I haven’t watched this episode in a few years. IIRC none of the crew spoke up in Tuvix’s defense?
That’s not realistic. As this thread shows. This isn’t a easy decision. Janeway is Captain but I think a few crew members would have spoken out.
Hypothetical. There are four people who need organ transplants or they’ll die. One person needs a liver, one person needs a heart, two people need kidneys. You’re stopped and told, “Sorry, we have to take your heart, liver and kidneys. You’ll die, but your death is going to mean the life of four people.” In your mind, is that an ethical thing to do to you, and second, if you object to that, is that unreasonable selfishness on your part?
Was it not a certainty that Tuvok and Neelix would come back? Cause I was going to suggest that to make the choice more dubious.
Actually (having just watched it recently) there was a lot of hand wringing and the Doctor refused to perform the procedure that actually killed Tuvix but it seemed to me everyone was just happy to let Janeway be the bad guy and be glad they didn’t have to make the decision.
Tuvix asked Kes to stand up for him but she couldn’t. She wanted Neelix back (but obviously felt really guilty). The very end of the episode also makes it clear Janeway hated herself a little for what she did.
At first it was not but eventually Harry and the Doctor figured out a method that they knew would work.
This was not “unethical.” This is evil, a far different matter. Janeway isn’t a bad character, but she’s deeply flawed and has done some horrific things over the years as long as she can handwave an excuse and pretend it wasn’t really wrong to herself - all the while passing moral judgement upon others as tough she were some kind of god.
Among the many reasons that her actions here were evil, and I have to pick and choose, she arbitrarily decides who is an isn’t a person. Let me repeat that point, because some didn’t seem to notice. Janeway uses violence and assigns lesser value to some people based solely on the nature of the being in question, not on what that being actually is, does, thinks or feels. Tuvix may be weird, but he is no different from any of the other strange and wonderful creatures out there in the universe, but his life is destroyed because Janeway finds it inconvenient to see him as a human being (well, whatever-alien being). If there was any more basic message in Star Trek…
Everything else is an excuse to obfuscate the issue. The writers, for their part, dropped it like a hot potato. Ironically, they did seem to see the issue, and Janeway’s actions are not glorified here. The only problem is that they didn’t follow-up and explore this any further. That is to say, I’m criticizing the character, not he people who made it. They understood that Janeway’s actions were cruel and selfish.
Anything to eliminate Nelix is ok with me.
Tuvix is an accident. With the trappings most geared to generate sympathy and fake drama. If Tuvix had Neelix and Tuvoks WORST traits the poll would be diffrerent. And yet it shouldn’t.
Identical situation: Your two kids are sucked into your computer. The computer morphs into this wonderous, shiny, angelic biped that starts spouting how its alive and can’t wait toooooooooooooooooooo…thats the sound of the plug being pulled if those kids can come back.
He’s a holo program run too long. Except this holo program is keeping two crew members from coming back.
How do we know he’s even telling the truth??? We’ve seen countless times ST characters having their bodies hijacked.
Edit: I do appreciate we are still talking about this after (looks it up)…TWENTY FUCKING YEARS??? Good God where did my life go?? Arguing on the internet!! That’s where!
Yeah, if Tuvix had embodied the worst aspects of Tuvok & Neelix we wouldn’t be having a discussion.
It’s fine to defend life when life is cute.
The original Siamese twins could not be separated by the technology of their day. Tuvok and Nelix could be. Their medical condition was reversible and was preventing them from consenting to the ongoing violation of their individuality.
Opposing their separation is no different than opposing the restoration of other crew adversely affected by coercive conditions.
No, Tuvix is not just destroyed because Janeway doesn’t see him as a human being. It’s not like she grabs a phaser and disintegrates him on sight.
Tuvix is only “killed” when Janeway has to make a choice between his life and the two lives that were lost to make Tuvix possible. Once she has a way to restore Nelix and Tuvok, refusing to do so is killing them just as much as the restoration killed Tuvix.
I’m not sure you could justify any other decision given all of those facts.
(Of course, I question the facts based on what we’ve seen transporters do in other episodes, but that’s another issue.)
The original Siamese twins were two people. Tuvix is one person. In the Siamese twin situation, it’s
“Two people exist, joined together.”
In the Tuvix situation, it’s
“Two people and an orchid exist, an accident happens, those two people and the orchid stop existing, and a new person is created.”
Tuvok and Neelix are dead at this point. Their genes exist in Tuvix, but they don’t exist anymore. Meanwhile, Tuvix is alive, and does exist.
I remember Bones hating transporters because as far as he was concerned, every time you transport you’re being killed and copied.
Has there been a canon resolution to Bones’ concerns?
There sure has! Specifically, the resolution is “Ha-ha-ha! It’s so silly to worry about the transporter; nothing ever goes wrong with that thing except that we have a i nor crisis with it every episode, which usually requires it to work in such a way that none of the other crazy crises could ever have occurred.”
This is just one of those things you have to roll with. Transporters can do whatever, and work in whatever manner, the plot requires.
We’re all doing that, though, no matter where one comes out on the question. One can’t take Tuvix’s part without deciding that he’s a person independent of Tuvok and Neelix, after all.
By the way, if one decides that Tuvix is such a person, doesn’t the question boil down to the classic trolley problem? Allow two to die through inaction, or take action and kill one.
And i sure wish people would stop saying Neelix and Tuvok were dead. They obviously wern’t.
They were ‘no longer there’ - they had ceased to exist - now, while ‘parts’ of them may be living on as part of Tuvix, the two seperate entities known as Tuvok and Neelix were no more. That’s about as ‘dead’ as you get.
My biggest problem with this - and many episodes of Voyager - is this another example of the reset button - excellent premise, excellent episode for thought and what ifs - but in the end, they don;t let it stay on - they reset it - and then (to my knowledge, I quit watching Voyager after Sof9 showed up) it’s never mentioned again.
And the dumb thing is…they set up in the pilot more of a BSG-serial type of future problems. (If that makes sense)
A mixed crew of rebels and SF officers
A short lifespan for a major character (Kes)
Those bio-genic computer packs
Some 39 photon torpedoes. (whatever the number was)
Strange thread.
The organ transplant hypothetical, previously mentioned many times already, often has a similar emotional reaction. Sometimes people are like, “Well, if we made an example of taking organs, then the fabric of society would fall apart because nobody could trust anybody else!” Well, okay, but that’s not the point. So in order to clarify, we might might specify that nobody would find out and the fabric of society won’t change – it’s a one time thing – and then they say “But you can never know for certain, so it’s not worth the risk!” No matter how many times we try to focus on the underlying moral issue, they throw up irrelevancies to avoid it.
If taken to extremes to avoid any consideration of the real moral issue, this is moral and intellectual cowardice.
It is supposed to be emotionally uncomfortable. That is the entire point. When people rewrite the situation into a form they could wriggle their way out of with enough cleverness, they’re refusing to face the underlying spirit of the problem. In this case, the show went out of its way to make it clear that Tuvix was, in fact, a new being. This is well-explored philosophical territory, for example, the sentient ant colony in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. The same assembly of ants successfully make up two different personalties, each one fully distinct from the other although the underlying ants are the same. Hofstadter believes it is the pattern of interactions that makes up our sense of self, not the underlying stuff involved.
His argument seems totally obvious to me, though of course it’s valid to disagree. But even for people who disagree with that particular theory of self, it’s still a total copout to shy away from the accepting the premise of the episode, in which the situation is made perfectly clear. Tuvix was a new entity.
For anyone who advocates murdering him for the greater good, then shit, just fess up to it. The pussyfooting around is just ridiculous.
I, for one, would be tempted to kill him to save the two others precisely because his unwillingness to do so voluntarily in such a clear case might indicate a similar unwillingness in time of emergency when bigger things, maybe even the entire ship, could be at stake. It’s a trolley problem (as mentioned) but I don’t think the exchange is necessarily 2 for 1. Could potentially be a much better return than that. But I’m not going to hide from the implications. It would be an execution to retrieve the two others from their current suspension.
yep - and what I started to type out - the series had so much promise, and pissed it all away (crossover with the WWE, really/).
Not to say there wasn’t some fantastic bits in it - but on whole, I just can’t bring myself to watch it.
Would Janeway have been right to order a single crewmember killed against his will so that two others could be saved by transplanting his organs? I would argue certainly not, no matter how essential the other two crewmembers were.
If you agree with that, then the only excuse for killing Tuvix is that somehow because he was created by an accident, his life wasn’t as real. But I don’t see any reason why that should be - Tuvix was clearly a sentient being, after all. In fact, it’s worse than killing a crewmember to save two others, it’s actually a matter of killing a crewmember to bring back to life two who are already dead (at least brain dead, as their distinct consciousnesses had ceased to exist, and been replaced with his consciousness).