'Do I Have The Right?' - What would you say?

I wouldn't do it!

In my head - I'd probably justify that destroying Davros' abhorrent experiments and preventing the existence of an alien force that will kill billions over the millennia of its existence was a moral act. I could see how right and logical it would sound, especially if it saved the lives of the innocent.

In action - I doubt I could do it. I don't know that I could bring myself to *actually* kill another sentient being, especially not en masse.

I wouldn't, but the War Charlesuirdhein would

I guess the point The Doctor makes though is that he knows what good also comes. What alliances are forged. What races don't fight each other because they have to fight together against the Daleks. Context for a time-traveller isn't as easy as it is for us, or Sarah who acts as our stand-in in that scene. 

Could I do it...yes. Though I'd hope to have the courage to think twice. It's easy after the show and BF have given us a billion and one blown up Daleks to struggle to remember that, yes, it truly would be genocide. The Eccleston Doctor couldn't do it either. "Coward every time" he said. I'd hope to have the bravery to be a coward. And the consience to live with either decision.

I suspect I would probably do it.

I suspect I'd very likely do it.



It's been a while since I watched Genesis, but doesn't even the Doctor change his mind later and try to return to do it? (And then, fittingly enough, a Dalek ends up doing it anyway).

Though now that I say that, it wouldn't have actually destroyed the Daleks if he had set off the explosives the first time around, would it? Doesn't the speech come in the last or second to last serial or something - and there are already plenty of Daleks about the place by that point?

I'm sure if I'd just witnessed the deaths of the people I loved and cared about personally, I'd do it in a heartbeat as an act of vengeance. But I think somewhere down the road in the future, I'd feel a bit disgusted with myself. Good brought at the cost of going against my own morals. The ends justifying the means. What would that say about what I believe in and what I think is good and right? Diplomacy over violence?

However, in the situation the Doctor was in, where the last deaths of his companions to the Daleks took place a few regenerations ago, I think I would have been able to think more rationally about the situation. It's still a difficult one, and there's still the deaths of the countless innocents weighing on my shoulders, but it's a little less personal in this instance, I think. Plus, in real life, I haven't lost anyone I deeply care about to the Daleks, so assuming I'm exactly as I am now - with the understanding that I either joined a time traveller or time travelled myself at the behest of the Time Lords - I wouldn't have that much of a history with the Daleks themselves. So, maybe that conflict of morals would be more present and maybe I'd think of all the good that also came from peoples being brought together to defend themselves from the Daleks and the peace that wouldn't have emerged on their worlds if their determination to never become like the Daleks hadn't been there.

Even assuming I did have a personal history with the Daleks like the Doctor, I still have to think from the perspective of someone who'd time travelled back to the point of the Daleks' creation and what my decision would do. It'd definitely create a paradox, which the Time Lords were most certainly aware of and willing to accept, but the consequences that could have on me and everyone I knew might be severe. I doubt the Time Lords would have cared much what happened to the Doctor and his friends afterward, so I doubt they'd care much about me. Would the Doctor take Sarah home to find out that everything has changed? Maybe UNIT doesn't exist in this timeline because the aliens displaced by the Daleks' influence never invaded. Maybe Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright never stayed with the Doctor because there were no Daleks to face.

And maybe the Doctor himself is different. We know from Into the Dalek that the Daleks had a profound effect on the Doctor that helped make him the Time Lord he is today. So, what if he never encountered them? Would some of what we consider to be the Doctor today be lost? And what if the absence of the Daleks leads to something worse threatening the Universe? The Eminence is just one example, but how about the Doctor himself? What if the Doctor from Full Fathom Five is a Doctor who never discovered who he was or what he stood for because he never met the Daleks? And then we have to also consider the Time Lords as a whole. They've just erased what would become arguably their only major threat. What is there to stop them now?

I think the Daleks place in the Doctor Who universe is entirely equal to that of the Nazis in real life. They committed horrible acts of evil and ruined the lives of millions. It's entirely understandable and even reasonable to want to wipe them from history. But a lot of their evil also helped define what we consider good today. I think without the Nazis, Germany might not be as it is today and neither would so many other countries that refused to allow their versions of the Nazis come to power because of what the actual Nazis had done. I think there's reason to criticize our relationship to the Nazis nowadays and perhaps say their impact has been weakened by their overbearing presence in mainstream media as the bad guys of movies, comic books, and more; but in the grand historical scheme of things, we're still a lot more cautious and alert to ever even approaching the level of evil the Nazis embraced.

I'm really overthinking this, probably, and I think this was all a roundabout - and rambling - way to say, "too tough to be for certain."

Yeah, this falls under the, "But criminals will always find a way to get guns," response to gun control for me, in that yes, some people will probably still die, but not as many and not as often and not as horribly. 

You had the right, Doctor.

I've wondered the same thing, for the same reasons, but I don't have the background you do, I'm not aware of any part of my family being persecuted and murdered, so why am I so clear that I could and would kill the Daleks?

I think it comes down to a decision I made a long time ago, which is that if I felt my life was about to be taken then my fight back would be all or nothing (I kill you, or you kill me).

I know the Daleks would kill me as soon as look at me, as such I grant them the same.

But what if the Daleks by being mass murders kept others from becoming mass murderers? So by stopping Daleks in their tracks and annihilating them completely you've then allowed other genocidal maniacs to develop and have a free hand? Committing genocide to stop genocide doesn't make any sense logically, as if races committing genocide are evil, then committing genocide to stop them is equally evil.

Although I'd imagine Daleks don't actually consider themselves as being evil, they just think they are doing what needs to be done. Seek, locate, exterminate...