Heh. Whereas my opinion that separation was correct was based on my conviction that the show made clear that he was not. :p:cool:
Haha, fair enough. Just not what I got out of it at all.
Even though I literally just used the organ transplant example before reading your post, now I kind of want to fight the hypothetical…
Hypothetical situations where you have unrealistically perfect knowledge of the outcomes of your actions seem like a poor way of sussing out good moral rules. The one that bothers me, more than the trolley problem, is “Would you torture someone if you knew it was the only way to determine the location of a hidden nuclear bomb in time to stop it from destroying a major city?” The “obvious” answer I suppose is yes, but of course that situation is highly unlikely to occur. What’s much more likely is that you have a suspect who is probably a terrorist, who might have information about an imminent attack, which might cause significant loss of life if it weren’t thwarted by other means, which might or might not happen, and perhaps torture might be an effective means of getting the necessary information from him, while other methods might fail. But the person who looks at the ticking nuclear time-bomb hypothetical and says “look, obviously torture is justified when the stakes are high enough” is much more likely to talk themselves down the slippery slope to thinking it’s justified in these much more questionable circumstances, compared to someone who just says “Torture is wrong, full stop.”
So I suppose I’d rather have someone adhere to the moral rule of saying “Never torture, no matter the stakes”, knowing that they would make the right decision (in my opinion) in most realistic circumstances, even if arguably this leads to the wrong decision in the much more farfetched hypothetical situation.
So I guess I’m fine with people fighting the hypothetical and saying “Look, I need to choose my moral rules based on what works in the real world, even if some of those real world considerations were explicitly excluded in this hypothetical.” But in the case of Tuvix, I think the rule that generally works in the real world is “don’t murder one innocent person to save two others”, and so that’s an argument for not splitting him in two.
I’m totally okay with alternatives to the hypothetical, as long as they’re accompanied with an an answer to the pure hypothetical.
I think I’ve seen this called High Energy Ethics.
If physicists want to find a particle they’re never seen direct evidence of before, they crank up the machine to eleven. They build a particle accelerator miles long and send bajillions of electrons whizzing down it at near the speed of light to bash into the wall at the end. These are not normal conditions, but then again, that’s exactly the point. We don’t learn about the limits of intuitions if we’re restricting ourselves to common situations in which our regular everyday feelings are a decent guide for moral behavior. We learn about the limits of our instincts by positing situations that aren’t normal.
For the torture-bomb thing? My solution is that I’m totally fine with the decision to torture in that case, with the caveat that I think the torturer should absolutely be sent to jail. My problem with potential real world torture situations which I won’t explicitly mention here – ahem – is that the current perpetrators never make the “hard choice” that’s actually a genuine hard choice. If it’s so damn worth causing all that pain to someone else to get a stupid code, then why wouldn’t they be willing to pay a price themselves? Funny how all those people who claim to make hard choices are always making hard choices that others have to suffer through, never themselves.
I think “Torturers always go to jail” is pretty much a fair compromise in that situation. It ensures that the people who decide there’s a hard choice to make have the right incentives. But coming up with a compromise like that means thinking seriously about “high energy” situations.
Comparisons to killing are not very accurate, considering the transporter merging/unmerging is reversible and killing isn’t (in real life, at any rate).
But they do still exist–as proven by their later restoration.
I think you and others are getting confused by the fact that they’re fused into a single body. But they are still two persons. They are separable.
This is baffling to me. Does someone die when they hide in a closet?
Tuvok and Nelix were alive, but kept hidden in another body. A body controlled by an entity that was coercively preventing Tuvok and Nelix from consenting to their condition.
Was it also murder to disassemble Locutus?
Actually, I found Tuvix quite unsettling to look at - not attractive at all.
If Janeway had immediately restored Neelix and Tuvok, I would agree completely. But she didn’t. If she had (as I suggested earlier in this thread) had Tuvix put into a medical coma while the research was done to restore Neelix and Tuvok, again, it would be much like your hypothetical. But Janeway didn’t do that either. She treated Tuvix like a person, giving him responsibilities and assigning him tasks, just as if he were any other person on board the ship (she didn’t even end each day by saying “Good work Tuvix; I’ll probably kill you in the morning”). Then she decided he wasn’t a person after all, without even acknowledging that she had changed her policy.
Well, that is part of the problem - I have a slightly easier time believing in the possibility of a merger than of its complete reversal several weeks later.
I could support the position “Janeway was evil, but she acted morally by restoring Tuvok and Nelix”. 
I always found Neelix very ugly to look at, Tuvix was no better and really I never liked most of the crew, but I’m ignoring that for the sake of the discussion.
Enterprise was the only show with characters I thought were somewhat attractive.
The problem with this is that they manifestly weren’t alive. Tuvix wasn’t a thin guy on his own, but he had nowhere near the mass of the two put together, nor he think exactly like either one of them, or even both of them working together. He had their skill and memories, but had a different personality. AT the end of the episode, the two were re-created, and you can argue whether or not the two at the end are even the same people as at the beginning.
Locutus had no independent identity; he was only a part of the Collective.
A lot of that is just more transporter inconsistency. We’re told you can’t duplicate someone because their matter just goes from point A to B, but here we have a case where half the matter goes missing and then magically reappears when they need it.
Given this inconsistency, I don’t think you can make a clear statement about whether they were alive but conjoined, or dead but with components recycled. There’s evidence to support either position.
Let’s try a different analogy. Suppose Tuvok and Nelix are trapped in an extra-dimensional closet that’s impossible to perceive. When they are trapped, a homunculus with some resemblance to both appears and explains the situation. Tuvok and Nelix will be trapped forever in the closet, unless we kill the homunculus in a very precise way.
Initially, we know of no way to accomplish that very precise way of killing the homunculus, but after a while we figure it out. Is it moral to kill the homunculus in the precise way that will release Tuvok and Nelix from the closet?
In other words, I don’t find the claim that they weren’t alive very persuasive. If a person is hidden in a reversible way, they are not dead in any normal sense.
I don’t think the independence of an entity is pertinent to whether it has a moral right to exist.
So… you never clip your nails? Or cut your hair?
Neither my nails nor my hair is sapient or even sentient.
I used the drug-addict example only for the change in personality between someone who’s on drugs and off. I also don’t think its true that people would support the continued existence of a person on drugs. If we’re talking medicinal drugs, then drugs cure or suppress an illness and brings that person back to “normal”. With extracurricular drugs, the effect is opposite: that drugged up person is not the “normal” one that would take precedent over the sober one
I don’t know if “ill” can be used to describe the situation perfectly, but in Tuvix’s case, his existence is causing the harm that Tuvok and Neelix is non-existent. Whether its his doing or not, I think Tuvok and Neelix take precedent.
But the Vidiians were taking organs that didn’t belong to them. Tuvix was created from Tuvok and Neelix. The Vidiians had no claim to any organs from anyone else, but its pretty clear Tuvok and Neelix definitely has a claim to Tuvix. That he is a separate and distinct and viable life form is, I think, besides the point. If Tuvix had come out as sentient blob of protoplasm, able to live and communicate but is otherwise a useless blob, the moral dilemma would be the same but the choice would be much, much easier.
I was not created by stealing the organs from those people, so I think your analogy doesn’t hold. Tuvix was, and in the context of the episode, Tuvok and Neelix would be back to their old selves without being diminished. Now if I were created from those people by a mad scientist kidnapping them and putting their organs into a Frankenstein’s monster like me, then I would genuinely think that I would feel some responsibility to give back to those people. Its been a while since I saw that episode so I don’t remember if Tuvix ever felt responsible for the “deaths” and wished he could bring them back
But if she didn’t make the decision, then by default, it is understood that Tuvix, having been created from the “deaths” of two crewmembers, is a person. If that’s too big of a question for Janeway to answer, then by default, she should be allowed to say the 2 people who we know for sure 100% are “persons” override that of someone who may or may not be a person. I don’t think you can call her decision evil for doing that.
If Tuvix is a person, then so are Tuvok and Neelix and their lives override Tuvix’s.
If Tuvix isn’t a person, we still know Tuvok and Neelix are and their lives override Tuvix’s
Yes. Exactly.
If Tuvix were a horrific looking hodge-podge of bio-matter like the zombie-like Vidiians, maybe it would be easier to stomach. Not that I found the combination of the two men aesthetically pleasing in the first place.
But in the episode where a Vidiian steals Neelix’s lungs in order to save another Vidiian’s life, Janeway captures the thief, and has to make a choice:
Will she take a life, the Vidiian’s life, to save Neelix?
No, she chooses not to do that. She chose to let a criminal attempted murderer and organ thief go on living with Neelix’ lungs in the Vidiian’s own chest, and would have let Neelix die rather than kill him to save Neelix.
Later, a perfectly innocent independent life form was created during a transporter accident, who had committed no crime, and was a stable, sentient, intelligent, viable being. Janeway was absolutely willing to end this person’s life to restore two others.
This is a lot of the reason why I felt the writers were actually commenting on abortion rather than making any other kind of analogy. It is a textbook definition of the ethics behind a pro-life stance, but with different circumstances which actually allow for those arguments to have some merit. Namely, the difference being that we’re sacrificing a stable, sentient, intelligent, viable being, to conduct what amounts to a scientific experiment which may or may not restore two lives, since it had never been done before.
It would be sort of like cutting your head off, and giving your body to someone who suffered from a muscular degeneration disease, and giving your brain tissue to someone who had brain cancer, and somehow all the medical science making this a viable option.
Sure, you as a unique, stable, sentient, healthy, viable being, will be forced in two and sacrificed so that two patients can live, who will undoubtedly die without your sacrifice. It doesn’t matter, that decision is still unethical. These ethical questions answered incorrectly led to some quite terrible experiments conducted by fascist regimes. When Janeway decided that Tuvix was acceptable to involuntarily sacrifice in the name of science, and to possibly restore other lives, Janeway allowed herself to become a monster.
It doesn’t matter, since it’s just a TV show, and a fictional character is the least of my concerns.
However, it is slightly troubling that we, as a culture, can’t agree on what is ethical.
There are two competing interests here, the ethics of the choices we make, and the rewards of certain outcomes.
If I could murder a billionaire, and steal all his money and his identity, and get away with it, and then use his money for charity work and philanthropy, I could convince people who are okay with the ends justifying the means that I am a good person at heart.
But just because something good can come out of a wantonly unethical act, doesn’t mean it is a morally acceptable action.
If a child is born from the product of an underaged person who is a victim of incestuous rape, and that child goes on to become the greatest leader the world has ever known, that’s an admittedly great outcome.
But that does not mean that the ends justifies the means. Rape is never okay.
That’s the difference between what we want, and what we’re willing to do to get there. There is no such thing as ethics if we are willing to do anything to get what we want, ignoring the negative consequences of our actions.