I agree with this one. Handing over the XO in battle conditions feels to me like dealing with terrorists. If this was something negotiated between governments, well it would still suck donkey balls in my opinion, but if the government ordered me to hand over a member of my command for extradition to another government I would comply. This is another thing entirely. We do not hand over members of our military/space fleet to placate our enemies, ever. Until and unless the rules of engagement change, I won’t be ordering this. We aren’t a shipping company. We’re Space Fleet. Suck it up.
The difference between your example and the example originally stated by Skald the Rhymer is the presence of a reasonable expectation of cessation of demands, i.e:
In your example, we (at least as stated) have no reason to believe that a group threatening to blow up Union Station unless we give them the President is going to stop at that. In fact, everything we know about the behaviour of humans suggests that they will do the exact opposite, and likely publicly and gruesomely execute the President and continue on to blow up Union Station regardless. We have no reasonable expectation that handing over the President will lead to a positive outcome.
In the case of the warlike, honour-bound aliens, we know with certitude that they are only interested in the XO. Once they kill the XO, for the purposes of the example, we know that things will not escalate further. We are entirely sure that by handing over the XO, we are saving the lives of the rest of the crew, and that nobody else will be harmed as a result of this particular act. Indeed, given what we know about their behaviour, there is absolutely no way that they would ever misuse a mandate to summarily execute humans based on their concept of “sins of the father”, because they never lie and they never break their word. Only humans whose relatives have in fact and certainty harmed these aliens would ever face harm.
@Skald - Would you care to elaborate whether this alien race in question is, on a civilisational scale, capable of crushing us like bugs with a particularly puny exoskeleton? The correct course of action in your second example, in my mind, very much depends on the overall balance of power between humans and the alien race in question.
Well, fighting the hypothetical, we don’t “know” the alien race won’t destroy our ship or the star base our ship limps to anyway. How do we “know” that they don’t lie? Because they told us?
THIS time. What if other alien races hear what happened, and begin threatening ships unless the Captain is handed over based on THEIR concept of blood feuds and dishonor?
Bolding mine.
The thing with the first bolded part is that we don’t know that. Does the XO dying mean that his kids are off the hook? Or his brother? or his third cousin seven times removed? Not to mention the harm caused to the rest of Earth when they can’t find people to man their starships without conscription, since the fleet is fine with handing someone over to murderaliens as a pacification option.
And that’s the problem with the second bolded part. You may have saved a single ship. You’ve doomed the entire fleet.
I don’t think the second example really merits debate if we fight the hypothetical. The case is interesting exactly because of the preconditions - it is known, in the formal philosophical sense, that the aliens will not lie or break their word. Fighting the hypothetical removes any interesting niche the question has because it renders it essentially another case of “what happens if we negotiate with terrorists?”
I can certainly appreciate yellowjacketcoder’s argument that caving to the demands of this particular alien race might lead to far more onerous demands being made by others, but I do not think fighting the notion that the aliens in question are perfectly honest and perfectly oath-bound brings anything interesting to the discussion. They are aliens, after all - they are not meant to be realistic.
However, yellowjacketcoder, assume that you know that in refusing to hand over the XO and fighting back, you risk offending a vastly militarily superior alien race to such a degree that they simply purge us as a species. Do you still not hand over the XO? Do you choose to die to a man with the XO, but not make any attempt to fight back for fear of provoking even more future violence? I genuinely believe the the morally defensible course of action in this case depends entirely on the consequences of refusing to hand over the XO, because refusing to do so may not be as simple as “everyone on the ship dies.” It may be “everyone dies”, period.
In this scenario, you order the engineer to do her duty, and you don’t hesitate. The two options here are, she does her duty, and you see to it that she is awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal*, or she doesn’t do it, and she is presented to Courts Martial, on charges of violations of Articles 89, 90, 92, 110, 119 (250 counts), 133 and 134 of the UCMJ*. She wouldn’t live long enough for the anomaly to kill her.
In this case, I do not turn over the XO, but not for the reasons presented by ddsun, Grrr! or yellowjacketcoder. The XO is simply too big a security risk: even if the alien kept his word to leave the ship alone if I turned her over, he has made no promise that he won’t torture her for everything she knows before he kills her, and I couldn’t afford to accept such a promise on faith, anyway. I can’t risk compromising the fleet’s security like that.
- Or whatever a space-faring fleet’s equivalent to those things might happen to be.
This is a rather different scenario. In the OP, it’s presented as “hand him over or we destroy your ship. Either way, the debt is paid”. It’s not “hand him over, or we purge your species”.
In that case, ‘tis better to die on your feet than live on your knees’.
I’ll say this… in Scenario #2, if you sell out your XO, you’d better get used to being disrespected by your crew, assuming you’re not already a shitty ship’s captain and not respected to begin with.
I think you underestimate the proportion of the crew that would simply be grateful that their captain chose not to consign them to space-dust over a quarrel they had no part in.
Ultimately I think the problem with the example is that the aliens are exactly that: aliens. We have no way of making so much as an educated guess as to whether some sort of viable “don’t bother the perfectly truthful, perfectly oath-bound aliens or you and your family all fucking get it” treaty could ever work out for the simple reason that being perfectly truthful and perfectly oath-bound is completely and utterly irreconcilable with the human experience. We have no real way of approximating what dealing with them would be like - how interactions would go, what we could reasonably (as a species) acclimate ourselves to long-term in terms of dealing with them, etc.
I’m not sure shooting her will do any good. Anyway, the question isn’t so much what you should do in either situation, but rather whether you order the subrodinate to sacrifice himself or herself in BOTH (or decline to give such an order in both).
Yes, I would give the order to both.
Let’s say that this particular alien ship happens to be more powerful than this particular Earth ship, but otherwise the the aliens are to humans as NextGen Romualans are to NextGen Feds. There’s just no telling who’s gonna win an all-out war, and nobody really wants to find out… The Dawn Treader is a corvette, not a capital ship or carrier.
In that case, can I bluff and threaten full-scale war?
Case 2 is actually easier: we all go down fighting. Or more precisely, RAMMING SPEED! The point is that by demonstrating our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of one of our own, we save future human lives.
I’ll invite comment from actual military officers but in the first case, I rather think that part of being a line officer means that the chief engineer would not be waiting for an order.
In that case I agree that handing over the XO is an unacceptable course of action, and I choose to go down with my crew. Not because of any particular moral compunction about handing over the XO, but because she (as other posters have previously stated) poses a security risk, and because handing her over would damage the morale of a potentially-needed fleet to a perhaps irreparable degree. Handing her over endangers more lives than it potentially saves.
On the other hand, had the aliens been capable of crushing humanity like so many bugs if they saw fit, I would have handed over the XO without question. In this case, she is not a security risk, and the morale of the fleet is irrelevant, because any potential war is unwinnable and leads only to extinction. I would most likely attempt (mandate permitting) to negotiate some sort of vassal status - in exchange for handing over the XO and a legally recognized right to do whatever the fuck they please with any Earthlings that might have wronged them, they vaporize anyone else that threatens us. I have no compunctions about human sacrifice, being a protectorate, or performing dogeza when the alternative is potentially extinction.
Before anybody gets all shirty, I mean the DT is a corvette in terms of firepower, not size. Obviously it’s pretty big, if it could carry 200 colonists in the first scenario; it’s just not meant primarily for combat.
In case #2 we fight to the death, the deaths of all of us. I would not surrender the exec. Whatever the system of morality/honor the aliens have, its not OUR system. I hope that first they’d give me a chance to explain why I’m making the decision. Maybe if they thoughy OUR families would go after THEIRS, in an endless cycle, there would be the teensiest of chances the aliens would back off. Or, if they gave me a chance, I’d offer my life in the exec’s place, but it sounds as if they wouldn’t take it.
But I would not surrender the exec to save the ship.
In case #1 I’d order the chief engineer to do the job. Sometimes that’s what an officer has to do. If she wouldn’t do it, and since I couldn’t I’d order someone else capable,(but not the best) to do it. If and when we successfully return to civilization I’d see that the chief engineer was cashiered. I’d shame her to everyone that has an ear to listen. That would be worse than simply killing her.
If the chief engineer goes willingly I’d assure her that any family or kids left behind would never want for anything I could give them. And, like in Armageoddan, I’d be sure a high school was named for her.
Now that you mention it, that’s probably closer to how it would play out than what I originally posted. If the CHENG wouldn’t do it, I’d order the ACHENG to do it, and have the CHENG immediately confined to the brig, pending courts martial. If I had anything further to say about it, the CHENG would receive the maximum sentence, be stripped of her rank, dishonorably discharged, and spend the next 20 years making license plates in Leavenworth.
But, for sure, I would submit the ACHENG for whatever the Spacefleet equivalent of the DSM, and make sure that her family were taken care of, for as long as I was still alive.
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order the engineer to fix the ship, chances are if they are professional enough, they are only waiting for you to give the order.
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Either fight, or surrender the entire ship. Either your dead or you have a pow thats in enemy control and out of your control what happens to them.
Declan
In the first case, I order the engineer to go in. And I stay with her. If I’m lucky, she yells “look out behind you!” and clocks me with a monkey wrench when I turn to look, I wake up in the nearest space hospital and give her family the folded space flag at the memorial service. If I’m not lucky, we both get a school named after us.
In the second scenario, I shoot the exec myself. If I’m lucky, I get a court-martial and possibly a firing squad. If I’m unlucky, the ship is turned into space dust.