Could one ethically make decisions for a time-clone of yourself?

Can you please explain what a time-clone of myself is? Is that another me in another time? Can I make decisions for them, ethically? I suppose I would but my meddling would be part of this little game anyway. LOST, anyone?

Yes, I would like some clarification too

Or would it be a clone of myself at this point in time?

Ah, sorry, sorry.
A time-clone is a clone created by time travel – essentially yourself at a different point in time. The you last week is similar enough to the you from today that you could be clones. Marty McFly, in Back to the Future II had to avoid meeting his time-clone or else risk causing a paradox.

It would be a difficult quandary as ethical responsibility would have to be assigned at a certain point in time to a clone or it’s origin (if applicable). I’ve seen a couple of really good (mindbending) movies in regard to this as well as read most of pk dick’s tome where it is a favorite subject matter.

Is the scenario that you do something punishable and your time clone gets punished while you get to run around free? I just don’t understand how you could make decisions for another version of yourself. Help!

This complicated @Nullo I have as much as a right to control my own destiny as any other adult who is not restricted in some way in my ability to control my own destiny, i.e. I am not on probation, in jail, a convicted felon, a registered sex offender, etc. It’s not a moral and ethical matter. Morals and ethic come into play, in my mind, when it comes to what decision I make for myself and whether or not and how that decision affects the life of others. It have a right to make my own choices but I don’t have right to make your choices. Obviously, it wouldn’t be ethical for me do decide that I should have your iPad instead of you and take out of your backpack and put it in mine and walk off with it.

And I don’t have a right, it would not be ethical to control someone else’s destiny. And I don’t mean destiny as in fate, you know what I mean but if my time-clone self has it own time line separate from mine, her own choices to make her own opportunities and life separate from mine then I would say I had no right to make her choices for her but… if I go backwards in time and see my self making such a mess of things as I did in my youth is there a time-clone court where I can go to have my youthful self declared legally incompetent and declared my ward? Then I could make better choices for her.

Okay, say for instance that you go senile before you can write up a will, negating the “of sound mind etc.” business. The powers that be decide to bring your pre-senility self into the scenario.
Could you make that decision, or is your future self too much of a separate person for you to be deciding for yourself?

your pre-senile self could make that decision but would it be unheld by the senile self or the ‘future-others’ around you?

Time paradox. I don’t think it would be ethical to make the decision for your future self because you must have had a reason for not doing it, having presumably gone through this same cycle with your own future senile self. The trailing self, though, might take the information he found out about the senile self and decide to make a will sooner than he might have, thus creating a time paradox. I.e, if he had made his will earlier, he wouldn’t be intestate.

You could probably get away with it if you were in the infinitely branching worlds scenario. Then you could have different outcomes in different worlds without time paradoxes. But then do you make any decision concerning the senile you? What’s the point? It won’t affect you. You’re in a different universe already. You are two very different people and there shouldn’t be even an ounce of consideration that you have any power of attorney or whatever over the older you.

@wundayatta (and @Nullo)

“The trailing self, though, might take the information he found out about the senile self and decide to make a will sooner than he might have, thus creating a time paradox. I.e, if he had made his will earlier, he wouldn’t be intestate.”

Wouldn’t that be making the decision for the future self; using the information to change the outcome? If you make the choice in the present, using your present self you are making the decision for you, but you are also making the decision for the future self.

But, on the other hand, once armed with the information, that you will die intestate, if you’ll fail to correct that are you allowing your future self to make choices for you? Is it ethical for the future self to expect you to not act on that information if it causes you or your descendants harm by not acting on?

Don’t invest too much effort on the senility scenario. This whole thing is in reaction to a general tendency in time-travel stories for time-travellers to meddle in the affairs of their past/future selves without once asking permission, and only sometimes coming up with a reason not to.

When would your pre-senile self ask permission? It seems there may some sort of apriori paradox here in that in order to ask permission, one would already have to know the outcome (future senile self) yes?

@Nullo Time travel metaphors are not really about time travel. They are about what-if, mostly. And attempt to work out paradoxes is just a hopeless attempt to twist your mind into places it won’t go.

The question is whether the two people are the same person or a different person. Clones, of course, are different people, just as twins are. So that metaphor doesn’t put us into any different scenario than we are already in. There is only a problem when the two people are actually the same person. But if they are the same person, doesn’t the trailing person have no freedom to do whatever they want? They have to do what they have already done, which is exactly the same thing as what their future self has done.

So, if they are the same person, then the issue is moot because the trailing self has no freedom of action. If they are independent people, then the rules governing independent people are in effect. These are, of course, the rules we live under now.

I guess you are asking us to imagine a situation where we are both the same person and a different person at the same time. Thus actions in your past can change. Things that you remember doing are no longer what you remember doing. A new memory takes its place. Most authors I’ve read let their characters have some dimming memory of the original past, so they can start to try to do something about it. But you could choose any condition from absolutely instantaneous change in memories with no residue of another past to having two sets of true memories about the same past.

Can retrospective past actions change a future that has already happened? Is that a sentence that can make sense in any universe at all? God. What a question. I think I need to ask it. It’s just so absurd.