I haven’t seen this film yet, but I’m aware of the basic concept: looking into the future to prevent crimes before they happen. They used to ask a similar question in most Ethics courses. If you could go back in time, would you kill a teenaged Hitler before he could cause the horrors you know he will?
My problem with this is that it’s very arbitrary. A lot of this depends on your beliefs about the nature of Time. Here’s how I see it:
Measurements of any kind are only in place so that we can easily quantify things. We use distance units to measure the space between two objects. We use time units to measure the space between two events. With distance, you can measure things in different ways, but the result is the same. Two sticks in the ground are 6 feet apart. Or 2 meters. Or 1/1,000,000th of a parsec or whatever. But the sticks never move and have the same distance between them, no matter we choose to measure it. With time, it’s the same, but a little more of a mind-bender.
My point is that I don’t believe that the “Future” actually even exists. We only choose to apply the same measurements to it, to make Time make sense. A well-known paradox once argued that there must be a smallest measurable amount of time, the actual “present”. With the future attached at one end and the past at the other, you must be able to measure the moment that separates them. But with any amount of time divisible by two, is there really a “Tick of the Universe”, so to speak?
There is if you eliminate the future. Here’s how I see Time. The present is always in existence. The past is everything that has already happened. Most see time this way :
-----.------
with the period as the present, the line to the left as the past and the line to the right as the future. I see it this way:
-------------.
with the period as the present, the line to the left as the past. Now imagine the line growing longer, always pushing the period ahead:
(1 second) -.
(5 seconds) -----.
(20 seconds)--------------------.
See? It will always be the present, we’re just measuring what’s already happened, the thing that is quantifiable. Even if you could somehow leap into the future, all you’re really doing is bypassing parts of the line and arriving at a new period, a new “now”.
I believe that anything is possible when looking forward. This could happen. That may happen. Maybe you could even see one of the possible outcomes. But I don’t think that we are locked into a set of circumstances, given that there is no measurable place for them to happen in.
Ok, that’s the science of it. The morality of it is that I cannot in good faith condemn someone for what they have not yet done. Given the argument above, they may not. The person you are arresting in the current “now” is innocent. You exist in the same “now”. The present is the measurable time in which you are arresting an innocent person.
That’s my belief anyway.