---
title: "Baby Hitler and Trollies"
date: 2020-03-23T15:30:37Z
tags: ["ethics", "politics"]
topics: ["philosophy"]
draft: true
---

{{< youtube VWORnVSz9Io >}}

It has become fashionable today, to make all thought experiments of the moral dilemma variety, about murdering the infant Adolf in his crib. Why?

Stephen Fry wrote a fascinating little book called "Making History" ( https://kek.gg/u/fr6Y ) which argues deftly in dramatic form, the point that you have no idea what the outcome of your action will be, and may in fact lead to an even worse circumstance from where you started.

Fry's book offers an interesting twist on the murder question. Rather than murdering the infant, what if you were equipped with a potent drug that, when slipped into Papa Hitler's drink, rendered him impotent and resulted in no Adolf pregnancy to begin with? Would you be willing to do that?

Ben Shapiro may have had a bit more difficulty with that moral dilemma. But it's an interesting twist because it narrows the dilemma. Instead of trading murder for murder (the killing of an infant, versus the killing six million jews and gypsies), you're offered the opportunity to prevent the latter without any actual killing at all, just a minor inconvenience to Adolph's father.

The point of Fry's thought experiment is not to find out at what point you'd no longer be squeamish about trading evil-for-evil in order to attain some good. Rather, it is to question whether it is even justifiable to expect a good at all -- and, secondarily, to ask us to question what sort of responsibility we could possibly have for the events of history, as individuals.

The Baby Hitler scenario is an obsession today because it represents an alienated portion of our own selves. The portion that appears most dangerous to us. The portion that asserts individual self-mastery, risk-taking, and the nagging anxiety of free will, in a world that demands conformity and self-annihilation, in exchange for survival. We have to kill Baby Hitler, because he is the goat onto which all the sins that the group can see, can be projected.

Insisting on preserving Baby Hitler is thus insisting on the death of the group self, and the preservation of that alienated self. It is the acceptance of responsibility for that alienated self, come what may. Leaving Baby Hitler to his life, is suggesting that he need not have made the choices that he did make (he 'could have done otherwise', in philosophical-speak) -- which implies the same for ourselves.

Ben Shapiro isn't the first to raise this question in public, and he won't be the last. Hitler, ironically, has become the archetypal hobby horse for the fear of our own capacity for evil.
