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Ratio (new series) XII 3 September 1999 0034–0006

DISCUSSION
TIME TRAVEL: HOW NOT TO DEFUSE THE
PRINCIPAL PARADOX

Timothy Chambers

Is time travel possible in a world governed by familiar physical

laws? Peter J. Riggs defends an affirmative answer to this ques-
tion. Specifically, his aim is to disarm what he dubs the Principal
Paradox of Time Travel – that time travel gives rise to a contra-
diction since it appears that ‘something could travel to an earlier
time and prevent the very departure [which commenced the
journey in the first place].’1
An oft-discussed example of this paradox is David Lewis’ tale of
Tim the Time Traveller:
Consider Tim. He detests his grandfather, whose success in the
munitions trade built the family fortune that paid for Tim’s
time machine. Tim would like nothing so much as to kill
Grandfather, but alas he is too late. Grandfather died in his
bed in 1957, while Tim was a young boy. But when Tim has
built his time machine and traveled to 1920, suddenly he real-
izes that he is not too late after all. He buys a rifle . . . and there
[Tim] lurks, one winter day in 1921, rifle loaded, hate in his
heart, as Grandfather walks closer, closer . . .2
So a conundrum is in the offing. For it appears that Tim clearly
can kill Grandfather: the gun is loaded, Tim’s a good shot, he’s
at point-blank range, etc. Yet if Tim can kill Grandfather, then
Tim can bring it about that Grandfather dies a childless man; for
Grandfather’s dying in 1921 implies that he dies childless. But
now we have a contradiction, since no natural grandson can
bring it about that his grandfather dies childless. So time travel,
concludes the naysayers, is impossible.
In his attempt to derail this line of argument, Riggs sets forth a
three part thesis:

1
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, Ratio X (1997), p. 50.
2
Lewis, D., ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, American Philosophical Quarterly 13
(1976), p. 149.

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 DISCUSSION 297
1. ‘Since Tim’s existence provides a guarantee of failure, there
always must be a cause(s) of Tim’s failing. These failures come
about either from temporally prior causes (e.g., by accident) or
they come about from later causes (which are related to
Tim).’3
2. ‘The alleged generation of the Principal Paradox would
require . . . a closed causal chain of events . . . [Yet] each event
on a closed chain causally influences the other events on the
chain in a manner . . . [which ensures] that contradictory
closed chains cannot form.’4
3. ‘What we should be asking is whether in a universe in which
travel to an earlier time is possible, are the laws of nature such
that they prevent the performance of ordinary actions? To the
extent to which time travel is involved, the answer is in the neg-
ative. The limit to which people can bring their desires to
fruition in our universe does not include being able to do
everything and certainly not that which is impossible.’5
My aim in this essay is not to challenge Riggs’ arguments to these
claims. Instead, I wish to point out that even if we grant his
premises, nothing has yet been said to diminish the Principal
Paradox’s force.
To see why Riggs’ premises fail to challenge the Principal
Paradox, it will prove helpful to spell out how the Paradox arises.
The steps underpinning the puzzle are these:
(a) If time travel is possible, then Tim can put himself in the
vicinity of his Grandfather in 1921.
(b) If Tim can put himself in the vicinity of his Grandfather in
1921, then Tim can bring it about that his Grandfather dies a
childless man.
(c) So, since (b)’s consequent entails a contradiction, time
travel is not possible.
Now Riggs concedes premise (a). ‘Suppose,’ he says, ‘that I travel
backwards in time with the aim of killing my natural grandfather at
a time prior to his conceiving my natural father. I can then shoot
at my grandfather as much as I like.’6 So Riggs must be challenging

3
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, p. 56.
4
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, pp. 58, 63–64.
5
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, p. 57.
6
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, pp. 57–58. Note that some
accounts of time travel skirt the Principal Paradox by denying premise (a). According to

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298 TIMOTHY CHAMBERS

the remaining premise. That this is indeed his objective becomes

clear when he claims that, despite his proximity to his grandfa-
ther, Riggs nonetheless insists that ‘I simply will not succeed in
killing him immediately nor will I succeed in permanently ren-
dering his reproductive organs inoperative before my father is
conceived.’7
In choosing to challenge premise (b), Riggs faces an uphill bat-
tle. For we know that a quite intuitive condition underwrites this
premise. The condition has been dubbed the Autonomy
Principle:
Suppose an agent, T, within a local region of spacetime, S, is
able to bring about some configuration of matter with feature
F. Then in any local region, S’, sufficiently similar to S (with
respect to the regions’ intrinsic characteristics), an agent, T’,
sufficiently similar to T, must also be able to bring about a
configuration of matter with the feature, F.8
Moreover, the argument from the Autonomy Principle to
premise (b) is straightforward; we show this by contraposition.
Let C be the local region of spacetime containing Tim’s
Grandfather in 1921, who is steadily approaching someone other
than Tim; following David Lewis, we call him Tom.9 Suppose fur-
ther that Tom is similar, with respect to intrinsic characteristics,
to Tim: Tom is armed, has hatred in his heart toward Tim’s
grandfather, etc. Given these local circumstances, it certainly
appears that Tom should be able to bring about a configuration
of matter bearing the following feature, F: that Tim’s grandfather
lies dead of a gunshot wound. Yet no matter how similar Tim is to
Tom, and no matter how similar Tim’s circumstances are to those
hypothesized for Tom, Tim cannot, on pain of paradox, kill

such accounts, it’s not Grandfather who Tim encounters on his voyage, but rather a distinct
timeline’s Grandfather-counterpart (as it were). Cf. Meiland, J.W., ‘A Two-Dimensional
Passage Model of Time For Time Travel’, Philosophical Studies 26 (1974), pp. 153–173, and
Deutsch, D. and Lockwood, M., ‘The Quantum Physics of Time Travel’, Scientific American
270 (1994), pp. 68–74. For a worry that such models ‘seem not to give us time travel as we
know it from the stories,’ see Lewis, D., ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, pp. 145–146.
7
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, p. 58.
8
This framing of the Autonomy Principle, and the argument of the paragraph
which follows, reflects the suggestion of an anonymous referee, to whom I am grateful.
For (similar statements of) the Autonomy Principle, see Sider, T., ‘A New Grandfather
Paradox?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997), pp. 142-143, as well as
Deutsch, D., and Lockwood, M., ‘The Quantum Physics of Time Travel’, p. 71.
9
See Lewis, D., ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, pp. 141–142.

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 DISCUSSION 299
Grandfather. Yet to say that Tom can kill Grandfather, on one
10

hand, yet deny that Tim can do likewise (regardless of how simi-
lar Tim and Tom are, with respect to intrinsic characteristics), on
the other hand, contradicts the Autonomy Principle. In sum,
then: if Tim can put himself in the vicinity of his Grandfather in
1921, yet cannot kill Grandfather, then we have a counterexam-
ple to the Autonomy Principle. Which means that the Autonomy
Principle implies premise (b).
So we see the case for accepting the premise Riggs has target-
ed, namely, it’s underwritten by ‘a fundamental principle that
underlies both science and everyday reasoning’11 with respect to
human agency. Bearing this in mind, let’s return to Riggs’ thesis
and see how it fares. Has he exposed blemishes in the above argu-
ment?
Tim’s existence, Riggs observes in his first premise, provides a
‘guarantee’ of Tim’s failure. Yet the proponent of the Principal
Paradox, we’ve seen, has a parallel rejoinder available: Tim’s
proximity, plus the Autonomy Principle, provides a guarantee for
Tim’s success. (So, the proponent would then conclude, since
the claim that time travel is possible is part of a set which entails
contradiction, and it’s the sole proposition lacking prima facie
intuitive weight, then it’s the proposed possibility of time travel
which we ought to reject.) In lieu of any reason to question the
Autonomy Principle, then, Riggs’ first premise fails to address the
supporting reasoning for premise (b), and hence fails to address
the challenge presented by the Paradox.
Does Riggs’ second claim fare any better? This premise, we
note, amounts to the claim that if there were causal loops, such
as those found in the tale of Tim, then familiar physical laws pro-
vide an explanation for why such loops couldn’t turn out to be
contradictory loops.
Yet, again, this response fails to dispel the motivation of the
Paradox. For, clearly, we know that contradictory loops are incon-
sistent with physical law; what’s at issue, rather, is the conditional,
‘if time travel were possible in a world like ours, then contradic-
tory causal loops would arise.’ Now acceptance of this condition-
al is warranted if premise (b) is; and premise (b) follows from the
Autonomy Principle.
As for the Autonomy Principle, it remains unclear how Riggs
10
By “similarity,” I mean similarity with respect to intrinsic characteristics.
11
Deutsch, D., and Lockwood, M., ‘The Quantum Physics of Time Travel’, p. 71.

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300 TIMOTHY CHAMBERS

might deny the Principle, on the one hand, while preserving our
familiar physical laws, on the other. For consider: if we were told
a story where an agent is able to lift a pencil in a given situation,
yet a similar person, in an intrinsically similar situation, proved
unable to lift the same pencil, then we’d suspect that the story in
question depicts a world with different natural laws than those of
our acquaintance – laws, that is, which make appeal to factors
extrinsic to the agent’s situation.
Now Riggs recognizes this point. In familiar cases involving
causal loops (e.g., Wheeler and Feynman’s Paradox of Advanced
Actions), Riggs observes that
There is an unstated assumption that events external to the
closed chain play no role in resolving the paradox . . . This is
appropriate in the Wheeler-Feynman example, but generally
will not be the case. Consider again Lewis’s time Traveller Tim
. . .’12
Yet there’s the rub. The Principal Paradox calls the possibility of
time travel into question in the first place. So Riggs’ challenge to
the Paradox’s supporting conditions – a challenge which rests
upon an example which presupposes time travel’s possibility –
turns out to beg the very question at issue.
Riggs’ third claim addresses the matter of autonomy; yet, once
again, we find that his criticism fails to impugn the argument for
premise (b). For, as we can see, the Autonomy Principle is con-
sistent with drawing sober boundaries to human agency – if an
agent in a certain situation is capable of a given action, runs the
principle, then a similar agent in a similar situation is likewise
capable of the action. Thus, contra Riggs, the Principal Paradox
doesn’t involve a naive picture of human agency which permits
agents to ‘do everything’ or to ‘do whatever one pleases.’
Neither does the Autonomy Principle permit an agent to do
‘that which is impossible.’ Rather, the opponent of time travel
would reply, it’s only when we conjoin a claim of time travel’s pos-
sibility to the Autonomy Principle that agents become able to do
the impossible; ergo, if we accept the Autonomy Principle, then
we must reject time travel’s possiblility.
The Principal Paradox of Time Travel turns upon the fact
that otherwise innocuous abilities – abilities, that is, which

12
Riggs, P.J., ‘The Principal Paradox of Time Travel’, pp. 62–63.

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 DISCUSSION 301
straightforward criteria concerning human agency would lead us
to impute to anybody – lead to contradictions when these abilities
are imputed to time travellers. Now if the Paradox is, as time trav-
el defenders allege, fallacious, then it behooves these defenders
to show why our initial intuitions concerning agency are misbe-
gotten. As with Zeno’s paradox, a satisfying resolution to the
Principal Paradox of Time Travel will be had only when we can
fault the intuitions which led us to accept Paradox’s premises in
the first place.

Department of Philosophy,
Brown University
Providence
Rhode Island 02906
USA

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999