Recently, Ben Shapiro began to catch flak for his comments at the March for Life regarding “Baby Hitler”.
Here are the specific comments in question that got Ben Shapiro in trouble with the mainstream media:
“The argument, I guess here, is ‘Would you kill baby Hitler?’
The truth is that no pro-life person on Earth would kill baby Hitler, because baby Hitler was not Hitler – adult Hitler was Hitler; Baby Hitler was a baby. [What] you presumably want to do with baby Hitler was take baby Hitler out of baby Hitler’s house and move baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be Hitler. That’s the idea.”
We will deconstruct these comments in a moment, but before we go any further, it deserves to be noted that part of the criticism of Ben Shapiros’ behavior at the March for Life (which so far has cost him 2 advertisers on his show) has to do with the fact that he used his time on stage as a part of a livestream for his news & opinion podcast, the Daily Wire, and paused occasionally during his speech to catcall Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (JOKE. . . that was a joke!) . . . correction. . . to insert advertisements from his sponsors into his show, by speaking them into the microphone, an action which many considered inappropriate for the march.
Now, for the “baby Hitler” comments:
Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice or have another opinion on abortion, Ben Shapiro’s comments actually don’t fall squarely within the realm of the normative discourse on the subject for several reasons:
1) Abortion debates normally revolve around fetuses or babies still in the formative stage, still physically residing inside of their mother’s womb. A baby, whether 1 year old or 2, has obviously already been born, which preemptively ends the nuanced “unclustered group of cells” or “my body, my choice”, or “sentience”, or “God’s work” arguments (and there are many more on both sides, and other sides).
2) Most abortion debates don’t presume the baby’s future actions to be a part of, or catalyst for, world war and genocide, which adds other concerns, considerations, and an emotional weight onto the scale not usually present, even in the most contentious and controversial hypothetical “abortion debate” scenarios (i.e., rape, incest, kidnapping, etc.).
3) Since the question of time travel is involved, this plants Shapiro’s propositional question closer into the realm of Back to the Future territory more so than it does approximate Citizen Ruth, as questions of the “Butterfly Effect” or theoretical phenomena thereof have already been posited by numerous commentators, such as Carl Benjamin (AKA, “Sargon of Akkad), revealing a likely tendency of the world to asymptotically approach a calamitous fall in Germany after WWI, which would inexorably lead to a “strong-man” archetype in the likes of Hitler to rise nevertheless if Hitler personally rose as that man himself.
The set of moral and scientific questions, assuming the Shapiro Time Machine™ does not go back further than Hitler’s birth or a year or so thereafter, is as follows:
1) Does a person have a right to alter the past?
2) What are the consequences of altering the past (i.e., if you go back to kill a person who plays a role in societal collapse, but you fail to stop that societal collapse, a new person will likely fill the void you have created and the same horrors you seek to avoid may not only inevitably occur but could possibly be even worse than in the original timeline).
3) Does a person have the right to kill one person in order to save one other?
4) Does a person have the right to kill one person in order to save many others – dozens, thousands, millions?
5) Does a person have the right to kill an innocent person, who may become corrupted by the horrors of their own life and become a monster, in order to save other lives? This is the question Shapiro answered, by answering with an idea that is essentially along the lines of:
‘No, you cannot kill them, you can only save them from that destiny to spare the world their wrath. Spare the rod and spoil the child.’
6) Can you change the past at all? (i.e., If you actually did time-travel, and did as Shapiro proposes – take baby Hitler out of his house and raise him in a good house – would the lack of Hitler becoming a problem for the future prevent the future-you from time-traveling back in the first place to stop or save baby Hitler, causing future-you to never time-travel backwards in the first place? This is a common paradox explored in the science fiction realm.)
Only one thing is for sure: Discounting all paradoxical concerns about ‘destiny’ or short-circuiting the space-time fabric of reality, one poignant concern that created an overlap between science fiction and the morality of the March for Life, and the abstract impetus for Shapiro bringing up the subject of baby Hitler, was thus: The path of least resistance.
Shapiro’s true question (and as aforementioned, hypothetically suspending all concerns of time-travel paradoxes and assuming that time-travel actions will have the travelers’ intended effect) was as follows: Is there a moral difference between the people who would simply kill baby Hitler (i.e., “pro-choice”) versus those who would endeavor to take it upon themselves to spend years of their own life raising him in a “good” house (i.e., “pro-life”)?
The answer is, absolutely there is a difference.
The nominally “pro-choice” side, who would shoot baby Hitler in an instant in this scenario, (as an aside: it is worth noting that we can discount those few who in our world denominate themselves as “pro-choice” on abortion but whom would actually not shoot Hitler on the grounds that he was no longer a fetus in utero, or a more rarely held belief, that he was not their own personal offspring and therefore held no rights over baby Hitler) cannot be held in moral esteem in this scenario over the pro-life crowd (for whom it is conversely worth mentioning that there would be some who self-describe as “pro-life” on abortion but nonetheless would shoot baby Hitler in the face, for the obvious usual reasons of future dictatorship, war, genocide, etc.) for a series of multifaceted reasons:
1) If you are Left-wing or “pro-choice”, you cannot believe in “determinism” (the scientific or religious view that all things are an inevitability, and that “free will” is an illusion either evinced as a facet of destiny itself or in fantastical escapism from it), and therefore must believe that baby Hitler could morally be reformed or simply be raised differently (i.e. “tabula rasa”) under different circumstances from those which he objectively, empirically was subject to or of.
2) If you are Right-wing or “pro-life”, you cannot believe shooting baby Hitler was the moral right either, because it is just as Shapiro said: He was a baby, and moral people do not kill babies.
3) Objectively, to shoot a baby rather than to simply raise it would be to take the “path of least resistance” (i.e., to be lazy), especially when juxtaposed to the certain hardship and dedication that comes with the responsibility of parenting (herein lies the overlap between Shapiro’s hypothetical preponderance and the March for Life: that pro-life people are inherently more virtuous, or at least have a superior work ethic/moral ethic in this scenario, than pro-choice proponents).
4) If you are Left-wing or “pro-choice”, you cannot be in the moral right if you shoot baby Hitler within the normative confines of what defines “choice” because, as a propertarian would say, even assuming the Left-wing position of a fetus being the property of its parents (or even more narrowly, just its’ mother) – if you are not baby Hitler’s parent then you would have no right to exercise any action over him, including a “post-natal” abortion as some on the Left would call this hypothetical action. That would be tantamount to eugenics itself, which ironically was Hitler’s greatest atrocity; or, at the least, to do so would be a practice in anarchy (since you would be killing another person’s child without their consent, a violation of all normative “pro-choice” mantras), which then begets the question of moral relativism, leading to all rules becoming inconsequential thereafter, which again is akin to the circumstances Hitler used to take power himself (most notably, when he burned down the Reichstag, a symbol of law and order).
5) If you are Right-wing or “pro-life”, you must believe in the redemptive power of adoption in both cleansing your own soul while at the same time saving another person’s, in this particularly strange case, by raising baby Hitler (maybe to become a painter).
6) Objectively neither side could say for sure whether or not killing baby Hitler would even prevent WWII or the holocaust, as pertinent and valid questions of paradoxes begin to arise forthwith, whereas those who would sacrifice their own time and dedicate it to redeeming others at least have the benefit of the doubt granted to their side that they are injecting positive or constructive action into the world (by raising a human being), whereas those who would kill a baby undoubtedly contribute only negative or destructive action into the world; and only the former is more likely to yield a world worth living in (not to say that the latter is impossible).
Ultimately, it is clear that Shapiro’s point was morally consistent and logical within the confines of pro-life doctrine (and to a greater extent, scientific logic). It is pertinent to note that the New York Times previously polled its’ readers and found that 42% of their readers would actually kill baby Hitler (and another 28% were “unsure”), which raises serious questions about the moral health and scientific literacy of our nation (or of NYT’s readership).
Nothing Shapiro said can easily be refuted from a Left-wing perspective, as demonstrated above, without serious contradictions in normative pro-choice doctrine, or entirely disregarding moral considerations.
To boil it down simply: Shapiro is right, it is immoral to kill a baby, and morally superior to raise a baby you fear would destroy the world than it would be to simply kill it.
Now, back to the usual abortion bickering about trimesters and choices. Let’s keep the time machines out of this, shall we?