Board Thread:Hosting Game/@comment-30895062-20171117223743/@comment-32399751-20171125022150

"If you could travel back in time to kill Hitler as a baby, preventing the deaths of millions of Jews and preventing the second world war, wouldn't you do the same?" (I didn't want to quote the whole thing)

Without legitimate authority for the killing you would merely be murdering an innocent child. And there is no generalized legal or moral rationale for such an act. Even the most liberal reading of preemptive action under just war doctrine cannot justify killing an infant now because of what they will do in the future as an adult. Indeed, there is only one way the action would be legitimate: If God directly told you to take the child’s life. If it were not God’s will, the baby Adolph would never have survived to adulthood. By saying, “Yes, for the good of mankind, I’d kill baby Adolph” we are essentially saying God willed wrongly and that we would use or ability and will to get it right. It is saying that we are willing to put our trust in our own authority and our knowledge of what is good and evil. It is saying that in ourselves rather than trusting in the sufficiency of the revealed will of God.