The last thing he was able to communicate as a conscious intelligent being was that he wanted to be human, and he ran into the arms of a crewmate who pleaded with him to come home. He was basically in a condition in which his caretakers had to interpret his last wishes through power of attorney.
That’s not exactly the same as going against the stated wishes of a crewman who clearly says “I understand what you intend to do and do not consent to this procedure, which I equate with my own death.”
I think it would’ve just highlighted another way that he became something that wasn’t really the best of both of them.
Fair enough, but instead he said he wasn’t that selfless, making that explicit. On the other hand, there were a couple references to the fact that he was more than the sum of his parts. I think Chakotay said it explicitly, but Janeway hinted at it too. If I am recalling it correctly.
I didn’t see the pro-life angle until you posted it. My first reaction was “No, Tuvix wasn’t a potential life - that would be like killing an actual CHILD to save the life of… Oh.”
I really hope that wasn’t the intent.
And more important that that are the contractual issues. Tom Wright demanded he be paid twice the amount of any other character. /s
What’s your point? Illustrating that he was a unique individual, different than the simple sum of his parts, is all the more reason to accept that he was his own person, and had as much of a right to exist as any intelligent, self-aware individual. If you think that anyone who isn’t selfless enough to offer up their own life to save another isn’t worthy of living then that’s one heck of a catch-22.
In a number of your posts you refer to the fact that Tuvix’s creation was an accident. That’s completely irrelevant in my mind, but it seems to be a very important consideration for you when weighing the morality of ending his life. May I ask why? Surely you don’t think that a person (let’s say someone who’s already an adult to stay away from the thorny pro-life issues) who came into this world as a result of drunken parents having a one-night stand would have any less right to life than someone whose birth was meticulously planned?
Edit to add:
Given the well-documented record of transporter accidents I think that anyone who voluntarily uses one of those things has basically forfeited any expectation of personal safety and it’s not fair to expect others to expend extraordinary means to help them out.
Not from the plant’s perspective.
I find it interesting how history is starting to be quite kind to Voyager when it was once considered the weakest of the trek stable and it’s got a lot to love but as discussed before the episodic nature of it just ruins the whole premise. Case in point being this episode. There is a ridiculously long comment section over on the tor rewatch just for this episode and i agree that it drops the ball due to the constraints of the episodic structure forcing the writers to wrap it up in a nice neat bow by the end. What’s also worse is that it will never be mentioned again.
That’s not what Tuvix argued. He wanted to live and deny Tuvok and Neelix the continuation of their lives.
It was similar to the accident that created “Evil Captain Kirk.” I remind people because there didn’t seem to be as much outcry among the fans to save his life. I wonder why? Also, I’m having a hard time finding a list of Trek episodes where the doctor asks the captain to perform procedures because of ethical concerns. Don’t get me started on how many unethical things were done by that same doctor.
As I stated above, I don’t believe that it’s the moral choice to sacrifice two lives for the one. This is especially true on a fictional starship in the Trek universe where the skills and abilities of the two were needed by a small crew that couldn’t afford many losses. On top of that, the one didn’t have the qualities normally shown by a Starfleet officer. That’s not to say it was his fault, but it just was, and needed to be resolved.
I’m afraid that it was, with all the misogynistic angles against Captain Janeway thrown into the mix. They touched on sentience and the rights of aliens so many times, but not this particular angle on other Trek shows. Hell, the away team on ST:TNG straight up incinerated clones-in-progress during the episode “Up the Long Ladder” and were cheered for defending their body autonomy. However, most detractors of the Tuvix episode target Janeway, because the doctor conveniently stepped aside to let her take all the blame. So I ask, “What would Kirk, Picard, or Sisko have done differently, other than to make the doctor do it?”
The Trolley problem was about abortion.
I don’t see anything wrong with an episodic format. The original Star Trek hardly had any multi-episode plot arcs at all. Even the original BattleStar Galactica had little connective tissue between the events of any two episodes.
He wanted the right to exist, which is a basic right generally afforded to all living people. At that moment Neelix and Tuvok did not exist and were not living people. For all intents and purposes they were effectively dead, or at least as dead as Tuvix was about to be if they forced him to undergo the procedure. Sure, there was the option of using dark magic to sacrifice the life of an innocent (Tuvix) in order to resurrect them from the dead, but him not being OK with that option should have been his choice and I think it’s pretty ridiculous to question that. But, like I said upthread, it looks like we’re just not going to see eye to eye on this.
When I watched that episode at the time, I felt like the problem with Tuvix’s existence was that it was stolen. The thing that did it for me was that the flower was the “secret ingredient” in causing the merger of Tuvok and Neelix. If not for the flower, they wouldn’t have merged into Tuvix; that made it somewhat of a hostile act.
Was that Tuvix’ action, or fault? Maybe not, maybe a little? But the “accident” was not actually an accident. It was mediated by the presence of the flower. Did the flower make a choice to cause that? We don’t know. We root against the Daleks in Dr. Who, but they have about the same kind of agency as that flower.
I thought the Space Trolley Problem is when you can deflect a killer asteroid away from its original target but not enough to stop it from hitting somewhere else
Deflect? No. You need to…
Seems like the trolley problem is usually framed in such a contrived way, it’s the person writing the scenario who really bears the moral burden of choice.
But then it occurs to me that spaying and neutering feral cats and then releasing them back into the wild is itself a version of the trolley problem. People like cats. Yay! Cats are fun. But people also like birds. And cats eating birds is a serious problem. So if people are going to intervene in admittedly problematic situation, do wild birds automatically take a back seat to feral cats?
Well sure, I’m aware that episodic TV was the style in them days apart from a few outliers like Babylon 5 but i think Voyager suffered greatly from the show runners stubbornly sticking to this. Just leaves a bad taste especially when there’s that Neelix/Tuvok focused episode in season 3 (Rise) that would have benefited from a callback to this or anytime they have significant interactions really - ‘hey, remember that time our bodies and consciousness were merged’.
That tends to be the problem with much of philosophy which does little to address ethics and morality in the real world. For some people, it’s not about improving the mess we’ve made of this planet, it’s about showing how very clever one is compared to others. Meanwhile, we have real moral dilemmas to deal with.
This was a problem often created by people, so people DO need to solve it. Picking up strays and spaying/neutering goes a long way to helping this problem.
Great point. Humans like to think we understand how nature works, but there have been cases where our intervention in trying to control/manage other species has backfired. We’re still learning and discovering previously unknown things (even about ourselves), so hopefully we will figure out missteps before they turn into problems that can’t be fixed.
We have an unfortunate tendency to prioritize based on what we like, too. There are rescue groups and amateurs who are well-meaning, but possibly misguided in their approach. We need birds and cats for different reasons and they pose different risks. The priority and possible solutions to problems should be based on more objective measures.
Ethics aims to lighten that burden. The trolley problem is a contrived scenario designed to elicit a person’s moral instincts, so that they can be analyzed, deconstructed, and made more consistent. in the future. If you must make a decision, and taking too long to ponder about the decision itself causes pian, or injustice, wouldn’t it be useful to have a more precise moral instinct? Years later, do you really want to be haunted by regrets-- “why didn’t I think that at the time?”
The trolley problem was formulated as a easier to understand alternative to the doctrine of double effect-- (which controls certain ethical instincts of catholic heathcare). Whether it contradicts this doctrine in meaningful ways is beyond me. A cynic would liken it to a framing device designed to encourage thinking along specifically catholic lines, and discourage, other more proiductive analyses.
Huh? The Daleks are basically fascists intent on the genocide of what they perceive as lesser beings. How do they not have agency?
