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Would it be unethical to write someone out of existence?

Windwalker

Veteran Member
Premium Member
It was a question about time travel, but I am interested in your input on historical revisionism, too.
In thinking about this just now, I think they are somewhat related from an ethical perspective. First the question of changing history through time travel. If you were to go back and do something to interfere in the birth of baby Adolf Hitler, such as offering his father a well-paying job in another part of the world where he would never meet Adolf's mother, that would at least not be killing baby Adolf through an act of murder. It's more just a diversion of the stream of time.

But would that be unethical because you changed history for those people and everything downstream from that point? Not to them, since their histories had not yet unfolded. The world would not have changed for them. They would not have lost something that they already had, such as a marriage and child with this person or that. They would have other alternative histories in the making, no different than any direction at any point in any life on any day of any week right now.

I do not believe there is any predestined path for history, and we are all just passive pawns being swept down that river of time. We create the pathways for those streams through choices set against the environment we find ourselves within, like a river cutting its way through the landscape. Once that has been laid down, then it has a history, a history which affects everything following afterward. If it hasn't been set yet, you haven't changed anything. You haven't wiped out a history already created, for those people.

But what about for yourself? That history you are destroying is part of your own history. Baby Adolf became that mass murderer, whose reality affected the environment for the whole world which formed the different paths and influences in your own life in one way, shape, or form. If I changed that history, ostensibly it would only be my own history being altered, because those of my time I came from, ostensibly don't exist yet while I'm in the past.

This then relates it seems to historical revisionism. If we start with our own individual histories, with some degree of insight we begin to realize what constitutes our "history" is really a matter of interpretation and creative storytelling that shapes how we understand our own past. And in fact, the facts of what happened become seen through that interpretive lens so as to actually revise what may have actually happened to fit into our current understanding. We can in fact reexamine our own histories and come to new understandings, or revelations about what those are, and how we today our affected by those. In other words, the 'truth' is a lot more fluid and interactive than just static fact laying around fixed on some historical timeline.

Even from the very first recollection of an event there is some 'revisioning' going on. And being humans, once we tell ourselves a particular story, we begin to repeat it. And that repetition becomes the thing remembered, and becomes the history of it in our own minds. But re-examining and revising that history for ourselves is not changing it for others, for the most part.

The same thing holds true for collective histories. Events of the day become narrated to us by the storytellers, in whatever form they exist. and those become the 'facts' to our minds - even if those narratives are deliberate fabrications and lies told again and again for political purposes, such as the "stolen election" lie.

It becomes truth, once the mind identifies it as facts by having invested emotionally with believing the narratives, and the facts that deny or challenge those stories are met with skepticism and denials because of the cognitive dissonance they create. Deliberately manipulating the way truth is created in people's minds, is highly unethical.

Such is the case of historical revisionists, who wish to make things like slavery seem like a good thing, and that the slaves were happy working the fields, living better lives as slaves that in their tribal lives back home, rather than being in misery as property owned by others.

What we say to ourselves is ethically sound, even if we are unfair to ourselves in our own self-narratives, or overly generous perhaps. We are only lying to ourselves to our own harm. But historical revisionists, those who attempt to repaint history for illegitimate political reasons, such as the Civil War was about "States Rights", which is was not, are ethically unsound. It denies actual facts where others were severely impacted negatively and denies their voices.

Unlike going back in time and preventing the birth of baby Adolf and creating a new timeline, revisionists deny the current timeline and do violence to facts and people's lives. Whether they are Holocaust Deniers, who ignore the reality of what happened, creators of the "Lost Cause" mythology who deny that the civil war was about the horrors of human slavery the South embraced, or the 'Stolen Election" lies of the January 6th seditionists, that sort of revisionism is ethically and moral corrupt. It denies reality to those who lived through it.
 
Last edited:

Ella S.

*temp banned*
In thinking about this just now, I think they are somewhat related from an ethical perspective. First the question of changing history through time travel. If you were to go back and do something to interfere in the birth of baby Adolf Hitler, such as offering his father a well-paying job in another part of the world where he would never meet Adolf's mother, that would at least not be killing baby Adolf through an act of murder. It's more just a diversion of the stream of time.

But would that be unethical because you changed history for those people and everything downstream from that point? Not to them, since their histories had not yet unfolded. The world would not have changed for them. They would not have lost something that they already had, such as a marriage and child with this person or that. They would have other alternative histories in the making, no different than any direction at any point in any life on any day of any week right now.

I do not believe there is any predestined path for history, and we are all just passive pawns being swept down that river of time. We create the pathways for those streams through choices set against the environment we find ourselves within, like a river cutting its way through the landscape. Once that has been laid down, then it has a history, a history which affects everything following afterward. If it hasn't been set yet, you haven't changed anything. You haven't wiped out a history already created, for those people.

But what about for yourself? That history you are destroying is part of your own history. Baby Adolf became that mass murderer, whose reality affected the environment for the whole world which formed the different paths and influences in your own life in one way, shape, or form. If I changed that history, ostensibly it would only be my own history being altered, because those of my time I came from, ostensibly don't exist yet while I'm in the past.

This then relates it seems to historical revisionism. If we start with our own individual histories, with some degree of insight we begin to realize what constitutes our "history" is really a matter of interpretation and creative storytelling that shapes how we understand our own past. And in fact, the facts of what happened become seen through that interpretive lens so as to actually revise what may have actually happened to fit into our current understanding. We can in fact reexamine our own histories and come to new understandings, or revelations about what those are, and how we today our affected by those. In other words, the 'truth' is a lot more fluid and interactive than just static fact laying around fixed on some historical timeline.

Even from the very first recollection of an event there is some 'revisioning' going on. And being humans, once we tell ourselves a particular story, we begin to repeat it. And that repetition becomes the thing remembered, and becomes the history of it in our own minds. But re-examining and revising that history for ourselves is not changing it for others, for the most part.

The same thing holds true for collective histories. Events of the day become narrated to us by the storytellers, in whatever form they exist. and those become the 'facts' to our minds - even if those narratives are deliberate fabrications and lies told again and again for political purposes, such as the "stolen election" lie.

It becomes truth, once the mind identifies it as facts by having invested emotionally with believing the narratives, and the facts that deny or challenge those stories are met with skepticism and denials because of the cognitive dissonance they create. Deliberately manipulating the way truth is created in people's minds, is highly unethical.

Such is the case of historical revisionists, who wish to make things like slavery seem like a good thing, and that the slaves were happy working the fields, living better lives as slaves that in their tribal lives back home, rather than being in misery as property owned by others.

What we say to ourselves is ethically sound, even if we are unfair to ourselves in our own self-narratives, or overly generous perhaps. We are only lying to ourselves to our own harm. But historical revisionists, those who attempt to repaint history for illegitimate political reasons, such as the Civil War was about "States Rights", which is was not, are ethically unsound. It denies actual facts where others were severely impacted negatively and denies their voices.

Unlike going back in time and preventing the birth of baby Adolf and creating a new timeline, revisionists deny the current timeline and do violence to facts and people's lives. Whether they are Holocaust Deniers, who ignore the reality of what happened, creators of the "Lost Cause" mythology who deny that the civil war was about the horrors of human slavery the South embraced, or the 'Stolen Election" lies of the January 6th seditionists, that sort of revisionism is ethically and moral corrupt. It denies reality to those who lived through it.

This is a fascinating, well-thought out, and nuanced reply. Thank you, I appreciate your input.
 
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