It feels kinda wrong how quickly some people say they wouldn’t kill hitler if they were sent back in time and given the opportunity.
I’m using that scenario because it seems like a common example, but I’m curious about how materialist theory would approach this.
Barring the sci-fi theories around time travel and whether a new timeline is created, where I believe it’s fair game to change the past (since it’s a new timeline) would it be morally right to improve the world if flung into a version of the past?
My thought is that it would be a moral obligation to help with things and not just be a witness to atrocity.
Edit: I think my question was more - Is it wrong to do nothing if flung into the past when you know what is likely to happen, or is it more wrong to try to prevent or change it?
I ask because it’s almost a given in media and general discussion that you don’t mess with things on the chance you make things worse by interfering. That argument feels flawed and lib- brained and I don’t think I would be okay with a bad thing happening in front of me just because that’s how it happened in my history book. Like the idea of standing by and doing nothing in the face of suffering feels wrong especially with something as nebulous as ‘affecting the timeline’
A single person isn’t going to change anything because Great Man is a fuck. You would need to send back dozens, if not hundreds, of leftists to change anything drastically (such as preventing WWII or arming Native Americans with totally-not-wunderwaffen).
I think the important thing to do would be recover and record things that were lost (like the other epics written by Homer or samples of the birth control plant the Romans drove to extinction), followed by socialism as science. Science is repeatable and predictable. The usefulness of time travel is being able to verify what was previously unverifiable.