Donald Trump and Baby Hitler Once you’ve determined that it’s okay to commit a heinous act—all bets are off. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/20/donald-trump-and-baby-hitler/
In November 2015, when he was still the presumed frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, Jeb did an impromptu online Q&A while on his campaign bus. Among the questions he was asked was whether he “would go back in time and kill baby Hitler.” “Hell yeah, I would,” he responded immediately. And he would do so, he said, because “you gotta step up.” His only objection—or at least the only one he voiced in front of the cameras—was the butterfly effect, that is to say, the presumption that such a small change in history would have enormous future ramifications, the science for which he said “we all learned” from those “Michael Fox movies…Back to the Future.”
This answer raises two questions. First, why would Jeb answer that way? This is a guy, remember, who was raised in a very WASP-ish patrician home, was educated at the finest prep schools and one of the best public universities in the country, and converted to Catholicism. If he, of all people, thinks that the answer is an immediate “hell yeah,” then we have to ask ourselves why that is the case.
The second question is: why would anyone ask such a stupid thing anyway? Obviously, time travel is not possible, Back to the Future notwithstanding. So why would it even cross anyone’s mind to question a former governor and presidential candidate about the possibility of doing so? Where do people come up with these things?
As it turns out, the answer to this second question is interesting—and telling. On October 23, 2015, just over two weeks before Bush was asked the question, the New York Times Magazine tweeted to its followers: “We asked @nytmag readers: If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it? (What’s your response?)” The graphic accompanying the text showed that 30% of NYT Magazine readers said “no,” 28% answered “not sure,” and a depressing 42% replied “yes.” Bush, therefore, was asked the question because the New York Times Magazine thought the subject was interesting enough to merit asking its readers, at least one of whom thought it would also be interesting to ask the question of a Republican presidential candidate.
This scenario—do you kill baby Hitler?—is what’s known as a “moral dilemma,” an intentionally contrived instance in which a conflict exists between two or more moral principles. Moral dilemmas are generally created by “ethicists,” who devise them for the purpose of demonstrating that in some cases, in some specific set of circumstances, there is no “right” answer to a problem posed, meaning that there is also no way of knowing what behavior is moral and what behavior is immoral.
Moral dilemmas are controversial for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that they’re stupid. You can’t travel back in time to kill Hitler. Period. To think about doing so is not to engage in the consideration of moral implications but rather to indulge in absurdist moral posturing. Time travel is not possible. Additionally, you are never going to be able to control the switch that determines which trolleys travel on which tracks. You are exceedingly unlikely to be a soldier whose brother was killed by the Germans who wants to avenge said brother but also wants to be a consolation to his mother. None of these is a particularly real thought experiment and thus none is particularly useful in discussing anything other than the fact that life is sometimes ambiguous, which anybody who’s actually lived already knows.
These dilemmas are intended to teach students about moral ambiguity and to convince them that right and wrong are fluid concepts that can vary by situation. In scenario A, in which variables x and y apply, is it moral to do z? Well, that depends on whether or not n also applies. And if n doesn’t apply, then it’s necessary to think about m. And so on. The idea of this exercise is to introduce vagaries into situations in order to convince students that right and wrong are not black and white but various shades of gray.
The broader intention here is to undermine belief in deontological ethics, that is to say, ethics in which rules, laws, and precepts are intended to be basic guidelines for human behavior. By introducing ambiguity, one erodes the belief that right is always right and wrong is always wrong—the idea that morality can be known and codified in a set of behavioral restrictions and mandates. And once this basic, fundamental belief in deontology is undermined, then other definitions of right and wrong may be introduced.
The great polar opposite of deontological ethics, of course, is consequentialism, which posits that the morality of any action (or inaction) can be determined by its outcome—its consequences. Any act that produces good consequences is moral, while any that produces bad consequences is immoral.
Undoubtedly the best-known consequentialist ethical construct is utilitarianism, the moral code advanced by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham argued that “rights” are mere human constructs, the creation of governments, certainly not endowed by our creator, and designed to favor one group over another. “For every right which the law confers on one party,” Bentham wrote, “whether that party be an individual, a subordinate class of individuals, or the public, it thereby imposes on some other party a duty or obligation.” Bentham saw the very idea of “natural rights” or “natural law” as “perversions of language.”
The measure of utilitarian morality, therefore, is not an action’s consistency with natural law or the command of a higher authority; it is not an action’s adherence to an eternal truth; it is rather the greatest happiness principle. Acts that produce greater happiness and pleasure and decrease aggregate suffering are moral.
Utilitarianism begat consequentialism, which has become the defining moral ethic of the liberal West. Consequentialism, which, again, defines morality based on outcome, offers an easy and soothing alternative to the rules and laws of deontology and thus a satisfying answer to many moral dilemmas, like, for example, whether or not it’s acceptable to kill an infant to save millions of lives.
It is no coincidence that the baby Hitler dilemma became a part of the public discourse in late 2015. Jeb Bush was still, technically, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, but it was clear by then that Donald Trump was capable of garnering significant support and even, possibly, of winning a few primaries. As with all such moral dilemmas, the baby Hitler hypothetical was not really about Hitler. Rather, it was about undermining the otherwise ubiquitous belief that it is wrong to violate established moral precepts to do harm to a person or a movement.
We all know murder is wrong. It’s a commandment, after all. We all know that killing a baby is wrong—horrifically, grotesquely, inhumanly wrong. But what if that baby grows into a monster? What if, by killing him before he even has full consciousness of the world around him, you could save millions of people? Would that still be wrong? And if you say that it’s not wrong, that it would be okay to shed a small amount of blood to save so many, then what would you do if you were presented not with a hypothetical but a real-world situation in which you could save countless, maybe millions of lives—from bigotry, from global warming, from heaven knows what debauchery? What would you do, then? Which of your principles would you be willing to sacrifice to do so?
Therein lies the moral of the story. Once you’ve determined that it’s okay to commit a heinous act—to unleash violence against someone in contravention of long-standing moral precepts because of the future consequences of actions they may take—all bets are off. Then, all it takes to justify full-fledged, preemptive violence against political rivals is to convince oneself that said rivals are evil, not just wrong. If it’s okay to kill baby Hitler, in other words, thereby theoretically saving a bunch of people, then it’s okay, at least in theory, to kill Donald Trump to save “our democracy.”™
I’m not generally fond of blaming the media or political rivals for the acts of deranged individuals. People are responsible for their own actions. Nevertheless, the American ruling class inarguably set the stage both for the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and for the barrage of “too bad he missed” quotes, notes, and posts in its wake. As Cicero put it nearly 2000 years ago:
[W]hat is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
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