The killing of Doc Brown....murder or self defense?

[calcbandit]

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if the abortion doctor had succeeded in aborting you how are u travelling from the future to prevent your abortion..

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Great Scott!

[kerowo]

Good lord, if you want to talk about abortion, talk about abortion. Don't go putting it in some weird hypothetical that as soon as you tie it back to abortion makes people want to kick you in the nuts.

[Max Raker]

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The entire story is a thought experiment.


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[Max Raker]

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I honestly don't know why Doc Brown invented the time machine. Perhaps its in that movie Back to the Future. If knowing the reason is that important to you go rent the movie, watch it, and report back to us why he invented a time machine.

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Doc: "I didn't invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented the time machine to travel through time."

[SBR]

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I posed the question because I wanted to gain some insight into how others veiwed "potential people".

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If you are alive how are you a potential person?

[btmagnetw]

for an actual answer:

this scenario is akin to someone saying that he plans to come murder you on Friday at 5:00PM. you are 100% sure he will kill you and the only way to stop him is to shoot him now, on Wednesday. is this self defense?

probably not, and the original is probably not either. but i don't know the law. i don't think beign 100% certain that someone is about to kill you is legally possible. you have to stop them in the act so maybe traveling back in time along with doc brown and shooting him as he is putting the gas into the car would count as self defense.

but this would still be flimsy at best.

[luckyme]

There are so many confused concepts mixed up in the scenario a meaningful answer isn't possible to the whole. So skip the time travel part and deal with the concept of 'potential X"

Today Switzerland has the potential to build a nuclear bomb and attack us. Are we justified nuking them tonight?
A cabinet at work has all the components needed to assemble a good computer worth several thousand dollars. An employee smucked them. Should he pay me $3000 or the $500 the parts are worth?
My neighbor planted a seedling of an exotic fruit tree. My iguana ate it. Do I owe him replacement cost ($300) or the $12,000 the tree will be worth in 10 years?

My answers are that only X's are X's. Y's that can be/willbe converted to X are Y's that can be/willbe converted to X.

So, Switzerland should be spared, my employee owes me $500 and I owe my neighbor $300.

If your answers are different, beware that I'll be leaving acorns scattered around my house when you're over with mega lawsuits in mind.

next question.

luckyme

[Duke]

Any self-defense killing has a time variable associated with it. "In the act" means absolutely nothing, aside from the fact that it was close enough to the point of no return that you could be certain but still prevent it. Say T is like 1 second in some case where a guy pulled a gun, aimed it, and is obviously going to shoot you.

Well, if you were paying attention, you could probably have known that the guy was going to shoot you a few seconds earlier. The more information you have, the longer that lag time becomes (between knowing, and it happening).

This is fundamentally the same thing, aside from the fact that T is really really big, because we have the Delorean and can alter the size of T in whichever direction we'd like. In everyday life, we don't have to worry about that because we don't have 88 MPH Deloreans. Laws would definitely have to change if we did.

See: Minority Report.

Then see: The Twilight Zone episode where the mind-reader guy KNEW that the old man was going to rob the bank, and he didn't. He did think about it every day, though.

[MaxWeiss]

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It's a different timeline FTW.

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Correct. OP assumes there is only one time line. Star Trek has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that this is simply not true. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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Not guilty by reason of saving the time line from contamination. Temporal Prime Directive.

[Archon_Wing]

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Good lord, if you want to talk about abortion, talk about abortion. Don't go putting it in some weird hypothetical that as soon as you tie it back to abortion makes people want to kick you in the nuts.

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Speaking of kicking people in the nuts and abortion, what if you could travel back in time to kick Hitler's father in the nuts?