Killing baby Hitler

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Killing baby Hitler is a thought experiment in ethics and theoretical physics which poses the question of using backwards time travel to assassinate an infant Adolf Hitler. It presents an ethical dilemma in both the action and its consequences, as well as a temporal paradox in the logical consistency of time. Killing baby Hitler first became a literary trope of science fiction during World War II and has since been used to explore these ethical and metaphysical debates. Ethical debates on the problem of killing baby Hitler can demonstrate the outlook of various moral philosophies: utilitarianism holds that killing baby Hitler is justified, as the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs; deontology holds that killing baby Hitler is unjustified, as infanticide is always wrong; and consequentialism may question what the consequences of killing baby Hitler might be, holding that the unforeseen future consequences of such an act make it difficult to judge its morality. It is also used...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Josef Franz Klinger (active from 1864 to 1906), Public domain