You are right, but I am still ordering your tiramisu ration confiscated.
Tuvix was no more “murdered” than Joran Dax was when the symbiont was removed from him.
And if the 2 are better than 1 argument doesnt hold…at what point does it? 5? 10? Does it have to be the whole ship?
A question for the people who think Tuvix was a nonentity because he was the result of an accident: if Will Riker had decided to just disintegrate Thomas Riker with a phaser because he thought it was weird to live with a duplicate, would that have been murder?Immoral?
No, because the situation isn’t 100% analogous. Thomas Riker was a separate entity created from Will Riker, nobody needed to die to create him.
The problem with some of these Star Trek moral dilemmas that people like to discuss is that there is no equivalent in the real world. Therefore traditional guidelines used to resolve it often won’t be entirely accurate. If you had to make an analogy, I wouldn’t consider Tuvix to be a separate person birthed from the death of Tuvok or Neelix, nor would I consider him a clone exactly. The situation is closer to that of a druggie who’s drugged up personality differs from that of his sober one. Of course the drugged up person has rights, you can’t just kill him, but his situation is temporary, or sustainable as long as you keep giving him drugs. That’s not the real person. The real one is the sober one who, if asked, probably doesn’t want to perpetually continue as the “different” person he is when drugged.
Sci Fi originated as a sneaky way to engage in some potentially sensitive commentary on social and political issues. Can’t criticize your government, but you can write a story about aliens on another planet with a government that just happens to seem familiar in certain ways.
So, what was the veiled social or political issue in play here?
Yep. The existence of Tuvix wasn’t a momentary event immediately corrected - Tuvix had the time to develop relationships with several members of the rest of the crew, and to demonstrate that he was an individual distinct from either Neelix or Tuvok, with no sign that the merger was causing him distress - the only significant distress in his life was when Janeway and the Doctor pursued him around the bridge, ignoring his pleas for mercy. Now if Tuvix had been placed into stasis immediately after the accident while a means of reversing the transporter accident was sought, I would probably had voted the other way, but under the circumstances as given, Janeway was completely wrong.
P.S. “Good” Kirk vs. “Evil” Kirk is a related situation, but with a different answer - neither Kirk could survive in their separated state, and neither was a completely healthy being even after a few hours (Good Kirk was rapidly losing the ability to make decisions, and “evil” Kirk seemed to lose more and more reasoning ability).
What about a paranoid schizophrenic who is only sane when taking the drugs? Surely, the sane version would argue for the right to keep taking his drugs to retain his sane state, even though it’s an abnormal and potentially temporary one for him.
I thought about it this way:
Two of my friends mysteriously disappear, and at the same time I meet a new guy who claims to have escaped from a Slobbovian jail where he was unjustly imprisoned with no way to contact the outside world. A while later, I receive a message from the Slobbovian government saying that my two friends are being held incommunicado in a Slobbovian jail and they’re willing to exchange my two friends in exchange for the new guy (who naturally doesn’t want to go back). What should I do?
I don’t think there’s a good answer, but I would probably try my hardest to get my two innocent friends back.
Tuvix did not consent. He viewed it as dying. He had opinions and beliefs distinct from Tuvok or Neelix.
I always assumed it was abortion. E.g., does the existing lifeform take precedence over the newcomer?
Consent is not required when ordering a crew member to his death
Also…what about Riker vaporizing his immature clone in that season 2 ep and saying “Enh. It came from me. I can do it.”
I’m surprised Thomas Riker had enough time to explain his side with trigger happy Will around.
Maybe not, but it might affect the morality of the action. I’m also surprised about the whole division here. Putting aside the fact that inflicting Nelix on the galaxy is pretty definitely a war crime, like Skald said, she murdered an innocent person to get her friends back.
And Tuvix is a person in his own right. This isn’t just some sort of Siamese twin situation or anything like that. He’s a distinct person, with his own personality, his own desires, his own moral sense.
So was that psychopath trill.
Neelix and Tuvok are not dead. They are being held hostage.
And fwiw…I thought Janeway was batshit crazy to let those Vidiians keep Neelix’s lungs. AND she broke her promise to lay the beatdown if they came after her again!!
How are they being “held hostage”? Who’s holding them hostage? Tuvix is a distinct individual who contains DNA from both Tuvok and Neelix and an orchid, just like I’m a distinct individual who contains DNA from both my mother and father (and a cala lilly…don’t ask.) Both my parents are still alive, but were they not, and if the capability existed, would it be moral to force me into a machine that would disintegrate me and reconstruct them? It doesn’t seem to be.
That’s one way to look at it. But in the case of a sick person, don’t you believe the healthy one takes precedent? When neither are “sick” like the situation with Tuvix, then illness doesn’t come into play for the decision
Its analogous to a hostage situation because the “death” is not permanent, and is held up solely by Tuvix. Frankly, he seems a bit selfish. If he really was a melding of both Tuvok and Neelix, given how selfless they were, he should have volunteered to be deconstructed.
You were comparing Tuvix to a stoned drug-addict - I was just pointing out that in some cases, most people would support the continued existence of a personality that exists only due to continuing use of a drug.
I agree that Tuvix was not ill; his continuing existence caused no harm to himself or to anyone else.
If Tuvix remains intact, you have 1 life and 2 deaths.
If Tuvix is separated, you have 2 lives and 1 death.
If your goal is to maximize life, then splitting Tuvix is the greater good.
If your goal is to minimize death, then splitting Tuvix is the lesser evil.
It’s easy to look down from Mount Olympus and say “let nature take its course”, but Janeway is the one who has to write condolence letters to the next of kin.
I would probably add to my self-serving rationalizations by claiming then Tuvix’s reluctance to be split was a mental disorder akin to Stockholm Syndrome.
I don’t agree with the decision, and view it as quite unethical.
It’s a science fiction show and the specific scenario was absurd, but the individual was a distinct, viable life form, unique from his parents, and had (or should have had) the same rights as anyone else. The closest ethical analogy is the kill one healthy patient to donate organs to two sick ones, aka the Vidiian philosophy, which we all recognized as being less morally acceptable, didn’t we?
As a viewer, I would have rather had Tuvok and Neelix back, because that’s more entertaining to me personally. But this decision (and a number of others made by Janeway) would be terrible to apply to the real world.
I think they were going for a science fiction version of the abortion debate, but the ethics involved are quite different due to the specific circumstances, and it involved a risky scientific experiment which would unquestionably destroy at least one innocent life and wasn’t guaranteed to bring back Tuvok or Neelix.
While the outcome was mathematically good, it doesn’t change the ethics. It reminds me of the TNG episode where a doctor experimented on dying patients to test new medical science, against the wishes of the chief medical officer, often with disastrous consequences for the patient. While Worf was restored whole, he did almost die, because things didn’t go according to the simulation. The only issue with that aspect of the writing was that Worf was told the risks and given the choice, as opposed to other patients that the doctor simply experimented on and got poor results.
The ethics involved with deliberately killing one patient to possibly save two others is pretty clear, and even if you were *guaranteed *to destroy one life and bring back two, that doesn’t change the fact that the ends do not justify the means.
If a magical genie appeared and was willing to grant the wish of eliminating cancer from human society from now on, and all it would take in payment was the sacrifice of a few thousand innocent people to permanently end cancer, as opposed to trying to find a cure and treatment on our own, one would think the ends wouldn’t justify the means, even if mathematically more people might die. Ethics is not mathematics, even if it is often rooted deeply in logic and greatest good.
This thread inspired me to rewatch the episode. Definitely one of Voyager’s best (a low bar to be sure, but still). I forgot about this one piece of dialogue my friends and I at the time really loved:
“Everyone out of the kitchen!”
“On who’s authority?!”
“Chief of Security or Head Chef, take your pick!”