Killing Hitler as a baby

When polled on whether they would kill Hitler as a baby, only 42% of NYT readers said yes.

When polled on whether the atomic bombings of Japan were justified, 56% of Americans said yes.

Either people are really uncomfortable with messing up the timeline, or killing 200,000 people to end the war early is considered preferable to killing one person to stop the war entirely.

Why would I kill Hitler?

Neither are a threat to my existence.

I think I might keep the first bomb. I would exhaust all other options first though, like I would make absolutely sure that the Japanese knew that we were going to drop it, and that it was real, and give them time to surrender. If they still say no, then it’s dropping the bomb, or launching a ground invasion which both would have killed about the same amount of people. 

The second bomb was a definitely un called for though.

I would have just surrendered and let Japan win.

i think it might boil down to whether the ends justify the means. a lot of people stupidly stick to ideology and think the end never justifies the means... they say hitler was at one point just an innocent baby, and that dropping the bomb was a just response to a bad guy. in truth, the moral thing is that we all know hitler was bound to be bad, even if he was innocent at time time. it's like not pushing an innocent person into traffic if it'd save lots of people. it's absolutely immoral not to do what's necessary for the greater good. it's called proportionalism. that's not saying all bad things can be justified, only if it's proportional. i know me being a christian who believes in proportionalism is controversial, but i dont care. there's not clear authoritative teaching on this, so i use the gift of reason that God gave me 

Butterfly effect.

Change the course of 20th century events and everything would now be different.

No Debateart, no Savant, no Zed, no poll.

The bomb was perhaps an evolutionary inevitability and going to be deployed at some point, by someone.

Japan recovered OK.

Europe recovered OK.

Shit still happens.

Clever stupid gene.

The Earth continues to rotate.

The Sun still does it's stuff.

And so on........

Sentiment of the Japanese public was a key driver of the country's aggressive Showa-era foreign policy. It made for a convenient postwar myth that they were dragged into a war they didn't want by men like Hideki Tojo but the fact is that the average citizen was, by and large, guilty.

Baby Hitler, in contrast, was a baby.

This analysis is, of course, flawed in that Japanese babies and children who had nothing to do with the war were killed too. But whatever.

You all know that life is meaningless. If you equate the life of the Universe to 100 years, the life of a human is 15 seconds.

The goal in life should be to make as much money and have as much sex as you can!

OMG, I'm a Trump!

The nuke question is something I'm still undecided on.

As for killing Hitler as a baby, I wouldn't. While WWII was tragic and took the lives of many, the butterfly effect that resulted created as many, if not more. People were dispersed, and they met new people that were found at their new home. In some cases, a refugee married someone they met in their new home, resulting a new bloodline being created. In other cases, someone had a changed outlook on life after the war, which resulted in that someone marrying a different person than they would have previously. Same concept.

To be honest, I don't think I would exist if WWII never happened. My grandfather was in the Navy during WWII, stationed in the Pacific theater. He never saw battle, but I would be shocked if his experience in the military didn't change him. It certainly impacted his decisions going forward, which likely ensured he would meet and eventually marry my grandmother.

I can guarantee I'm not the only one who wouldn't exist if WWII didn't happen. Should I sacrifice myself, many of the people I know, and who knows how many others around the world, for the sake of those whose fate was already decided back then? Absolutely not.

Sure, there'd be many individuals that would exist in place of us all; however, they don't exist, so we have no moral obligation to them. We have the people in this world right now.

And that's not even factoring in the future, where the butterfly effect would get even more intense.

According to the multiverse theory of time travel, you'd be creating a new universe where Hitler dies and billions of new lives in that universe, without affecting anybody in this one.

I don't believe in any sort of multiverse, but let's entertain the idea for the sake of argument.

It would be completely irrelevant. The original question about killing baby Hitler is about how we would handle things in our own timeline if we could change them.