The possibility for future mental illness would change everything. But that issue wasn’t raised in the show.
Honestly, the whole dilemma is a perfect example of how Star Trek writers don’t even understand the technologies they’re writing about.
Even if we ignore replicators as a way to duplicate a whole person, transporters have created numerous duplicates over the years in various ST series, including Kirk (TOS) and Riker (TNG). In Kirk’s case, there was a personality shift, but that was a result of an accidental duplication and should be avoidable if you do it on purpose.
So, you duplicate Tuvix and then restore Nelix and Tuvok from one of the copies. If there’s any error in duplicating Tuvix, at least you still get your original two crew members back.
(That said, Nelix is one of the characters that made ST Voyager unwatchable for me. Any excuse to get rid of him in any way would be my preferred course of action.)
I never saw any proof they died. On the contrary upon seperating, neither seems to go “Whaaa? Where am i? Whu huppen?”
Or as i put it years ago…if my daughter got sucked into the computer and the computer starts spouting off about how its suddenly sentient and deserves to live…that computer will last only as long as it takes to find a cure. That Tuvix was more humonoid looking makes no difference. That the computer was initially not sentient is even more reason to split Tuvic up and get two crew members back. OR:
Tuvix: I’m alive! I deserve to live!
Janeway: Not over two of my crew. I’ve known you for two seconds.
Tuvic: They are dead!
Janeway: Says you.
And obviously Janeway was right. They wern’t dead. They even seemed to be conscious of what happened. The rest is hamfisted writing trying to create an illogical moral dillema
A helluva tough decision, but yes, she was right.
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Firstly, any decision would have to be made quickly. Once you get too far down the road of acceptance (of both the death and the new life), going back becomes an issue. Whether the cure came too late for this or not, it would be hard to say. Certainly, they were on the edge.
After that, the question would be what Nelix and Tuvoc would have wanted. They probably could have just gone into the Holodeck, diverted all resources to it, and told it to take all of its information about the two and create simulations of them so they could be informed of the occurrence, and allowed to decide whether they preferred to be restored or to go on as the new life. If either of the two wanted to come back, both would have to be put back (or some sci-fi mumbo-jumbo done to recreate them, while leaving Tuvix alone). If there was insufficient trust in the Holodeck, they could have simply gotten all of the friends of the departed together, to make their educated guesses about what they would have preferred.
Of course, in Star Trek, anything is possible. So it’s possible that they could have recreated both people while leaving Tuvix alone.
The only real case to be made for giving Janeway the decision is if there is a specific need, for the overall safety of the crew, to have the two members back.
This. Her decision infuriated me. I’ll just leave it at that.
I’m always perplexed that this is even asked. The episode makes it quite clear that it’s evil. Kes and Janeway only do it for selfish reasons, and the Doctor points out how unethical it is.
It is essentially killing an innocent person to save two people. And that’s usually considered completely anathema. It’s used all the time by referencing organ donors. Kill one person, and you get to save a bunch of other people with their organs. But that’s not acceptable.
And I can’t figure out how one could be acceptable and the other not. (And no one on the other side in this thread seems to be addressing this, making their logic seem absurd to me.)
And this one is just horrible. You tread the disorder if the patient wants to be treated, or is harmful to themselves or others.
Forced medical treatment is one of most disgusting things to me as someone with a mental disorder. I don’t care how much better you think you’ll make me.
It’s also just bollocks–nothing about Tuvix demonstrated any sort of personality disorder. If anything, he seemed to be mentally healthier than the others.
So you just arbitrarily created a personality disorder to hide the killing of one innocent person to save two. Any argument must take that into account.
Except, the canon is that Star Trek transporters don’t work that way. The person being transported is disassembled, his component parts (atoms and sub atoms, or whatever) are beamed to the destination point, and he is reassembled exactly as he was when the transport began. He is not destroyed at the origin point and replicated at the other end. He is the original person who went through the transporting process. Otherwise nobody would be “a-ok” with being transported and transporters would never have been authorized for beaming living creatures.
Having two crew members make it more likely that the entire crew makes it back to the Alpha quadrant.
Tuvix was a much better person than Neelix or Tuvok. Should that make a difference, does Tuvix have exactly the same rights if he was a complete jackasss?
Tuvix was a temporary condition experienced by two people and they fixed the temporary condition. Tuvok and Neelix seemed fine to have their condition fixed and in a way, Tuvix does still exist, he’s just back where he belongs, in two people.
I think we just differ as to the fundamental premise at work. I don’t accept the assertion that Tuvix was a different person, or that anyone was being killed. The show made it quite clear that this was Tuvok and Neelix, their personalities altered by each other’s presence. Tuvix retained their memories, but his emotional responses were significantly different. Tuvok and Neelix were, for all practical purposes, unconscious and incapable of giving consent. I would hope that if I am in that condition, someone would address my needs, and I think Janeway was unquestionably correct to do so.
Slightly off-topic, but wasn’t the solution that they derived to attach a radioactive marker to every molecule of one person’s structure? It seems like the cure might have doomed one person to an immediate and horrible death from widespread radiation poisoning. That night have made me question the solution.
The problem is that transporter duplications have happened. The writers have painted themselves into a corner on this one.
Oooooh, I like this. They can even “duplicate” Tuvix in the adolescent state (as per Next Gen) and give him a partial childhood.
Would it make a difference if, instead of a short time period, the solution to separate Tuvix again was only found many years later? Or so many years that Tuvix had existed for longer than Tuvok and Neelix?
Yes, I think the amount of time involved would make a difference, and I wouldn’t want to be the judge in that case.
I suppose it’s a bit like abortion. After a certain amount of time, you have to start considering the second person. Or perhaps a case where you have to decide to save either the mother or the fetus, but can’t save both.
This was a lose-lose situation, and meant to be thought provoking but still lose-lose.
Really, with ST transporters, if they’d wanted to they could have used old transporter buffer records to recreate Tuvok, Neelix and let Tuvox live, but that wouldn’t work drama-wise. Heck, if they were short on crew, they could probably just use the transporters to clone everyone on the ship and voila, no more crew shortage.
Poll so far seems pretty evenly… heh, split 
Yes, you predicted correctly my friend. I don’t think this thread will be settling anything. 
I don’t think Tuvix was killed anymore than Good Kirk and Bad Kirk were killed when they were merged back into Captain Kirk.
I also suspect it was mentally unstable. It’s been alive for a day or two and its creating this ham-fisted dilemma. I assure you were I in Tuvix’s place I’d give two shits about sticking around. “I’m not alive. I just think I am. Split away!”
I’d also have the doctors subroutines looked at. I think he’s been reading too many archived Slate magazines. This really is a no-brainer.
Are the Parasite versions of the Enterprise (This Side of Paradise) crew dead when the spores are killed? They sure seemed happy. Maybe they should have claimed they would be killed if they were removed.
Joined Trill have distinctly different personalities than their seperate beings but no one is claiming something “died” when they have to be seperated. It’s ludicrous.