The other day after watching an episode of Quantum Leap I got to thinking about the ethics of the series. For those unfamiliar with the show, it's about a man stuck in time. He used a machine to go back in time. Unlike most other time travel concepts he basically goes into (or 'leaps') into another person. While there he appears normal to himself but everyone else perceives him as whoever he has leapt into.

In order to leap again (for various and somewhat ambigious reasons which I'll not go into here) he has to accomplish some task. These tasks involve helping people in a variety of ways (anything from saving a marriage to to influencing someone's career to stopping a murder). Once he accomplishes the task he leaps again.

It's not really made too clear on the show but presumably changing the past has a domino like effect on the present/future. And if you think about it, not all of those changes are going to be good. For instance if he gets someone a job, that's a job that originally went to someone else. There really would be no way to predict these effects as the farther into the future you went the greater the divergence would be from the original timeline.

So saving someone's life could actually end up leading to all sorts of unintended disasterous consequences. So while Sam Beckett's (the main character) intentions are good, he has no way of knowing whether there will be more positive or negative results from whatever action he performs (side note: His intention is basically just to help people. He wants to get home as well but there are several times when he opts to help people and gives up a chance to return home).
Now to translate that into real-life, any choice you take is also bound have countless unintended (and impossible to predict side-effects). Therefore it is foolish to use the consequence of your act to determine if something is ethically right or ethically wrong. You can never know all the consequences. Therefore one make ethical judgements using a different scale (intention perhaps?). Not only is the consequential scale the wrong one to use, it's impossible to measure.

I could obviously expand quite a bit on this argument against consequentialism but A) this is just a spur of the moment thing that I didn't really plan and B) I'm sure most of you have already skimmed past this stuff anyway. Maybe I will expand on it at some point though. If they ever do a book on the ethics of QL (like they have for quite a few shows), I could submit a longer/more polished version of this. I haven't really given a lot of thought to constructing the above argument but I feel the structure is fairly sound (if a bit underdeveloped).

Quote of the YesterDay: "The real spaghetti got wet when I was boiling it so... it's in the dryer!"
- Master Shake
Shake said this to trick Meatwad into the dryer. Good stuff. (Oh and it's from Aqua Teen Hunger Force)

Quote of the Day: "Someone's in my fruit cellar. Someone with a fresh soul!"
-?