I know it will make Alan happy to read that I admit watching Star Trek.
My family was watching the episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever" from the original series, and I got to thinking about the whole issue of history, contingency, and whether, in a case such as the one presented, there were or could be any choices to which the label "correct" could be applied. For those born or living under a rock, the episode concerns the accidental alteration of Earth's historical timeline by a drugged Dr. McCoy, and the ultimately successful attempt by Captain Kirk and Lt. Cmdr. Spock to set things aright. McCoy escaped through a time portal to 1930's New York and saved the life of a woman who, not having died, went on to delay American entry in to WWII. Through this delay, the Nazi's managed to win, and the ensuing struggle to toss off the Nazi yoke devastated the world. A minor quibble of mine with this particular episode has been this - if it is true that the moment McCoy went through the portal history was irrevocably changed, why is the landing party still there, rather than winking out of existence?
Anyway, Kirk and Spock manage to get themselves to NY a few days ahead of McCoy and Kirk falls under the spell of a soup-kitchen angel played by Joan Collins. In a rare instance in which Kirk actually shows real emotion, rather than simple tail-chasing, he is confronted with the horrific realization, provided dispassionately by Spock, that Edith Keeler (Joan Collins' character) is the pivot point around which all of human history swings. She must die.
This is the point at which I asked the following question: If Kirk's love for Edith Keeler is real (and we should not doubt it, because we cannot have future episodes of his tomcatting at this point), even knowing that her death saved millions, even billions of lives not yet born, is it a moral choice to allow her to die? Would I make that choice? Could I make that choice?
At this point, I should say that this episode shows the way little things, individual acts, can have drastic, world-historic implications without our ever realizing it. We all stand on the cusp of history, and even the most moral act can possibly have the most tragic consequences. How do we ever know whether the right thing isn't the wrong thing viewed from the future, or vice-versa? There is no way to make these judgments, so it seems to me this episode, in the end, creates a moral equation that is fundamentally flawed. While Kirk and Spock are forewarned, I nonetheless contend that allowing Edith Keeler to die was an immoral act. At this point, the lives that hang in the balance are only potential lives. Furthermore, had they allowed Ms. Keeler to live, they could have stayed, and influenced the course of history in such a way that the US entered the war on time. Or they could have made some other choice. Furthermore, perhaps the manner of Ms. Keeler's death in the episode was not the way it happened in Kirk and Spock's timeline, and their alteration was enough to make other changes.
I would also offer the suggestion that The Matrix trilogy offers the same conundrum - a balance of lives is offered, and Neo takes the one very real life of the woman he loves, in the hope that alternatives exist that had not been envisioned before, rather than sacrifice the one, very real woman he loves on the alter of a false choice offered by those in power as the only "moral" choice available.
What say you?
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