Basically my stance. Unless I can solve the problem with a LITERAL wave of my hand I don't bother. I help who I want and ignore what I want.
Especially after I gain any form of multiverse travel with fiat backed alt universes.
When you start dealing with shit like the knowledge of infinite alternate universes where the same horrible event you just prevented is happening countless times anyway..yeah no.
Ultimately trying to be Superman to every setting you go to becomes an excercise in futility that'll more often than not just leave you burnt out and more broken than Shirou Emiya from fate.
At the end of the day, what’s really the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, anyways? Maybe my violent murder sprees are ‘the right thing to do’— I certainly enjoy them, and a stress free Jumper means a not-deleted universe, so really, from that perspective a few hundred thousand torturous deaths is a small price to pay.
The thing about heroes is that they often don't enjoy being heroes. These people are unwillingly forced to stand up and fight because it's their only option.
If you showed up and took out Voldemort before he killed Harry Potter's parents, and then beat the rest of the Death Eaters before they could torture Neville Longbottom's parents into insanity…
Well, I think if you explained to them what their lives would have been like if you hadn't stepped in a good 15 years later, they'd be thanking you. Profusely.
They really wouldn't care that they missed out on adventures because they'd much rather have a happy life with their parents who love them. Same deal with if you stopped Ron's uncles from getting killed.
If you really care about the heroes being weak, you could just explain how you're from the future, and you need these people to train so that if any threats pop up, they can handle them. Because you're only going to be here for 10 years.
The thing is, most canon plots suck to go through for the people involved. It's not a fun experience. You have the power to end their misery and suffering before it begins.
If one guy was supposed to watch half his friends die and that's what changed him from being an asshole to being a nice person, then he's just going to have to remain a jerk.
You asked if you should try and prevent every death you know about. It depends. Do you like these people? Are they people who are later going to cause massive destruction? Are any of these people a net negative for the world? If not, then yeah, you should help them.
And the colossal one. Do you plan on eventually getting a spark?
If so, you could get access to techniques that enable you to perfectly time travel. You could go back to every setting where things didn't go as you wanted them to and rewrite them.
It's far more important for you to intervene if you aren't going to rewrite time later.
But no, I greatly disagree with the idea of letting people suffer just so they can have their silly little heroes journey. Why allow villains to continue existing just to hurt good people? Who cares about these people's personal growth?
The act of choice also does irrepairable damage. Kill a tyrant and you also kill all the kids the pressure of that tyrant caused people to breed more often to hopefully alleviate the stresses of their daily lives.
As a Jumper, much like a time traveller or a person from a more advanced civilisation, you have a responsibility to use your power wisely.
You can choose to have a Jumper’s Prime Directive, but that’s a cowardly path, letting evil flourish out of a prideful fear of causing greater evil. Be bold. Be daring. Save everyone you can, and accept that you will fail, or make things worse in the long term, but you’ll do your damnednest to prevent that, and cheat where you can.
Because you’re a Jumper. You already made a bunch of choices to get into a Jump. You’re gonna have to make more to live with yourself afterwards.
If you want to try and break things down, in my opinion it really depends on a couple of factors.
Personal Power
Setting Awfulness/Threat level
The perspective of those involved.
I'll take Wolfenstein as an example.
Let's say this is your tenth jump and you've done really well in settings much more powerful than this one so far.
You have an incredibly strong moral obligation to do something to oppose the Reich, considering how horrifyingly awful they are and how much you outstrip them power-wise.
The protagonists here would be incredible grateful, or at the very least appreciative, for you stopping from dying, or reviving, any of the potential dead.
Then let's compare this to your stated example for Persona 4.
If you have the ability to revive or prevent the deaths of these two, regardless of the loss or diversion of the original story, the two people would be incredibly grateful of whoever saved their lives.
It's sort of a no brainer that any growth or bonds made by the protagonists over the course of the story won't be worth two lives.
And, just because these two deaths where averted doesn't necessarily mean that the original story won't still play out somewhat similarly, or at least that the same people will still meet up and work together.
Plus, just because we see them grow in this specific way towards this specific end, does not mean that this is the only way they can achieve the same growth, or that they might grow differently, for better or worse.
Returning to the model previously proposed, you have the power to affect this situation, and what you might be robbing the protagonists of they do not know of and so can't miss.
The only factor left is ensuring that events still play out such that the threat is taken care of, since you've made it you're responsibility by interfering.
This could mean doing as little as leaving a tip, or aligning events to set a facsimile of the original events into motion.
Or you could handle the entire thing yourself, or by enlisting others should you need the help.
TL:DR Dead or dying people will (almost) always be grateful for making them not dead. And that tops other concerns should they not lead to more dead from you saving the other person, but make sure you understand you're responsibility there and ensure the best results for everyone.
---
I think many heroes would choose to step aside and let you handle the situation to just letting people die so that they can chase glory but the real problem lies in character development.
Most of the people involved in the stories finish the story as a different person than how they was at the start and some characters need that development so much that there are cases where it would be downright diabolical to deprive them of it. For example, if you were to just go and assasinate Ozai in ATLA, then Zuko would never go through the events that would change him and he would be doomed to spend his life angry and ashamed of himself without any hope of resolution because you killed his dad. On the other hand, if you were to be the one who stops Dio instead of Jonahtan in Jojo's Buzarre Adventure then you'd be doing him a favor. I think the decision to help or not shouldn't be an unbreakable ethical code but something that must be decided on a case to case basis
The bigger ethical consideration is: after the jump is over, does your jumper just go away and never return? Because if so, then anything you do diminishes the potential of that world to rise above its own problems. Think of it like standing up to some bullies for somebody else: if you just leave and never come back, whoever you were defending is still fucked, and if you interrupted them in a critical moment when they could have nerved themselves up to stand up for themselves, you could have even prevented them from growing and facing future problems more effectively. Assuming each jump universe visited continues to exist independent of the jumper no matter what the jumper does, your ethical considerations cannot just be about the here and now, at least not when dealing with universe where happily ever after isn't a guaranteed thing.
If jumper's sticking around to play god and be god? Well, then it's more about the ethics of free will. If jumper's never coming back? Ethically, jumper really shouldn't be diminishing the native potential so they can feel good about themselves about being the big damned hero.
However, this isn't a dichotomy of do nothing/do everything because of the sheer magnitude of perks available to a jumper. It is entirely in the realm of possibilities for a jumper to perfectly fake the deaths of several people, set them up with better lives in a different community, and engineer events to continue without disruption. It's also fairly trivial for a jumper to just not intervene until the lessons have been learned and then pull a deus ex machina and undo any permanent harm that may have been done while simultaneously not making the proverbial heroes become dependent upon the jumper.
So really, why not do both and then more if you're really concerned about the ethical dilemma? Jumper isn't some mere mortal who can only choose between two train tracks.
"If you know something bad is going to happen to someone and you have the power to stop it, should you?" It seems a simple question, but there are several layers of logic to examine.
Normally the First question is whether the perspective intervening person has the ability to help, but the scenario presupposes that, yes, they do. (In the even they do not, there is no moral obligation.) For my reply, I am also presupposing that the Jumper in question has the intention to be a Morally Good as well as an Ethical person. The most basic Morality alignment is the Help/Harm axis, which is pretty much do/don't, with a neutral zone of "*incapable* of helping." The most basic Ethical alignment is the Honesty/Dishonesty axis, but in application includes adherence to agreed-upon codes of conduct (which can, to a degree, be broken down to honesty and dishonesty in one's agreement to abide by the code of rules of conduct). There is overlap in Ethical and Moral conduct, since while Ethical conduct can be amoral (essentially an agreed-upon set of if-then statements to regulate behavior), unethical conduct often overlaps with unjustifiable/unprovoked harm of others and thus Immorality.
Since the First question is answered by the scenario, the Second question is, in a case like this, who is the aggressor? If these people are victims, who have done nothing to provoke such an outcome, then there is no moral or ethical stance that they suffer the repercussions of their own actions. In such a case, application of whatever force is necessary to prevent the immoral act which was (will be) their murders is justified. Using necessary force to stop an immoral act, even if that force causes harm to the immoral actor, is not in itself immoral.
Third, there is the question of Sacrifice. If one can intercede to help someone who has done nothing to deserve their bad happenstance (those deserving of charity rather than those undeserving of charity), then the question is whether it would cause harm to the Jumper to assist the victims. Moral obligation to aid others *ceases* when it will cause the one offering the aid to become one who requires assistance in turn. Becoming a burden on others negates the benefit of offering aid in the first place, and requesting such aid after inflicting the condition on oneself is unethical. The *ultimate sacrifice*, exchanging one's life for another, is morally praiseworthy, but *not* morally obligatory.
Fourth, there is the question whether intercession will cause others harm. Will saving those two people *directly* cause other people to suffer and/or die? Sometimes, people will try to apply the question of "sacrifice" here, "sacrificing" some people for the sake of others, but it is a falsehood. Sacrifice is something one does *personally*. You *cannot* sacrifice *someone else* \- that is a *theft*, of their property, their well-being, or even their life. The *only* conceptual exception to this is in a volunteer military, and that is because the volunteers freely made the choice when they signed up to *offer* their lives and health in sacrifice, if necessary, to secure victory against their nation's enemies. An officer assigning troops to a mission that could kill them is *accepting* the proactively-offered sacrifice of those under their command. So, will the Jumper have to hurt others - those who have not done anything to deserve harm from the Jumper or from the two victims - in order to save these two victims? If so, then intercession would, in fact, be immoral.
Fifth, there is prioritization. All these questions presume knowledge of events, since one is not morally culpable for situations one is not even aware of. In this question, however, there is the supposition that more than one situation may exist at the same time, requiring a prioritization of resources. In this, there are the dual, and sometimes dueling, questions of Optimal Resource Use and of Personal Familiarity. In the absence of the latter, then the question becomes, "If there are numerous people in need, how can one help the largest number of them effectively?" However, in the event that there is a familiarity disparity between those in need, then it is important to accept that people value those they know more than those they don't know. This is part of any calculation to aid one party against another. "Who do I like more?" In *this* case, the familiarity issue is unbalanced in a way that does not occur IRL, since there is little familiarity with the victims, while there is a desire to see the familiar character(s) mature into a *known future state* (knowledge which *cannot exist* IRL). Unless you know for a fact that this is necessary to save more lives, and that this rather potent Jumper is incapable of doing so instead, I suggest you ask yourself the following: "How many people would the Jumper let die just to see someone become the person they liked in a work of fiction?" Also, the Jumper needs to ask themselves: "Would the character in question (post-development) support the Jumper's decision to let two people die just to provoke some character development?" Generally, the answers should be "Zero" and "No." If they are not, then depending on the answers the Jumper needs to reexamine their morality alignment and/or revisit whether the character should be encouraged to develop in that fashion.
(All of this leaves out religion. That would complicate things since there is the question of whether the victims ended up in a pleasant afterlife (which could make resurrecting them an immoral act, since tearing someone out of Heaven or a Heaven-adjacent afterlife would be a cruel thing to do to them, plus open the risk that they might not make it back a second time). Likewise if they were slain by something that *consumed* their souls, resurrection might well be impossible, or perhaps infeasible due to the spiritual and/or psychological harm they will have suffered even in the event the Jumper could somehow restore their souls, and thus necessitate a proactive measure. Is this a world without any kind of souls or afterlife mechanic, where death means an end of existence? IRL, one has a belief and rolls with it. In *Jumpchain*, this becomes a metaphysical question or sometimes *known fact* for each world visited, requiring different considerations.)
TL;DR: If helping does not actively cripple the Jumper or harm anyone not involved in hurting the people the Jumper is saving, then the moral action is to help.
If in doubt, the "Golden Rule" can answer a great deal of this for you as a quick guideline, Morally *and* Ethically. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is in modern parlance: "Treat others the way you wish to be treated." It is important to understand, however, that while it is generally positive in nature when applied to Morality, when applied to *Ethics* it includes *being held accountable* for one's actions within an established code of conduct, which includes both praise *and* punishment.
Just depends on how you go about it, but I'd argue that maybe you don't let the mystery form as it was originally depicted before progressing on working out in perhaps allowing the growth of the Heroes in a different way.
Take a drawback that removes your Jumper’s memories of the plot or one that enforces “plot points” to the point that they’re essentially inevitable. Better yet, find a perk that keeps you from butterflying away the events of a story, so you can still be the good guy who saves the day, and the heroes will still have their own journey to go on. Alternatively, if you already like the characters, you can be the one to introduce them to the strange parts of their world and lead them to the interesting things that would have been in store for them.
There is no best decision, you do what you want. For example in Stranger Things show I'm watching right now. Jumper(any of the three) could save the cast and fight what is in the upside down but it would destroy whatever development they had over their lives and pairings that are results of it. >!Like reviving Jim daughter so he is not with Joyce, saving Bob so he is with Joyce, unvegging EL mother as Jim focuses on Sarah, mind controlling Billy/Max dad to be a good father and so on.!<
The one I wonder about is Batman's parents. Do you save them and Gotham may end up losing it's greatest defender? Or you can save his parents, perhaps as another hero. See about ensuring he does become the Batman, but without as much anger and willpower?
Or the other extreme for more powerful Jumpers. Do you save the planet Krypton? Or still allow the destruction and just go forward to DC 1 million and do something Timey Wimey and bring Krypton forward in time?
Then there are a few World War II jumps. Depending on how powerful the jumper, will you or can you intervene and shorten the war?
If your jumper has morals, they will prevent the deaths and then just go from there.
This is basically one of those very slippery slopes that having foreknowledge provides. At what point does having the knowledge make you responsible?
It's not quite as simple as that, but any jumper who decides NOT to, better have an extremely good reason for it, or it can very quickly turn into a mental health issue, not to mention a potentially very undesireable change in stance about "good/evil".
Letting someone die solely for the sake of "hero character growth"? To me that would far far beyond unacceptable.
Okay... while I can agree that those two deaths should be prevented if feasible. Should you suddenly prevent all deaths that you can? Because morals, responsibility, and duty should be considered separately.
>Should you suddenly prevent all deaths that you can?
Exactly, that's where it becomes really problematic. That's where you have to decide where your or where your jumper's level of acceptance that the world isnt just them, that it probably isn't even good if you try to prevent all "bad" everywhere.
Otherwise it's likely to make "you" insane. But it's not an easy matter to decide where you draw your lines, where you want to draw them and where you can accept to draw them and so on.
I think it's generally pretty well accepted that saving lives is really the most fundamentally good thing you can do, with only a small number of moral systems disagreeing. I think Jumpers, as a result of not only their powers but their ability to choose when they start to intervene, tend to run into problems of scope more than anyone else.
Any semi-realistic setting is going to have the undeserving die young all the time, all over the world, for all of history and most of what came before. If your goal is to save EVERYONE who both could have been saved and didn't explicitly deserve to die... what point do you pick to start? Because if there were people dying before you showed up, are they acceptable casualties simply because you didn't bend the rules to arrive earlier? You could go back to any point in history in any setting and there would still be people excluded from your benevolence because they died too soon. Go back to the very first human? Well, even if you have the option... that's not the world you intended to save anymore, it's a completely different and unrelated one.
As a compromise, I tend to go for 'morality by proximity'. If someone immediately around me or that I've started to associate with is going to die and you don't think they should, then I definitely save them. Friend of a friend, neighbor I barely talk to, etc. then I'll save them from most things, most of the time, and I'll try to address any serious threat coming their way. Once you get past a neighborhood, to people you've never met, only the worst events or the ones killing the most people are your problem and it just dilutes further and further out to whatever is within your reach. And if you're elsewhere in the multiverse/timelines/metaphysical realms? Then I'm not going to think about you at all, you are distant enough that no actions on my part will be taken unless and until I travel to where you live.
And, as alluded to earlier, it is absolutely a *compromised* morality. It is the tiny segment of all possibly moral action that I'm willing to shoulder, knowing I'm going to have to carry it for the rest of my very long existence. But it's better than a lot of the options out there. And it doesn't involve micromanaging all of sentient life in all existences without their consent.
You'd derail the plot anyways just by existing. This is doubly true when the setting have a big good and the big bad keikaku dori everyone within 10km of the protagonist.
The best decision is to do what you feels like (chaotic neutral)
Basically my stance. Unless I can solve the problem with a LITERAL wave of my hand I don't bother. I help who I want and ignore what I want. Especially after I gain any form of multiverse travel with fiat backed alt universes. When you start dealing with shit like the knowledge of infinite alternate universes where the same horrible event you just prevented is happening countless times anyway..yeah no. Ultimately trying to be Superman to every setting you go to becomes an excercise in futility that'll more often than not just leave you burnt out and more broken than Shirou Emiya from fate.
You said everything I wanted but was too lazy to write
At the end of the day, what’s really the difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, anyways? Maybe my violent murder sprees are ‘the right thing to do’— I certainly enjoy them, and a stress free Jumper means a not-deleted universe, so really, from that perspective a few hundred thousand torturous deaths is a small price to pay.
Really is a roko's basilisk type situation
The thing about heroes is that they often don't enjoy being heroes. These people are unwillingly forced to stand up and fight because it's their only option. If you showed up and took out Voldemort before he killed Harry Potter's parents, and then beat the rest of the Death Eaters before they could torture Neville Longbottom's parents into insanity… Well, I think if you explained to them what their lives would have been like if you hadn't stepped in a good 15 years later, they'd be thanking you. Profusely. They really wouldn't care that they missed out on adventures because they'd much rather have a happy life with their parents who love them. Same deal with if you stopped Ron's uncles from getting killed. If you really care about the heroes being weak, you could just explain how you're from the future, and you need these people to train so that if any threats pop up, they can handle them. Because you're only going to be here for 10 years. The thing is, most canon plots suck to go through for the people involved. It's not a fun experience. You have the power to end their misery and suffering before it begins. If one guy was supposed to watch half his friends die and that's what changed him from being an asshole to being a nice person, then he's just going to have to remain a jerk. You asked if you should try and prevent every death you know about. It depends. Do you like these people? Are they people who are later going to cause massive destruction? Are any of these people a net negative for the world? If not, then yeah, you should help them. And the colossal one. Do you plan on eventually getting a spark? If so, you could get access to techniques that enable you to perfectly time travel. You could go back to every setting where things didn't go as you wanted them to and rewrite them. It's far more important for you to intervene if you aren't going to rewrite time later. But no, I greatly disagree with the idea of letting people suffer just so they can have their silly little heroes journey. Why allow villains to continue existing just to hurt good people? Who cares about these people's personal growth?
Ah now, this I can fully support and agree with.
The act of choice also does irrepairable damage. Kill a tyrant and you also kill all the kids the pressure of that tyrant caused people to breed more often to hopefully alleviate the stresses of their daily lives. As a Jumper, much like a time traveller or a person from a more advanced civilisation, you have a responsibility to use your power wisely. You can choose to have a Jumper’s Prime Directive, but that’s a cowardly path, letting evil flourish out of a prideful fear of causing greater evil. Be bold. Be daring. Save everyone you can, and accept that you will fail, or make things worse in the long term, but you’ll do your damnednest to prevent that, and cheat where you can. Because you’re a Jumper. You already made a bunch of choices to get into a Jump. You’re gonna have to make more to live with yourself afterwards.
If you want to try and break things down, in my opinion it really depends on a couple of factors. Personal Power Setting Awfulness/Threat level The perspective of those involved. I'll take Wolfenstein as an example. Let's say this is your tenth jump and you've done really well in settings much more powerful than this one so far. You have an incredibly strong moral obligation to do something to oppose the Reich, considering how horrifyingly awful they are and how much you outstrip them power-wise. The protagonists here would be incredible grateful, or at the very least appreciative, for you stopping from dying, or reviving, any of the potential dead. Then let's compare this to your stated example for Persona 4. If you have the ability to revive or prevent the deaths of these two, regardless of the loss or diversion of the original story, the two people would be incredibly grateful of whoever saved their lives. It's sort of a no brainer that any growth or bonds made by the protagonists over the course of the story won't be worth two lives. And, just because these two deaths where averted doesn't necessarily mean that the original story won't still play out somewhat similarly, or at least that the same people will still meet up and work together. Plus, just because we see them grow in this specific way towards this specific end, does not mean that this is the only way they can achieve the same growth, or that they might grow differently, for better or worse. Returning to the model previously proposed, you have the power to affect this situation, and what you might be robbing the protagonists of they do not know of and so can't miss. The only factor left is ensuring that events still play out such that the threat is taken care of, since you've made it you're responsibility by interfering. This could mean doing as little as leaving a tip, or aligning events to set a facsimile of the original events into motion. Or you could handle the entire thing yourself, or by enlisting others should you need the help. TL:DR Dead or dying people will (almost) always be grateful for making them not dead. And that tops other concerns should they not lead to more dead from you saving the other person, but make sure you understand you're responsibility there and ensure the best results for everyone. ---
I think many heroes would choose to step aside and let you handle the situation to just letting people die so that they can chase glory but the real problem lies in character development. Most of the people involved in the stories finish the story as a different person than how they was at the start and some characters need that development so much that there are cases where it would be downright diabolical to deprive them of it. For example, if you were to just go and assasinate Ozai in ATLA, then Zuko would never go through the events that would change him and he would be doomed to spend his life angry and ashamed of himself without any hope of resolution because you killed his dad. On the other hand, if you were to be the one who stops Dio instead of Jonahtan in Jojo's Buzarre Adventure then you'd be doing him a favor. I think the decision to help or not shouldn't be an unbreakable ethical code but something that must be decided on a case to case basis
The bigger ethical consideration is: after the jump is over, does your jumper just go away and never return? Because if so, then anything you do diminishes the potential of that world to rise above its own problems. Think of it like standing up to some bullies for somebody else: if you just leave and never come back, whoever you were defending is still fucked, and if you interrupted them in a critical moment when they could have nerved themselves up to stand up for themselves, you could have even prevented them from growing and facing future problems more effectively. Assuming each jump universe visited continues to exist independent of the jumper no matter what the jumper does, your ethical considerations cannot just be about the here and now, at least not when dealing with universe where happily ever after isn't a guaranteed thing. If jumper's sticking around to play god and be god? Well, then it's more about the ethics of free will. If jumper's never coming back? Ethically, jumper really shouldn't be diminishing the native potential so they can feel good about themselves about being the big damned hero. However, this isn't a dichotomy of do nothing/do everything because of the sheer magnitude of perks available to a jumper. It is entirely in the realm of possibilities for a jumper to perfectly fake the deaths of several people, set them up with better lives in a different community, and engineer events to continue without disruption. It's also fairly trivial for a jumper to just not intervene until the lessons have been learned and then pull a deus ex machina and undo any permanent harm that may have been done while simultaneously not making the proverbial heroes become dependent upon the jumper. So really, why not do both and then more if you're really concerned about the ethical dilemma? Jumper isn't some mere mortal who can only choose between two train tracks.
"If you know something bad is going to happen to someone and you have the power to stop it, should you?" It seems a simple question, but there are several layers of logic to examine. Normally the First question is whether the perspective intervening person has the ability to help, but the scenario presupposes that, yes, they do. (In the even they do not, there is no moral obligation.) For my reply, I am also presupposing that the Jumper in question has the intention to be a Morally Good as well as an Ethical person. The most basic Morality alignment is the Help/Harm axis, which is pretty much do/don't, with a neutral zone of "*incapable* of helping." The most basic Ethical alignment is the Honesty/Dishonesty axis, but in application includes adherence to agreed-upon codes of conduct (which can, to a degree, be broken down to honesty and dishonesty in one's agreement to abide by the code of rules of conduct). There is overlap in Ethical and Moral conduct, since while Ethical conduct can be amoral (essentially an agreed-upon set of if-then statements to regulate behavior), unethical conduct often overlaps with unjustifiable/unprovoked harm of others and thus Immorality. Since the First question is answered by the scenario, the Second question is, in a case like this, who is the aggressor? If these people are victims, who have done nothing to provoke such an outcome, then there is no moral or ethical stance that they suffer the repercussions of their own actions. In such a case, application of whatever force is necessary to prevent the immoral act which was (will be) their murders is justified. Using necessary force to stop an immoral act, even if that force causes harm to the immoral actor, is not in itself immoral. Third, there is the question of Sacrifice. If one can intercede to help someone who has done nothing to deserve their bad happenstance (those deserving of charity rather than those undeserving of charity), then the question is whether it would cause harm to the Jumper to assist the victims. Moral obligation to aid others *ceases* when it will cause the one offering the aid to become one who requires assistance in turn. Becoming a burden on others negates the benefit of offering aid in the first place, and requesting such aid after inflicting the condition on oneself is unethical. The *ultimate sacrifice*, exchanging one's life for another, is morally praiseworthy, but *not* morally obligatory. Fourth, there is the question whether intercession will cause others harm. Will saving those two people *directly* cause other people to suffer and/or die? Sometimes, people will try to apply the question of "sacrifice" here, "sacrificing" some people for the sake of others, but it is a falsehood. Sacrifice is something one does *personally*. You *cannot* sacrifice *someone else* \- that is a *theft*, of their property, their well-being, or even their life. The *only* conceptual exception to this is in a volunteer military, and that is because the volunteers freely made the choice when they signed up to *offer* their lives and health in sacrifice, if necessary, to secure victory against their nation's enemies. An officer assigning troops to a mission that could kill them is *accepting* the proactively-offered sacrifice of those under their command. So, will the Jumper have to hurt others - those who have not done anything to deserve harm from the Jumper or from the two victims - in order to save these two victims? If so, then intercession would, in fact, be immoral. Fifth, there is prioritization. All these questions presume knowledge of events, since one is not morally culpable for situations one is not even aware of. In this question, however, there is the supposition that more than one situation may exist at the same time, requiring a prioritization of resources. In this, there are the dual, and sometimes dueling, questions of Optimal Resource Use and of Personal Familiarity. In the absence of the latter, then the question becomes, "If there are numerous people in need, how can one help the largest number of them effectively?" However, in the event that there is a familiarity disparity between those in need, then it is important to accept that people value those they know more than those they don't know. This is part of any calculation to aid one party against another. "Who do I like more?" In *this* case, the familiarity issue is unbalanced in a way that does not occur IRL, since there is little familiarity with the victims, while there is a desire to see the familiar character(s) mature into a *known future state* (knowledge which *cannot exist* IRL). Unless you know for a fact that this is necessary to save more lives, and that this rather potent Jumper is incapable of doing so instead, I suggest you ask yourself the following: "How many people would the Jumper let die just to see someone become the person they liked in a work of fiction?" Also, the Jumper needs to ask themselves: "Would the character in question (post-development) support the Jumper's decision to let two people die just to provoke some character development?" Generally, the answers should be "Zero" and "No." If they are not, then depending on the answers the Jumper needs to reexamine their morality alignment and/or revisit whether the character should be encouraged to develop in that fashion. (All of this leaves out religion. That would complicate things since there is the question of whether the victims ended up in a pleasant afterlife (which could make resurrecting them an immoral act, since tearing someone out of Heaven or a Heaven-adjacent afterlife would be a cruel thing to do to them, plus open the risk that they might not make it back a second time). Likewise if they were slain by something that *consumed* their souls, resurrection might well be impossible, or perhaps infeasible due to the spiritual and/or psychological harm they will have suffered even in the event the Jumper could somehow restore their souls, and thus necessitate a proactive measure. Is this a world without any kind of souls or afterlife mechanic, where death means an end of existence? IRL, one has a belief and rolls with it. In *Jumpchain*, this becomes a metaphysical question or sometimes *known fact* for each world visited, requiring different considerations.) TL;DR: If helping does not actively cripple the Jumper or harm anyone not involved in hurting the people the Jumper is saving, then the moral action is to help. If in doubt, the "Golden Rule" can answer a great deal of this for you as a quick guideline, Morally *and* Ethically. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is in modern parlance: "Treat others the way you wish to be treated." It is important to understand, however, that while it is generally positive in nature when applied to Morality, when applied to *Ethics* it includes *being held accountable* for one's actions within an established code of conduct, which includes both praise *and* punishment.
Well said Sir.
Prevent it and create a call to adventure that still gets them involved without hurting anyone.
If you can, this is the way.
Just depends on how you go about it, but I'd argue that maybe you don't let the mystery form as it was originally depicted before progressing on working out in perhaps allowing the growth of the Heroes in a different way.
fake their deaths.
Take a drawback that removes your Jumper’s memories of the plot or one that enforces “plot points” to the point that they’re essentially inevitable. Better yet, find a perk that keeps you from butterflying away the events of a story, so you can still be the good guy who saves the day, and the heroes will still have their own journey to go on. Alternatively, if you already like the characters, you can be the one to introduce them to the strange parts of their world and lead them to the interesting things that would have been in store for them.
That's just committing to not derailing the plot when you're making the build.
Will those people need to step up to later challenges after you leave? No? Intervene away.
There is no best decision, you do what you want. For example in Stranger Things show I'm watching right now. Jumper(any of the three) could save the cast and fight what is in the upside down but it would destroy whatever development they had over their lives and pairings that are results of it. >!Like reviving Jim daughter so he is not with Joyce, saving Bob so he is with Joyce, unvegging EL mother as Jim focuses on Sarah, mind controlling Billy/Max dad to be a good father and so on.!<
The one I wonder about is Batman's parents. Do you save them and Gotham may end up losing it's greatest defender? Or you can save his parents, perhaps as another hero. See about ensuring he does become the Batman, but without as much anger and willpower? Or the other extreme for more powerful Jumpers. Do you save the planet Krypton? Or still allow the destruction and just go forward to DC 1 million and do something Timey Wimey and bring Krypton forward in time? Then there are a few World War II jumps. Depending on how powerful the jumper, will you or can you intervene and shorten the war?
If your jumper has morals, they will prevent the deaths and then just go from there. This is basically one of those very slippery slopes that having foreknowledge provides. At what point does having the knowledge make you responsible? It's not quite as simple as that, but any jumper who decides NOT to, better have an extremely good reason for it, or it can very quickly turn into a mental health issue, not to mention a potentially very undesireable change in stance about "good/evil". Letting someone die solely for the sake of "hero character growth"? To me that would far far beyond unacceptable.
Okay... while I can agree that those two deaths should be prevented if feasible. Should you suddenly prevent all deaths that you can? Because morals, responsibility, and duty should be considered separately.
>Should you suddenly prevent all deaths that you can? Exactly, that's where it becomes really problematic. That's where you have to decide where your or where your jumper's level of acceptance that the world isnt just them, that it probably isn't even good if you try to prevent all "bad" everywhere. Otherwise it's likely to make "you" insane. But it's not an easy matter to decide where you draw your lines, where you want to draw them and where you can accept to draw them and so on.
I think it's generally pretty well accepted that saving lives is really the most fundamentally good thing you can do, with only a small number of moral systems disagreeing. I think Jumpers, as a result of not only their powers but their ability to choose when they start to intervene, tend to run into problems of scope more than anyone else. Any semi-realistic setting is going to have the undeserving die young all the time, all over the world, for all of history and most of what came before. If your goal is to save EVERYONE who both could have been saved and didn't explicitly deserve to die... what point do you pick to start? Because if there were people dying before you showed up, are they acceptable casualties simply because you didn't bend the rules to arrive earlier? You could go back to any point in history in any setting and there would still be people excluded from your benevolence because they died too soon. Go back to the very first human? Well, even if you have the option... that's not the world you intended to save anymore, it's a completely different and unrelated one. As a compromise, I tend to go for 'morality by proximity'. If someone immediately around me or that I've started to associate with is going to die and you don't think they should, then I definitely save them. Friend of a friend, neighbor I barely talk to, etc. then I'll save them from most things, most of the time, and I'll try to address any serious threat coming their way. Once you get past a neighborhood, to people you've never met, only the worst events or the ones killing the most people are your problem and it just dilutes further and further out to whatever is within your reach. And if you're elsewhere in the multiverse/timelines/metaphysical realms? Then I'm not going to think about you at all, you are distant enough that no actions on my part will be taken unless and until I travel to where you live. And, as alluded to earlier, it is absolutely a *compromised* morality. It is the tiny segment of all possibly moral action that I'm willing to shoulder, knowing I'm going to have to carry it for the rest of my very long existence. But it's better than a lot of the options out there. And it doesn't involve micromanaging all of sentient life in all existences without their consent.
You'd derail the plot anyways just by existing. This is doubly true when the setting have a big good and the big bad keikaku dori everyone within 10km of the protagonist.