Greentext

Society disensitises us to the idea of killing bad people, all the movies and TV you watch and games you play will have you kill someone because they're an enemy or a bad person. No media justifies the idea of molesting someone because they're a bad guy.

I think a lot of people tend to externalize the consequences of murder as simply a matter of course. Like, a lot of people don't think of themselves as murderers, but do think that if push comes to shove, or if shit hits the fan, or if worse comes to worst, they'd be able to dig deep and find the strength within themselves to "do what needs to be done" and "protect their family" or whatever.

In this sense, murder is just "work." It's a means to an end, if an extreme one.

But, basically no one feels this way about molestation. I mean, how could you? There's no obvious connection between action and effect; the prompt says there is, but you just have to take that on faith. It's probably easier to just commit the murder, anyway, which means there's a degree of "indulgence" inherent to this that makes it feel much more gross. Plus, most people know this intuitively: we fix problems either by stopping them (murder, prison) or repairing them (therapy, support, love), and molestation is neither of those. Intuitively, it seems like the molestation would make things worse, actually.

So, in a rule-utilitarianism sense, I think people feel that murder is horrible, but permissible. Molestation is just horrible.

Also, regarding all of the above points, there's a virtue ethics angle to what each of those options might say about what kind of person you are, even if they both yielded the same outcome.

To be fair, he was innocent as a baby obviously.

But much easier to imagine woodchipping him than well, the fucked up shit anon spouted.

Maybe we are all different kinds of sick?

Frankly, I don't see how killing baby Hitler is not... extremely obviously morally superior to molesting baby Hitler.

You can kill anybody nearly instantly.

'Molestation' implies... over a signifcant amount of time.

It also implies that this is done in lieu of directly killing baby Hitler.

So you've now generated an even more fucked up Hitler.

Who will... regardless of how their time travel affrcted lifepath plays out... well they'll have been molested. As a core memory.

That... seems to me to be less moral, causes more Hitler-suffering, unnecessarily.

You've minimized total suffering, via killing baby Hitler.

... this is all assuming that just... doing either of these things somehow results in Hitler not coming to power, WW2 doesn't happen, holocaust doesn't happen.

Frankly I also do not see anything near a guaranteed causality to 'molesting baby Hitler' -> 'somehow WW2 does not happen'.

Whereas it is at least semi-plausible that killing baby Hitler at least could result in ww2/holocaust not happening... I guess the ... Strasserists just stay in control of the Nazis? And do not have a strangely charismatic firebrand to massively expand the movement?

So it also just seems very impractical, unlikely that molesting baby Hitler would achieve the presumably desired aim.

And it also assumes that these are your only two possible actions.

Of course the entire thing is ludicrous is the sense of hinging on perfect foreknowledge, and time travel, which is fundamentally paradoxical, and/or results quantum suicide/immortality type nonsense, and/or in the Red Alert timeline.

Oh god, and we essentially have to assume that this will be the only possible instance of time travel that ever happens, otherwise we potentially get into a kind of battling time travellers scenario ala whatever the fuck the Terminator series is doing now, and/or just a reality where many people can do time travel.

Why not just do... teleportation, and either kill or molest Trump or Netanyahu, right now?

I think I'd again conclude that telefragging them would be morally superior.

Typical people deal with rape, murder is far rarer so there’s less “reality” to it. Go to a war torn country and you’d get a different response. Possivly “who is hitler?”

But, more specifically, the kill baby Hitler question already exists in the social ether to be finished through call and respond. Branching into molestation requires recontextualization which pulls us into reality. It’s no longer call and respond, and you’ve just asked someone if they’d molest a baby.