you try to change something, other events occur to generate the same outcome.

Turns out that this is consistent with Novikov's arguments; in fact, I discussed this via Email to some folks a while back. It became obvious that wormholes are not just a mathematical oddity but exist in real space/time, using exotic matter analog generated by an antimatter interaction with electromagnetism that has yet to be discovered, as it is comparatively low energy, and incidentally responsible for ball lightning! See work relating to pair production in thunderstorms.

I am writing a paper on my ideas in the hopes that others can one day fill in the blanks and make sending a signal back in time possible.

As it happens have some circumstantial evidence that broadcasting a signal at certain key frequencies at a region of imminent air breakdown might open the bridge, but this is pure conjecture.