Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:So, this sort of scenario was swimming in my head for the past hour and I thought it would make a good topic of debate:
Say that in some point in time, we develop a machine that can beam the information of today of milestones that happened later into the heads of people from the past would it be ethical? Like for example, beaming modern day scientific texts on race into the minds of everyone in the Jim Crow south, replacing the sexist cultural norms of the 50s with the modern day, or flashing homosexuality being taken off the DSM in 1974 and some modern day texts on neuroscience into the minds of certain people in pre-1967 Britain. Or should the past reserve the right to remain ignorant and progress at its destined rate?
As absurdist science fiction, that sounds like a fun concept. As reality, it's fanciful at best.
I don't think it would be ethical to make some hypothetical machine that can exert mind control over people in the past, to make them adopt the vogue ideologies of today. The problem with that is twofold:
1. If it can and should happen, it already has. The way time works is that it'd already have happened if it was supposed to and does in the future. That's why causality in time travel situations is boggling.
2. Competition from further off futures where values have shifted. I know progressives like to think that their values are marching on an inexorable path into the future, displacing everything else and leading us to a utopia, but I don't think that we can predict what the future will hold, and if we allow for 2017 to impose it's values on 1965, why shouldn't 2070 impose its values on both?
On top of this, I can't see how it would be ethical to force people to believe what someone else believes, even through time. They're still people even if they're wrong about something, and while certainly people have caused great suffering in the pursuit of their values, that's true of literally every ideology and worldview. Nobody says democracy is a bad idea because of the Terror.