Why Do Time Travel Suicides Get Botched?
The standard worry about time travel is that it allows one to go back and kill one's younger self and thereby create paradox. More generally it allows for people or objects to travel back in time and to cause events in the past that are inconsistent with what in fact happened.
(See e.g. Gödel 1949, Earman 1972, Malament 1985a&b, Horwich 1987.) A stone-walling response to this worry is that by logic indeed inconsistent events can not both happen. Thus in fact all such schemes to create paradox are logically bound to fail. So what's the worry?
Well, one worry is the question as to why such schemes always fail. Doesn't the necessity of such failures put prima facie unusual and unexpected constraints on the actions of people, or objects, that have traveled in time? Don't we have good reason to believe that there are no such constraints (in our world) and thus that there is no time travel (in our world)? We will later return to the issue of the palatability of such constraints, but first we want to discuss an argument that no constraints are imposed by time travel.
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