(Today’s post is about moral philosophy and Star Trek. You might want to skip it if you think that sounds boring.)

Star Trek has some really screwed up ethics in it. Especially Voyager and Enterprise. On Voyager, for example, Janeway frequently risks the lives of the entire crew to save a single person. “All for one” is a noble principle, but it implies some kind of consensus on the part of the “all.” And that’s not what Janeway does — when she decides to put every person on her ship in danger to help one or two people, she doesn’t ask the crew if that’s okay with them. She just does it and arrogantly assumes everyone else will agree that her decision was the most righteous one possible.

Consider the episode “Fury“; because of some time-travel mumbo-jumbo, Janeway knows a former crew member from the future will be boarding Voyager to kill a few security personnel and render the ship vulnerable to aliens that openly plan to kill and torture the crew. This former crew member has psychic powers that make her immune to hand-to-hand weapons and force fields; once aboard Voyager, Janeway would have no way to physically stop her. Here’s the ridiculous part: The captain has an opportunity to blow up the traitorous individual’s shuttle before she can get near the ship. Instead of doing so, she lets the amazingly dangerous half-crazy super-powered woman come aboard and then tries to talk her out of killing everyone. How is that in any way rational? It boggles the mind to think that anyone would actually equate a 60/40 shot at saving one elderly person with the lives of over a hundred men and women.

But that kind of senselessness is nothing compared to the episode of Enterprise I saw today: “Dear Doctor.” Basically, there’s this less-advanced alien world with two species of intelligent humanoids on it. One species, called Valakians, has some kind of genetic problem that will render them extinct in two generations. It causes pain and crippling in about one-third of their population (which is fifty million). The doctor on Enterprise develops a cure, but he and captain Archer decide not to give the information to the Valakians because doing so would interfere with nature, which might have “wanted” that species to become extinct. But just to show they weren’t total monsters, the Enterprise crew left the Valakians with a medication that would delay the appearance of symptoms for a while and reduce pain.

I can understand some of the logic behind the Prime Directive; you don’t want to give potentially dangerous technologies to people that aren’t mature enough to use them responsibly. Same reason you don’t hand a loaded pistol to a five year-old. I get that. But what’s the downside of saving lives when it costs you nothing? How can abiding by nature’s will (i.e. “what would have happened if we hadn’t interfered”) be considered a good basis for a system of ethics?

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