In superhero movies, defeating the bad guys tends to come at the cost of destroying a city. The Avengers have no regard to how NYC looks at the end of the film. It’s just a small price to pay for saving the world. Or is it? The ethics and consequences of preventing the end of the world are hardly ever discussed. Tom Sweterlitsch brings time travel to apocalypse fiction in The Gone World. They use the knowledge of time travel to prevent The Terminus, which will end humanity.
The ethics of time travel are interesting to discuss. If it begins to exist in real life, it will be a scientific revolution, but what problems will it cause? Paradoxes are likely to change the course of history. Going back to the past is most likely to cause a paradox. Any alteration of past events would change the future. An article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses the impossibility of backwards travel. Traveling to the past is avoided in The Gone World, but problems with the future still arise. There is no certainty that anything in the “future” will happen. Also, there is no known understanding of how one would return from the future.
Other forms of ethical dilemmas in apocalypse fiction include killing civilians, and innocents. Plague and zombie apocalypse stories provide the biggest example in killing infected people even if they are harmless. They don’t quite know the motives of an infected person, so it is safer to just kill them. Another trope popular in dystopian fiction is to have an authoritarian government. This tends to be post-apocalypse, but it is still a solution to save humanity. Control over people and lose of complete rights is unethical. Even if humans could not survive without a government system, there are better ways to rebuild society.
Currently, there is no known looming apocalypse, but understanding ethical solutions are important. Would creating a time paradox that changes the future completely be worth preventing the inevitable? In fiction, the answer is usually yes. The main characters tend to be past the point of moral decisions. In real life, is an ethical present worth a shorter future? Is making the ethical choice actually unethical because humanity would suffer? There are more questions than answers, but it important to think about.