Would Changing the Past Via Time Travel be Moral

I agree with you that your first scenario involves an immorality. But the immorality isn't that the man my mother rejected did something that prevented me from existing. Rather, the immorality was that out of bitterness and anger, he caused my father to have an accident. But that would be just as immoral if he did it in the present, so I don't see how this scenario supports your position.In the second senario, it doesn't seem that my grandfather did anything wrong, even though it resulted in me not existing. His intention was to make a better life for his family, and he succeeded in doing that. I don't see anything immoral about that.So I don't see how either one of these scenarios supports your argument.You say that, "I still support not changing the past to protect those who exist today. It doesn't seem right to write a person out of existence." This just amounts to an assertion, though. There's no argument.But even if it's true that you shouldn't intentionally go back in the past and make sure somebody doesn't come into existence, it wouldn't follow that any case of going in the past to change thing would be immoral. The question for this debate is, "Would changing the past via time travel be moral?" and you are taking the Con position, so you need to argue that it's wrong in general to go back in the past and change things. It's not enough to give one example of something that it would be wrong to change.Assuming time travel is possible, the past, present, and future are relative. Today is the present for us, but it's the future to people living in 1950, and it's the past to people living in 2030. Every choice we make in life affects the future. If I decide to have a kid, then that results in somebody existing in 2030 who wouldn't otherwise. But if I choose not to have a kid, then that person will not exist in 2030. Making a decision is no different today than it would be if I went into the past. If I went to 1950, then 2013 would be the future, and any decision I made in 1950 would affect 2013. So any decision we make, regardless of when I make it, is going to affect the future. If it's absurd to think it's wrong for me to prevent people in 2030 from coming into existence by something I choose today, then it's equally absurd to think it's wrong for me to prevent people in 2013 from comining into existence by something I choose in 1980.I don't think we can judge actions as moral or immoral based on long term consequences alone. After all, we don't always know what the long term consequences will be. Sometimes, our actions may have good short term consequences and bad long term consequences. Given the butterfly affect, it's just impossible to account for all the effects that ripple through time indefinitely into the future.I think a better way to judge actions as moral or immoral is to base them on the motive or intention of the person doing those actions. For example, if you shove an old lady because you don't like old ladies, that's immoral. But if you shove an old lady to prevent her from being hit by a car, then that's moral. So the same action (shoving an old lady) is good or bad depending on what your intention was.Likewise, a person who goes back to the past and changes something out of an intention to make things better is doing something moral.And I would argue it's moral even if things go awry. For example, suppose I see an old lady who is about to be hit by a mean kid on a bicycle. If the kid hits her, she'll probably be injured. She might even get some broken bones. So to rescue her, I shove her out of the way. And let's say after I shove her out of the way, a meteor hits her and kills her. If I had not shoved her, she would've been injured, but at least she'd be alive. Now that I've shoved her, though, she got killed. I would argue that even though my shoving her got her killed, I still acted morally because my intention was to save her from being hit by a mean kid on a bike. I can't be blamed for the meteor hitting her if it wasn't my intention.So it's the intention that matters, whether you go into the past and try to change things or you act in the future.