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19 November 2015

Finders Keepers

Time-travel technology is always tricky to write about without devolving into perfect solutions. There is simply very little that time-travel cannot do.

In “Finders Keepers”, a time-traveling surveillance system has been employed by law enforcement to identify and locate criminals. However, after watching a man accidentally drop a wad of cash, an officer decides to retrieve and keep it. This leads him to repeatedly abuse the system in search of discarded valuables for some years. In a court case, the prosecutor is unsure of what to charge him with, since no laws exist against hunting for lost property, nor has he violated privacy laws, limiting his searches, naturally, to public, easily-accessible locations.

My point was that abuse of power comes in many forms, and that those who have the power to help, when they intentionally use that power to profit themselves, are not, as a psychologist might argue, within their rights. All power to help, being conferred with inherent responsibility, must, even at financial detriment, be a moral obligation, mustn’t it?